Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes

173 Pages·2014·0.931 MB·English

by  Susanna Lidström

“After the theoretical upheavals of the past five years or so, what is now needed
in ecocritical scholarship is a book that takes account of these developments and
applies them to texts we thought we knew. This is exactly what Lidström does, in
an admirably clear, compelling style.”
–Adeline Johns-Putra, Chair, Association for the Study of
Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland
“Lidström has written a lucid, wide-ranging ecocritical study of the most
distinguished poets of the British Isles in the late 20th century. Her chief
innovation is to orchestrate a subtle interplay between the poets’ collections and
the theoretical frameworks they seem to require, rather than bashing them all
into a single ecopoetic mould. The result is wonderfully illuminating.”
–Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, USA
“Susanna Lidström creates a fascinating and timely study of Hughes and Heaney
as ecopoets. Arguing that environmental issues have ‘changed the mind of poetry’,
she draws exciting new insights from ecosemiotics, postcolonial ecocriticism, and
theories of local and global to create an innovative and important new work.”
–Yvonne Reddick, University of Central Lancashire, UK
“Lidström’s clear and accessible study illuminates two versions of ecopoetics, one
committed to anti-anthropocentric revelation of what lies beyond social and
cultural constructions of nature, the other invested in the intertwining of nature
and culture. Examining the poetry of Hughes and Heaney through six distinct
methodological and thematic lenses, she valuably highlights the diversity of
contemporary ecocritical practices.”
–Lynn Keller, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
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Nature, Environment and Poetry
The environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are
not only acute and grave; they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and
scope. Nonetheless, the political response to problems such as climate change,
biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address
these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the
relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present
and future. One place to look for such new ideas is in poetry, designed to
contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and
evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus
and rationale.
This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two
Anglophone poets: Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) and
British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998). Drawing on recent and
multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes’s and
Heaney’s respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments
in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and
environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics
and globalisation.
This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship
between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes
or Seamus Heaney.
Susanna Lidström is a postdoctoral researcher at the Division of History of
Science, Technology and Environment, with the Environmental Humanities
Laboratory, at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Routledge Environmental Humanities
Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin
Editorial Board
Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK
Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK
Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK
Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia
Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK
Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia
Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia, Australia
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, US
Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK
Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia
International Advisory Board
William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK
Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA
Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA
Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing
Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
University of Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Australia
Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory,
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director,
Rachel Carson Centre, LMU Munich University, Germany
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA
Kirsten Wehner, Head Curator, People and the Environment,
National Museum of Australia
The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture
recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution
and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl,
overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.
The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present
and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicentre of environmental
studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one
that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and
allied social sciences.
We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences
disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts
aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style.
The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social
sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of
environmental change.
Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities
Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman
The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress
An environmental history
Cameron Muir
The Biosphere and the Bioregion
Essential writings of Peter Berg
Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel
Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life
Interdisciplinary perspectives
Edited by Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller
The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis
Rethinking Modernity in a new Epoch
Edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne
Nature, Environment and Poetry
Ecocriticism and the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
Susanna Lidström
Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence
Ecological wisdom at the intersection of religion, ecology, and philosophy
Sam Mickey
Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture
Edited by Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias
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Nature, Environment
and Poetry
Ecocriticism and the poetics of
Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
Susanna Lidström
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Susanna Lidström
The right of Susanna Lidström to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-77524-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77391-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Goudy
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 Ecotrickster: environment and nature religion in Crow 22
2 Human history and environmental time: postmodern
nature in Heaney’s bog poems 47
3 Technology and landscape: counter and recovery poems
in Elmet 67
4 Colonised nature: Heaney and postcolonial ecocriticism 84
5 Ecosemiotics: anti-anthropocentrism in Hughes’s
animal poems 103
6 ‘The place in me’: Heaney, globalisation and sense of place 119
Conclusion: Hughes, Heaney and the different natures
of ecopoetics 141
Index 158