John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems
Yale University Press , 16 Mars 2009 , 440 p.
- ISBN: 9780300137507
- ISBN-10: 0300137508
- lire un extrait ici ou sur le site de l'éditeur
Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth.
In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets—from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder—have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.
Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers—a poetic legacy more vital now than ever.
John Felstiner is professor of English, Stanford University. He lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains
Sommaire:
List of Illustrations xi
Preface
The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead xiii
Introduction
Care in Such a World 1
PART ONE
“stony rocks for the conies”
Singing Ecology unto the Lord 19
“Western wind, when will thou blow”
Anon Was an Environmentalist 28
“The stationary blasts of waterfalls”
Blake, the Wordsworths, and the Dung 34
“The white Eddy-rose . . . obstinate in resurrection”
Coleridge Imagining 39
“last oozings hours by hours”
John Keats Eking It Out 46
“Its only bondage was the circling sky”
John Clare at Home in Helpston 56
“Nature was naked, and I was also”
Adamic Walt Whitman 64
“Earth's most graphic transaction”
Syllables of Emily Dickinson 75
“sick leaves . . . storm-birds . . . rotten rose . . . rain-drop”
Nature Shadowing Thomas Hardy 88
“freshness deep down things”
The World Charged by Gerard Manley Hopkins 94
“O honey bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare”
Nature Versus History in W. B. Yeats 104
“strangeness from my sight”
Robert Frost and the Fun in How You Say a Thing 115
“white water rode the black forever”
Frost and the Necessity of Metaphor 123
“Larks singing over No Man's Land”
England Thanks to Edward Thomas, 1914–1917 130
“the necessary angel of earth”
Wings of Wallace Stevens 136
“broken / seedhusks”
Reviving America with William Carlos Williams 141
“source then a blue as”
Williams and the Environmental News 149
“room for me and a mountain lion”
D. H. Lawrence in Taormina and Taos 162
“not man / Apart”
Ocean, Rock, Hawk, and Robinson Jeffers 170
“submerged shafts of the / / sun, / split like spun / glass”
Marianne Moore's Fantastic Reverence 176
“There, there where those black spruces crowd”
To Steepletop and Ragged Island with Edna St. Vincent Millay 184
“Gale sustained on a slope”
Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu 194
“the wild / braid of creation / trembles”
Stanley Kunitz—His Nettled Field, His Dune Garden 202
“Bright trout poised in the current”
Things Whole and Holy for Kenneth Rexroth 211
“I swayed out on the wildest wave alive”
Theodore Roethke from Greenhouse to Seascape 216
“That they are there!”
George Oppen's Psalm of Attentiveness 223
“surprised at seeing”
Elizabeth Bishop Traveling 228
“Why is your mouth all green?”
Something Alive in May Swenson 239
PART THREE
“care in such a world”
Earth Home to William Stafford 251
“The season's ill”
America's Angst and Robert Lowell's 259
“that witnessing presence”
Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov 266
“the tree making us / look again”
Shirley Kaufman's Roots in the Air 275
“that the rock might see”
News of the North from John Haines 282
“asking for my human breath”
Trust in Maxine Kumin 290
“What are you doing out here / this windy”
Wind in the Reeds in the Voice of A. R. Ammons 294
“between the earth and silence”
W. S. Merwin's Motion of Mind 301
“bear blood” and “Blackberry Eating”
Zest of Galway Kinnell 309
“Kicking the Leaves”
Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at Eagle Pond Farm 318
“I dared not cast / / But silently cast”
Ted Hughes Capturing Pike 327
“the still pond and the egrets beating home”
Derek Walcott, First to See Them 335
“It looks just like the Cascades”
Gary Snyder's Eye for the Real World 344
“Just imagine”
Can Poetry Save the Earth? 355
Sources 359
Text Credits 373
Acknowledgments 378
Index 381
Illustrations
Black and white
Scared Buffalo 11
God creating the birds sees Adam in His thought 22
Western Wind 28
Dorothy Wordsworth 36
Waterfall at Ambleside 48
Keats, “To Autumn” 51
John Clare, Glossary page 59
Helpston, before and after Enclosure 60–61
Walt Whitman, 1855 65
Emily Dickinson, ca. 1855 77
Walt Whitman with Butterfly 79
Emily Dickinson, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” 84–85
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Balaglas” 102
“Lapis Lazuli” stone, front 110
“Lapis Lazuli” stone, back 111
William Carlos Williams 146
Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers 156
Tor House and Hawk Tower 173
Marianne Moore 178
Marianne Moore, Mount Rainier 179
Robinson Jeffers and Edna St. Vincent Millay 190
Edna St. Vincent Millay protesting 191
Machu Picchu, Martín Chambi 198
Machu Picchu, Torreón Complex 200
Wellfleet Whale 207
Deer 227
Emily Dickinson, ca. 1847 241
Emily Dickinson (retouched daguerreotype) 241
xii ILLUSTRATIONS
May Swenson 247
Denise Levertov, “An English Field in the Nuclear Age” 270
Alaskan Glacier 283
Building the Homestead 285
The Last of the Curlews, Fred Bodsworth 305
Galway Kinnell 316
Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge, Guan Huai 345
Gary Snyder at Sourdough Mountain 347
Gary Snyder at Crater Mountain Lookout 348
Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge, detail 349
Mount St. Helens, Gary Snyder 354
Color
Gallery follows page 210
1. William Blake, Creation
2. John James Audubon, Osprey
3. Western Wind, sixteenth-century manuscript
4. Dorothy Wordsworth
5. Simplon Pass
6. John Constable, A Cloud Study
7. “Lapis Lazuli” stone, front
8. “Lapis Lazuli” stone, back
9. Cellar bin, Frost farm
10. D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers!
11. Not Man Apart
12. “Oh, Lovely Rock,” Robinson Jeffers
13. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Counting-out Rhyme”
14. Stanley Kunitz
15. Deer
16. George Hutchinson, Great Village, Nova Scotia
17. Fred Bodsworth, The Last of the Curlews
18. Donald Hall, Ox-Cart Man
19. Derek Walcott, Breakers, Becune Point, 1995
20. Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge, Guan Huai
21. Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge, detail
22. Yucky Pollution, Shiny Pretty