Fabricating Ecocentric Discourse in the American Poem (and Elsewhere)

Bibliographic Data

ID4270477
AuthorsRobert Kerns, Robert Kern (corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume37
Issue2
Pages425-445
Publication date2006-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2006.0038
OpenAlexW1989281465
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited2

The impossible task of the ecopoet," Jonathan Bate starkly asserts in The Song of the Earth, "is to speak the silence of the place," although in making this claim he simultaneously allows for some flexibility in his position by offering Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" as an example of a text that comes as "close as any poem has ever reached to such a speaking" (151). My own example of such a text, which I discuss in detail at the outset of my essay, is Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man," a poem in which, as I see it, Stevens speaks the silence of the snow man and its place precisely by acknowledging, in his language, the impossibility of doing so. My essay's overall aim, then, is to consider the ways in which Bate's "impossible task" is brought to consciousness, expressed, and overcome or otherwise dealt with, in the work of a number of 19th and 20th century American poets and nature writers (including Emerson, Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Whitman, Richard Wilbur, Edward Abbey, and Wendell Berry), and I am particularly interested in the textual means by which the paradoxical notion of what I call "ecocentric discourse" is constructed or fabricated (as it must be) in the work of writers who intuitively realize that speaking silence demands a movement beyond the norms of conventional speech

Aesthetics · Art · Impossibility · Literature · Poetry · Silence · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

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