| My dissertation seeks to elucidate modern ecopoetics by looking closely at a body of "nature poetry," although I take an unorthodox view of such a category. In contrast to some "first-wave" ecocritics who associate an ethical response to nature with a realistic portrayal of it, I argue for the ecocentric value of poetry's natural artifice. The main poets my study---Wallace Stevens, Syliva Plath, Richard Wilbur, and Elizabeth Bishop---demonstrate intense interest in the natural world but resist strict realism and express instead our inevitably figurative relationship with nature. They take the paradoxical position that creating artifice, such as poetic form, is the most natural thing for humans to do; therefore, one need not abandon form or figure to write poetry of the earth. Indeed, since metaphor structures the very way we think and perceive, such poetic devices as personification and apostrophe should not be dismissed as anthropocentric pathetic fallacies with which we merely project the human onto the nonhuman world but understood as a manifestation of our entanglement with that world. Poetry foregrounds our naturally artificial state. If humans are part of the natural world, after all, then so are our tools, including language, even if those tools also distinguish us from the rest of nature. Stevens, Plath, Wilbur, and Bishop don't advocate a total collapse of the old divide between nature and culture; Bruno Latour's hybrid notion of "nature-culture," in which nature is simultaneously real and constructed, better describes their conception of reality than a rigid dichotomy does.; In various ways, the poets I consider combine a modernist valorization of language with latent ecological consciousness, or devotion to physical reality. They practice what I call sensuous poesis, using formal poetic devices to enact, rather than merely represent, the immediate, embodied experience of nonhuman nature. Sensuous poesis relies on the visceral impact of formal effects, such as alliteration, cacophony, onomatopoeia, and stanza shape. Modern ecopoetics thus draws our attention to both the words on the page and the greater world of which they are a part---the language of nature and the nature of language. |
