Post for Week 2 Burns, Clare, Buell and Wordsworth

Reading the material for this week I was struck by how many of the authors (poets and ecocritic) were engaging in identifying and conceptualizing the boundary of nature-culture. In Burns’s poem we see man on a rampage, ruining a flower even though we’re all matter - “Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fat, / That fate is thine.” In Clare’s poem “To an insignificant flower,” we get repeated references “I” and “me” as Clare constantly compares and equates himself with plant life. However, the gesture seems to come from a place of distance. This connects with Buell, in that he notes on page 198 that animal rights protectionism began in the nineteenth century, born out of a industrialized alienation from bio-systems. Felstiner pointed out in our reading last week, something that I’ve read before, that some of the greatest nature writing arose during the largest systemic change in America’s ecology and was perhaps was precluded by it. A troubling thought, maybe, when negotiating nature/culture, and it connects with Wordsworth. In all three poems this week we have hints of danger, destruction and violence. In the “The Waterfall and the Eglantine,” WW upends the “Circle of Life” narrative (beating it by two hundred years), narrating not that perfect, sustaining narrative of “nature” as a communist utopia, but one of betrayal and strife. His “Oak and the Broom” equally contends the notion of a wise “nature” in that it’s ephemeral beauty that survives in the end. How can we, in the twentieth century, co-propagators of climate change and environmental injustice, talk about nature/culture with a vocabulary that includes the facts of biology, but with the purpose of shaping a more just world? Or is the lesson that we’re kidding ourselves?