Buell and Poems in Conversation

How are we supposed to view the narrator of “The Thorn,” whose telescope marks him as a man of empiric observation? How are aspects of the world of science viewed within in the lyric itself, and how does that mesh or clash with the history the Buell has outlined?

In part of Buell we didn’t read for class, he goes on to discuss the ambiguities of the “mother earth” trope, which can be both an image of power or submission. He quotes the anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who “argues for the universality of the equation ‘man is to woman as culture is to nature’ as an instrument of dominance worldwide” (216). In what ways are the Wordsworth poems engaging this equation?

Buell mentions the idea of an “ethics of aesthetics” (188) in relation to the Romantics’ growing skepticism regarding viewing the nonhuman as merely a framework for exploring the human: can we see this question or struggle playing out in Wordsworth’s poems? “The Waterfall and the Eglantine” and “The Oak and the Broom” appear to be more neoclassical than “The Thorn,” whose nature, while mediated through the narrator’s leading gaze, is not overtly imbued with a will until the closing stanzas.

In Karen Solie’s poem “The World of Plants,” I think we can see aspects of an ecopoetics as defined by James Engelhardt, whose manifesto says ecopoetics must combine aspects of both responsibility and play. I’m wondering where Solie might fit in our spectrum given by Buell. Does she enact the claims he makes for Carson and Booth, or is she doing something else?