A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов
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.
That’s what a body is, an
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.
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