SO MUCH DEPENDS

A few years ago I was on a panel with the poet Jack Ridl at a small writer’s conference in a small town on the west side of Michigan. The discussion point was Can Poetry Heal? I was the first to speak, and I had thought of a few comments that I hoped might be humorous about how poetry wasn’t going to help me with my bad knees or ward off cancer. I concluded with something about how the question might be wrong, that what we should really be talking about was the function of beauty. I worried that I might have sounded a bit glib. Jack spoke last, and I remember exactly what he said, quietly and cautiously—“Perhaps poetry doesn’t heal, but I know I have been consoled by it.” I knew he was right, and that he had been more thoughtful about the question than I had been.

I remembered the cautionary example of that exchange when I first looked at the title of John Felstiner’s new book: Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. I appreciated the provocative title and was amused by the catchy marketing ploy of the subtitle, although I had my doubts that a big hardcover from Yale University Press would really be a field guide to anything, even in a metaphorical sense. There was a bravado in the title that was winning, even as the answer seemed more than clear—Duh . . . I mean . . . No. But this was a book by the author of the critical biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, a book that had helped open up some of Celan’s difficult poetry for me, and of Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, a book I continue to recommend to young poets and translators almost thirty years after I first read it. I was predisposed to trust John Felstiner.

We don’t get far into the introduction of Can Poetry Save the Earth? before Felstiner comes clean about his own response to his title:

Realistically, what can poetry say, much less do, about global warming, seas rising, species endangered, water and air polluted, wilderness road-ridden, rain forests razed, along with strip mining and mountaintop removal, clearcutting, overfishing, overeating, overconsumption, overdevelopment, overpopulation, and so on and on? Well, next to nothing. “Poetry” and “policy” make an awkward half-rhyme at best.

Before we can process the idea that Felstiner may have undermined his effort even before it begins, he answers his own criticism: “Yet next to nothing would still be something.” On that thin strand—that “next to nothing”—Felstiner begins what will become a rather large project, one that becomes quite convincing by the end.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? is a collection of forty-two comparatively compact essays, most of which deal with a single poet and usually with one or two representative poems. The first section begins with an essay on the Hebrew Psalms and follows that with a reading of “Western wind, when will thou blow,” but it focuses on major figures of the nineteenth century, all British except for Whitman and Dickinson. The second section includes essays on the High Modernists and the generation immediately after, all American, except for Edward Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. The third section includes poets born between 1910 and 1930, again mostly American, with the exceptions of Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott. It ends, appropriately enough for a book carrying this title, with a good essay on the poet Felstiner labels “the English-speaking world’s most striking ecological poet,” Gary Snyder, born in 1930.

That summary might lead someone to conclude that Can Poetry Save the Earth? supplements the still vaguely defined theoretical possibility labeled “Ecocriticism,” but I’m not sure that is Felstiner’s intention. Ecocriticism, as I understand it, is the effort to apply (in a kind of close reading) the discoveries of the ecological sciences to works that lend themselves to that application, bringing out new understandings that help erase the traditional barriers between disciplines. Felstiner’s essays (though often very successful close readings of individual poems) appear to be born from a demand that is closer to environmental advocacy, although whatever Ecocriticism is or will become could certainly include this kind of writing under its interpretive umbrella. At their best, these essays are founded on an unmistakable urgency, best exemplified by the poem that Felstiner returns to most often throughout the book, Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In an effort to revivify a poem seen perhaps a bit too often in other contexts, he clearly enjoys copying and recopying Williams’s eight lines:

While he certainly wouldn’t deny the central place of Williams’s little poem in the development of Imagism, or its influence on purely pictorial writing, while he defends its prosodic subtleties of line break and syllable count, Felstiner is focused elsewhere. He returns time and time again to those first two lines—“So much depends / upon”—and the “unending urgency” he reads there: “So much depends on seeing the things of our world afresh by saying them anew.” Rather than reading the wheelbarrow and the rainwater as static elements in a controlled composition, Felstiner finds a greater impact because the “attentiveness to such live detail is a crying need of our time,” when we are distracted from the condition of the earth by commodities and entertainment.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? does have that almost evangelical tone to it, but it does not succumb to too much sermonizing. Felstiner’s essays find their topics in poets and poems we would expect to find in such a book (from Wordsworth and Keats to Kinnell and Snyder), but he takes pleasure in finding poets who are usually thought of as something other than nature poets. Even though there is little about T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound in the collection (it does seem as if he could have made some critical hay with Pound’s “the natural object is always the adequate symbol”), he reminds us that William Carlos Williams wrote over two hundred poems with flowers in them, even if they were the flowers of his urban streets. I am perhaps most drawn to the essays about poets I have not read very closely, or ones I, too, feel are overlooked. His essays on John Clare and Edward Thomas, for instance, are both discussions of interesting poems and reminders of work too easily ignored in the usual discussions. I take pleasure in his unexpected juxtapositions. For instance, I doubt that any other critical book or anthology has ever placed the objectivity of George Oppen between the emotional lushness of Theodore Roethke and the studied prosody of Elizabeth Bishop, yet given Felstiner’s overarching need to illustrate poetry’s celebration of the things of this world, his combination is entirely appropriate. And John Felstiner, a professor at Stanford, works hard to remind those of us who live in the eastern half of the continent that there were and are writers from the Pacific edge who have added considerably to themes that have exercised our imaginations since the Romantics. Perhaps Gary Snyder, still a lively presence willing, at nearly eighty, to travel the country and the world as poet and environmental gadfly, doesn’t need any help from Felstiner to find serious attention outside his region, but Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth, dominating writers in their time, have not recently had many substantive readings in the larger culture.

The essay on Rexroth is particularly fine at combining several different ideas and attitudes. After its unfortunate title, “Things Whole and Holy for Kenneth Rexroth,” which shows Felstiner’s occasionally winning, occasionally sentimental playfulness, the essay quickly introduces us to the eighth-century Chinese poet Tu Fu. Rexroth does not often get the credit he deserves for introducing a couple of generations of American readers to Chinese poetry, particularly in his first volume of translations, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Of course, Rexroth’s versions may not have provided any exact sense of what was happening in the T’ang Dynasty or its prosody, but they did provide an example of plain-spoken engagement with the natural world that continues to have an enormous influence on our poetry. Felstiner quotes Rexroth’s version of Tu Fu’s “Brimming Water”:

In case we could forget, Felstiner immediately provides the context: “Drama, but no moralizing. ‘No ideas but in things,’ said William Carlos Williams. Here, ideas arise from ‘the heart of night,’ ‘like a fist,’ ‘cut the water.’” He doesn’t give Rexroth a pass on the poet’s attitude toward women—both the overly idealized version in his poems and the troubling tendencies toward domination in his life, as they were chronicled in a devastating biography many years ago—the one attitude most responsible for the eclipse of his reputation. But he is willing to remind us of Rexroth’s deep involvement with the natural world and of how that involvement was able to inform the poems and console the poet. I hadn’t read Rexroth’s exquisite elegy for his first wife, “Andree Rexroth,” in many years:

Felstiner reintroduces us to this American poem, deeply influenced by a Chinese example, that is an extraordinary elegy, love poem, and, above all, a nature poem that celebrates the earth, what the earth gives us, and what it takes from us.

Of course, I was not as moved nor as instructed by all of the essays. I didn’t find anything particularly startling in the two essays on Robert Frost, for instance. I was not convinced that Shirley Kaufman is a poet of the stature of the rest of the others Felstiner discusses, although the possibility is now open and I will have to spend more time with her work. I find it hard to believe that anyone could do a book on this subject and with these parameters and not include a discussion of James Wright, yet there is no mention of him here. As a poet whose work is shaped by precise observations of the natural world, Wright exercised an enormous influence on his contemporaries, at least two of whom—Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall—are included.

But that is all quibbling, and I’m sure any reader will come up with his or her own list of shortcomings. Our lists can only remind us that John Felstiner in Can Poetry Save the Earth? has reintroduced the general audience to a serious discussion of nature poetry. He has connected contemporary work with the great strains of Romantic sensibilities, and has shown a way to understand some of the new work happening around us. If poetry cannot heal the wounds we have inflicted on our earth, it can remind us that so much depends upon our clear perception of it. If healing is possible, it can begin there.