A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов

Скачать книгу

on opposition for definition” (McNew 1989, p. 72).

      More recently, in Cascadia (2007) Brenda Hillman explores the mutually unstable conditions of self and environment. Exploring the California landscape, Hillman traces the collapse of a central self who dispassionately observes the world and rather portrays both human and more-than-human as “troubled, unstable, and wounded in an era in which human populations have become a geological force,” as Laurel Peacock observes (Peacock 2012, p. 88). Anthropomorphizing nature serves to decenter the human and stress the “vibrant matter” (to use Jane Bennett’s term) that constitutes the entire cosmos. In “The Shirley Poem,” Hillman writes:

      Physical earth reveals itself as persons.

      opportunity, hills dismantled geologically, shifting into

      twiceness now, its wishes hearing—

      a landscape full of an original

      chaos but not in itself divine.

      (Hillman 2007, p. 36)

      Cascadia is a striking extension and re-imagining of Thoreau’s last project, as he moved from Walden’s self alone in nature to what Laura Dassow Walls calls “a social ecology in which the ethical self does not center and command, but decenters, negotiates, constructs, and defends alliances” (Walls 1995, p. 22). In Hillman’s grimmer vision, however, humanity itself is part of the nature that is destroying itself.

      Shaped by a distinctive experience of religious radicalism, transcendentalist writers revealed common anxieties behind an often-smooth veneer of regularized verse: what is the self? What language other than traditional religious tropes can express “limit” experiences? In one direction, poetic responses to these questions followed an Emersonian path: the self-reliant self against limitation, often understood as the natural world, Emerson’s “Not-Me.” Even in the mid-nineteenth century, however, Emerson’s signature individualism was not the only influence. Whitman’s poetry, for example, offers a fluid self whose boundaries are porous to other selves and to nature. Women poets formed, in effect, a community of writers publishing in the movement’s leading journals.

      In our own time, inspired by Thoreau’s late writing, several poets and critics have articulated another version of transcendentalism. For poets like Oliver, Ammons, Merwin, and Hillman among many others, the work of decentering the self and expressing the “vital materiality” of the more-than-human world brings the nineteenth-century movement into dialogue with some of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century.

      REFERENCES

      1 Abrams, M.H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton.

      2 Adams, H. (1876). Critical Notices. Transcendentalism in New England. North American Review 123 (253): 468–474.

      3 Ammons, A.R. (1986). The Selected Poems. New York: Norton.

      4 Bauerlein, M. (1997). The Pragmatic Mind. Explorations in the Psychology of Belief. Durham: Duke University Press.

      5 Bennett, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

      6 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

      7 Bloom, H. (1971a). The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman. In: The Ringers in the Tower, 217–234. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      8 Bloom, H. (1971b). A.R. Ammons: “When You Consider the Radiance. In: The Ringers in the Tower, 257–290. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      9 Bloom, H. (1975). A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press.

      10 Branch, M. and Mohs, C., ed. (2017). “The Best-Read Naturalist.” Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

      11 Brownson, O. (1966). Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism. In: The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, (ed. H. Brownson), 6: 113–134. New York: AMS.

      12 Buell, L. (1993). The American Transcendentalist Poets. In: The Columbia History of American Poetry, (ed. J. Parini and B. Millier), 97–119. New York: Columbia University Press.

      13 Buell, L. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

      14 Costello, B. (2002). Ammons: Pilgrim, Sage, Ordinary Man. Raritan: A Quarterly Review 21 (3): 130–158.

      15 Cushman, S. (2011). Transcendentalist Poetics. In: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, (ed. K. Larson), 76–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      16 Dickinson, E. (1961). Final Harvest. Emily Dickinson’s Poems. (ed. T. Johnson). Boston: Little, Brown.

      17 Doty, M. (2020). What Is the Grass. Walt Whitman in My Life. New York: W.W. Norton.

      18 Eeckhout, B. (2007). Stevens and Philosophy. In: The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, (ed. J. Serio), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      19 Emerson, E. (1898). Emerson in Concord. A Memoir. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

      20 Emerson, R. (1996). Essays and Poems. New York: Vintage Books: Library of America.

      21 Folsom, E. (2010). Transcendental Poetics: Emerson, Higginson, and the Rise of Whitman and Dickinson. In: The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, (ed. J. Myerson, S. Petrulionis, and L. Walls), 263–290. New York: Oxford University Press.

      22 Frost, R. (1961). Selected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

      23 Fuller, M. (1998). Double Triangle, Serpent and Rays. In: Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, (ed. P. Bennett), Malden, MA: Blackwell.

      24 Hedge, F.H. (2000). Questionings. In: Transcendentalism. A Reader, (ed. J. Myerson), 523–524. New York: Oxford University Press.

      25 Hillman, B. (2007). Cascadia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

      26 James, W. (2000). The Stream of Consciousness. In: William James. Pragmatism and Other Writings, (ed. G. Gunn), 171–190. New York: Penguin.

      27 Kohler, M. (2017). Women, Transcendentalism, and the Dial: Poetry and Poetics. In: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry, (ed. J. Putzi and A. Socarides), 139–154. New York: Cambridge University Press.

      28 Loving, J. (1999). Walt Whitman. The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press.

      29 McNew, J. (1989). Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry. Contemporary Literature 30: 59–77.

      30 Meadvin, J. (2010). As Reckless as the Best of Them: Robert Frost’s Dark Transcendental Lineage. The Robert Frost Review 20: 112–136.

      31 Merwin, W.S. (1987). “Fact Has Two Faces,” Interview. In: Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose, 1949–82, (ed. E. Folsom and C. Nelson), 323–324. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

      32 Merwin, W.S. (2017). The Lice. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.

      33 Moss, W. (1976). “So Many Promising Youth.” Emerson’s Disappointing Discoveries of New England Poet-Seers. New England Quarterly 49 (1): 46–64.

      34 Oppermann, S. (2014). From ecological postmodernism to material ecocriticism: Creative materiality and narrative agency. In: Material Ecocriticism, (ed. S. Iovino and S. Oppermann), 21–36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

      35 Peacock, L. (2012). SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect. Environmental Humanities 1: 85–102.

      36 Poirier, R. (1977). Robert Frost. The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.

      37 Poirier, R. (1987). The Renewal of Literature. Emersonian Reflections. New York: Random House.

      38 Poirier, R. (1992). Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Скачать книгу