Is nature writing too nice?

I never much liked the English Romantic poets; even as an English literature-obsessed teenager, forced to write dreary essays about Wordsworth and Keats, something about them always made me want to spit. (But then, I was always more inclined towards the likes of Moby Dick than ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.) It’s not that I didn’t or don’t admire much of what the Romantics stood for: I do. It was absolutely necessary to provide an intellectual and artistic alternative to the increasing mechanisation of thought and rationalisation of nature in the wake of the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment. 

What I can’t tolerate is the way some of them executed it, and here Wordsworth (especially in his later years) is arguably the worst culprit. Faced with the growing understanding that however many nice poems you write, ‘nature’ isn’t all pretty daffodils, Wordsworth retreated into depression, and then decided that nature was probably subordinate to humanity after all, in the ongoing search for transcendence which none of these writers could seem to leave behind. So much Romantic writing is filled with talk of nature’s ‘sublimity’ and so much moralising nonsense accompanied it – and it can be argued that this only succeeded in further enhancing duality – the very division between man and nature that they set out originally to heal. They run the risk of putting ‘nature’ so far above human capability that in fact nature becomes God – something to be aspired to, but never attained by mere sinful humans.

Not surprisingly perhaps Nietzsche couldn’t much tolerate it either, referring to “The insipid and cowardly concept ‘nature’ devised by nature enthusiasts ( – without any instinct for what is fearful, implacable and cynical in even the ‘most beautiful’ aspects), a kind of attempt to read moral Christian ‘humanity’ into nature – Rousseau’s concept of nature, as if ‘nature’ were freedom, goodness, innocence, fairness, justice, an idyll …”

Fortunately for the future of British ‘nature writing’, antidotes to all this sublimity came along in the form of DH Lawrence, Ted Hughes, RS Thomas – poets for whom nature simply WAS, and did not need to be more than it was, or to represent any features that humans could superimpose on it. More on all that later, no doubt, on this blog.

And yet, and yet – so much of the ‘nature writing’ we see today still falls right into the same trap. We have seen it very clearly recently, in so many of the submissions we’ve received for our forthcoming ecopoetry anthology. Except that now, what is curious is that the poems which are focused on ‘poetic moments’ of admiring pretty daffodils are matched by poems that can only be described as self-flagellating guilt dumps. We aspire to an ecopoetry – to an ecoliterature – that moves beyond all of that. None of which is to say that guilt isn’t appropriate when we look at what we’ve inflicted on the planet – and none of which is to say that there isn’t still a need for very fine poems that celebrate the beauty and mysteries of the natural world too. But what we really long for is writing – whether poetry or prose – that connects the two conflicting responses to the natural world and then moves on. What we need from ‘nature writing’ is to replace it with genuine ecoliterature – literature that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world – those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect. 

Sharon