The Song of the Earth
Jonathan Bate

Stuart Simpson

The Song of the Earth is ostensibly an examination of the importance of poetry in the modern world. I say ostensibly as it is mainly concerned with 'Western man's alienation from nature'. Poetry is presented as a mechanism by which we can be 'restored to the earth'.

In our high-tech, high-speed information society, the argument goes, we have become separated from nature. We conquer and control, we destroy and penetrate. Biodiversity is diminishing, endangering the earth and as such ourselves. This is because of the Enlightenment worldview; our Cartesian outlook, the subject/object dichotomy that necessarily sets us apart from nature. It is poetry, or rather ecopoetics as:

…a criticism which speaks to the global crises of subsistence and environmental degradation…
It will be an ecological criticism...that will repair the rift between self and other.

Jonathan Bate is perfectly aware that this road has been travelled before, and to some extent attempts to differentiate himself from crude deconstructionists. Frank Kermode complains about such critics - those who have a lot to say on topics that happen to interest them more than the subject at hand - and gives this as one reason for his latest book Shakespeare's Language, a work which deals with poetry, not politics.

Marxist, feminists, and what-have-you people who are concerned with other things but happen also to like poetry have been rereading the western canon for quite some time. Bate argues that ecopoetics deserves a special place among these rereadings as it is non-political, or rather prepolitical. After all, says Bate, polis is the Latin word for city. Therefore, if we are talking about the poetry of trees and valleys and birds and the like, we can take a prepolitical stance.

In order to demonstrate his credentials as prepolitical Bate gives an example of a rather naff poem about whales:

The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing
planets in the sparkling whorls
of living light -

And Japan quibbles for words on
what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
dribbles methyl mercury like gonorrhea
in the sea.

(Gary Snyder, Mother Earth: Her Whales)

This will not do, he says. The poet should have written a letter to his MP or maybe tried a newspaper article, but he shouldn't have written a poem. Its emphasis is political. Whereas lines such as:

Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

(William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)

can be subjected to an ecopoetic analysis. These lines are not only concerned with our relationship to nature, but are good poetry. The ecopoetical reading concerns the removal of the distinction between the I and what the I sees. Are thoughts impressed upon the I that beholds or on the secluded scene?

Why Bate thinks we need an understanding of the ecopoetic to dismiss the first poem as trite or to ask the question he asks concerning Wordsworth's poem is not explained. It can be answered, however, by asking why Bate chose to write a book about the importance of poetry, but, with the exception of Shakespeare, seems only to address Romantic poets, or those that he perceives as following in their tradition.

The Shakespeare play which Bate discusses is The Tempest. If you want to find some poetry to back up your view of what poetry should be, you will probably be able to find it in some Shakespeare play. But what on earth would an ecopoetical reading of Macbeth show us? How should we respond when we hear that a forest has been cut down to camouflage an army? Or shall we find a new understanding of the Weird Sisters? As Banquo says

'The earth hath bubbles as the water has
And these are of them'.

Should we see the Sisters as the heroes of the piece, as they clearly have a close relationship with nature?

It seems rather shameful of Bate not to take up the issue of what happens to poetry that has no relationship to the issues he is concerned with, or worse still, poetry that is opposed to his concerns. Would Paradise Lost really be the same without confrontation? Can we even conceive of a Satan without pride, hate and a desire to revenge and destroy?

Or what happens to lines such as:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all -
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

(TS Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

Where is the common ground? Either this isn't poetry, or ecopoetics isn't. It is true that Eliot often comes in for criticism for his anti-Semitic attitudes, but do we really now need to subject him to criticism because he doesn't write about trees as often as we'd like?

The reason Bate is only concerned with the Romantics has more to do with the ideas he can relate to, rather than any poetic merit they may have. Wordsworth is usually understood as something of a philosophical poet. But this is a description of what kind of poet he was, because this is what he was, a poet, not a philosopher. To return to Eliot:

A poet who 'thinks' is merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought.
But he is not necessarily interested in the thought itself. (Criticism and Philosophy)

Bate seems to understand that there is some difference between a poet and a philosopher. He compares the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Shakespeare, and the way in which they may be adopted outside of the 'European metropolis', and borrows Keats' understanding of negative capability; simply put, the idea that there is no need to lay down the law or enforce an opinion. Keats said that Shakespeare's writing had this quality. Bate agrees, and says that Sartre's writing lacks this quality. Therefore, Shakespeare can easily be adopted by non-Europeans; Sartre can't.

What Bate fails to understand is that the difference is not that Shakespeare was somehow more open-minded, or that he had a less forceful personality. The difference is that Shakespeare was in the business of writing poetry; Sartre was in the business of formulating ideas. This is not to say that poetry does not contain ideas, or that ideas are irrelevant to the nature of the poetry. What it does mean, though, is that whether the ideas are objectionable, weak or just mundane, this will not affect whether a piece of writing is poetry or not. The other side of this is that the ideas a poem may contain are not themselves poetry.

If Bate is concerned with restoring mankind to the earth he would do better to separate his reading of philosophers such as Heidegger from poets such as Keats. He does a disservice to an understanding of either by pretending there can be any connection.