The Transatlantic Eco-Romanticism of Gary Snyder

Paige Tovey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137340153
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Tracing connections between Gary Snyder and his Romantic and Transcendentalist predecessors - Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau - this study explores the tension between urbanization and overindustrialization. The dialectical relationship between Snyder and his predecessors reminds readers that nature is never a simple concept.

1

THE ROMANTIC PASTORAL: SNYDER’S ECOLOGICAL LITERARY INHERITANCE

I

Snyder’s reputation and career are largely associated with and built upon his ecological philosophies and approach to living and thinking. As a poet whose work is based on an exploration and representation of the way that human beings interact with their environment, he has become a paradigm of the ecocritical movement in literature. His combination of a scientific outlook—he is knowledgeable and well read in biology, ecology, anthropology, geology, and other natural sciences—with the visionary stance of a poet and the spirituality of a dedicated Buddhist, has created a philosophy and works that both preempted and contributed to the establishment of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the development in the late 1980s and 1990s of ecocriticism as an approach to literary and cultural theory and criticism. Recognition of this significance for ecocriticism is increasingly widespread. Writing for The Ecocriticism Reader, William Rueckert extols the virtues of Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Turtle Island, and concludes his discussion of Snyder’s work by stating: “Its relevance for this paper is probably so obvious that I should not pursue it any longer.”¹

The history of ecological poetry and literature has deep and ancient roots. Poets throughout history have incorporated nature in verse as a backdrop or setting in which to explore themes ranging from love to war and revolution as well as a symbol or metaphor through which a poet can explore such themes. And poetry throughout history has sought to explore and express many of the issues at the heart of humanity’s interaction with its environment. The pastoral tradition encompasses literature that embodies these issues, and although it is often pejoratively simplified into a comparison of the idealized country life—its pleasures and basic, uncomplicated living—with the opposing complications and privations of city life, it can be an intricate and enduring mode of exploring the relationship between humanity and nature. William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral,² in its very title, is an example of the fact that the pastoral is a changing and complicated set of conventions through which a poet can approach various subjects. Stuart Curran’s chapter on the pastoral, from his brilliant Poetic Form and British Romanticism, identifies it as a complex and contradictory mode, and suggests that “the literary kind that celebrates simplicity is far from simple in either practice or critical taxonomy.”³ Curran also identifies the “enduring feature of pastoral” as “its double vision” and notes that it “guarantee[s] a tension of values.”⁴ Milton’s Paradise Lost illustrates this duality and tension as an “embodiment of mixed and competing genres”; even its epic ambitions are underpinned by the pastoral “in its most radical form.”⁵ This reworking of the pastoral has become a tradition in itself.

Leo Marx identifies Romantic Pastoralism as being “located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between,’ yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilization and nature.”⁶ Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads set the precedent for the British Romantic pastoral,⁷ which “dominated early Anglo-American literature” and upon which Emerson and Thoreau built an American pastoral that emphasized “a working rather than an aesthetic relationship with the land.”⁸ Snyder reworks American Transcendentalist pastoral into a postmodern and post-Romantic ecological poetics. His preference for and attempt to embody the pastoral is in many ways at odds with contemporary culture and his recognition and incorporation of this tension within his poetry give it a fascinatingly complex and at times productively contradictory double vision.

II

The pastoral’s connection to modern ecological literature is easily seen. Pastoral is one of the oldest modes of literature, dating from the Classical Hellenistic period and widely utilized by authors through to the modern age. Pastoral authors often employed rural scenes as idyllic settings in which to explore themes of love, leisure, and erotic fantasy. M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, asserts that the Romantic tradition follows a basic Christianized pastoral model that moves from innocence to a fall and ultimately to recovery. As Abrams puts it, the poets of the Romantic age were “philosopher-seer[s]” and “poet-prophet[s]” who sought to “reconstitute the grounds of hope” and proclaim “a rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth where he will find himself thoroughly at home.”⁹ Other Romantic critics see Abram’s model as an outdated and idealized view of Romanticism in which a poet can simply turn loss into recompense. Jerome McGann, for example, asserts that Abrams’s idea of the Romantic movement from a fall to rebirth and recovery is a false move. McGann finds Abrams’s criticism to be borne out of “a moral evaluation of the ‘message’ of ‘the great Romantic poems,’” and not out of an objective criticism. McGann goes on to describe Abrams’s approach to hope and despair as a simplified moral dichotomy wherein hope is equated with good and despair with bad:

“Despair” is an emotional state to be shunned if not deplored, and it is associated explicitly with “the unbounded and hence impossible hopes” of political and social transformation. “Hope,” on the other hand, is a good thing, and it is associated with an “infinite Sehnsucht”: which is possible to achieve: that is, with a psychological victory, a religious and spiritual success which can replace the failed hope of social melioration.¹⁰

McGann’s complaint against Abrams’s idealized take on Romantic tradition and revolution is understandable and in many ways justified; however, there is still some validity in Abrams’s model that can be traced from Romantic literature through to post-Romantic poetry and ideas. Specifically, the process of moving from innocence to fall to renewal can be seen in the poetry of Gary Snyder, whose contemporary pastoral poetry often maintains a moral and religious—albeit Buddhist rather than Judaeo-Christian¹¹—point of view that articulates a positive outlook and valuation of hope.

Before discussing Snyder’s ecological pastoral poetry, it is necessary to discuss Wordsworth—one of the central figures for contemporary ecological poetics and a poet whose influence upon Snyder is removed, or indirect, yet still deeply felt. Wordsworth’s seminal musings on man and nature are of such dominance in Anglo-American literature that much critical attention has been paid to his impact on subsequent Eco-Romantic authors. His unconventional use of the pastoral, and the fact that humanity’s relationship with nature is frequently the subject of his poetry, marks an important and influential transformation, not only in a literary sphere, but also in the realm of politics and culture. It is a transformation that still resonates. Michael. A Pastoral Poem, from Lyrical Ballads, exemplifies this transformation to the Romantic pastoral. When the poet introduces a scene of idyllic country landscape in the form of Green-head Ghyll, he also introduces a finely adjusted change. The pastoral ideal is immediately given another dimension: struggle and effort now precede the conventional pastoral otium or leisure. For, in order to reach the place where “The Mountains have all open’d out themselves, / And made a hidden valley of their own” (7–8), one’s “feet must struggle” (4) if one is to meet the mountains “face to face” (5) as though in confrontation. Then, as the story unfolds beside the sometimes “tumultuous” (2), sometimes “boisterous Brook” (6)—in which even the adjectival shift from “tumultuous” to “boisterous” indicates a turmoil of change—there is a tragic human drama told. The drama reminds us that for Wordsworth there is always a gap as well as a link between the human and the natural worlds. At the heart of Michael is a conflict between love of nature and love of man:

. . . these fields, these hills

Which were his living Being even more

Than his own Blood—what could they less? had lay’d

Strong hold on his Affections, were to him

A pleasurable feeling of blind love,

The pleasure which there is in life itself. (74–79)

Jonathan Wordsworth calls upon these lines to observe that “the first half of Michael is propagandist in intention, a garrulous eulogy of the shepherd’s way of life,” but that the second half of the poem illustrates Wordsworth’s “ability to imply feeling which could not convincingly have been described.” Jonathan Wordsworth points out that “one is aware as one reads that Michael’s love has a tragic intensity . . . and yet the poetry actually says nothing about it. Its surface implications in fact play down his suffering.”¹² For all the “blind love” that Michael has for his land, where “blind” is admonitory as well as admiring, his love for Luke, his son, is even greater: “but to Michael’s heart / This Son of his old age was yet more dear.” In fact, Wordsworth tells us that Michael’s “only Son was now / The dearest object that he knew on earth.” Luke was to Michael “His Heart and his Heart’s joy!” (149–62)

Jonathan Wordsworth’s examination of the subtlety with which Wordsworth creates a conflict in the shepherd’s divided love and “treatment of emotion”¹³ in Michael illustrates Wordsworth’s creation of a new pastoral with a double vision wherein contradiction—in this case, Michael’s “blind” love for his son and yet his willingness to sacrifice Luke to London, to the city, in order to save his land—is embraced and not explained away. In this way it could be said that Michael establishes a kind of form for the pastoral, and it bequeaths a pastoral structure from innocence to fall, but not necessarily to a complete recovery. It is a communication for how things used to be, a lament that they are not as they were, and a kind of half-recovery that is tainted, or short of complete, by the remembrance of a fall and the incorporation of tragic human flaws.

According to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,

Romantic pastoral theory . . . showed more freedom to disregard the form and the content of the traditional pastoral; to look on nature with heightened emotion; to endow primitive life with benevolence and dignity; and to place a greater value on sentiment and feeling.¹⁴

The same entry offers a view of Wordsworth’s Michael as “reflecting the empirical element of English romanticism” and “mark[ing] the end of serious attempts in the genre.” Perhaps this is because the pastoral—originally considered “a fictionalized imitation of rural life, usually the life of an imaginary Golden Age”¹⁵—having endured more than 2,000 years of experimentation and change, became a mirror image and opposing reflection of itself. Its values and emphases have reshaped themselves in a Romantic and post-Romantic climate. With the publication of Michael and subsequent post-Romantic pastoral poems, the pastoral has become more than an exploration of the real in opposition to the ideal. In fact, Curran observes that in The Excursion “Wordsworth both creates a self-reflexive pastoral mode and questions its value.”¹⁶ But Curran points out that this self-reflexive pastoral is not to be confused with the “antipastoral” of Crabbe. Rather, it is a celebration and acknowledgment that “systole and diastole is the ‘eternal language’ of God” and that “the opposition between pastoral bower and grave has been enlarged to a universal natural rhythm, reuniting man and nature”¹⁷ in a dialectic that passes into Snyder’s work through a transmission from the British Romantics. It is a mode that Snyder then develops into an ecological pastoral lyric for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ecocritics such as James McKusick¹⁸ and Jonathan Bate¹⁹ assert that examples of Wordsworth’s ecological awareness abound in his writings. However, McKusick gives an oversimplified description of the Romantic period in which Wordsworth wrote as “the dawn of the industrial era” where “the green world of field and fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Romantic Pastoral: Snyder’s Ecological Literary Inheritance
• 2 Snyder’s Twentieth-Century Eco-Romanticism
• 3 Romantic Aspiration, Romantic Doubt
• 4 Snyder’s Post-Romantic Ecological Vision: The Shaman as Poet/Prophet
• 5 The Measured Chaos of Snyder’s Ecopoetic Form
• 6 Snyder’s Experimentations with Post-Romantic Ecological Form
• 7 Mountains as Romantic Emblems of Revelation
• 8 Rivers as Romantic Emblems of Creation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index