New world poetics : nature and the adamic imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott / George B. Handley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Handley, George B., 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Chilean poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

Chilean poetry.

English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Ecocriticism.

Philosophy of nature in literature.

Ecology in literature.

Nature in literature.

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892--Criticism and interpretation.

Whitman, Walt.

Neruda, Pablo, 1904-1973--Criticism and interpretation.

Neruda, Pablo.

Walcott, Derek--Criticism and interpretation.

Walcott, Derek.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (456 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ga. : University of Georgia Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A simultaneously ecocritical and comparative study, New World Poetics plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of the poetry of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott, three of the Americas' most ambitious and epic-minded poets. In Whitman's call for a poetry of New World possibility, Neruda's invocation of an "American love," and Walcott's investment in the poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry does not reinvent the mythical Garden that stands before history's beginnings but instead taps the foundational powers of language before a natural world deeply imbued with the traces of human time. Theirs is a postlapsarian Adam seeking a renewed sense of place in a biocentric and cross-cultural New World through language and nature's capacity for regeneration in the wake of human violence and suffering. The book introduces the environmental history of the Americas and its relationship to the foundation of American and Latin American studies, explores its relevance to each poet's ambition to recuperate the New World's lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. The study provides much needed in-depth ecocritical readings of the major poems of the three poets, insisting on the need for thoughtful regard for the challenge to human imagination and culture posed by nature's regenerative powers; nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time; and the symptomatic dangers as well as healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.

Contents:

Ecology, the New World, and the "American" Adam

A New World poetics

reading Whitman in the New World

Nature's last chemistry in Leaves of grass

Natural history as autobiography

Hemispheric history as natural history

The muse of (natural) history

Impressionism in the New World

Death, regeneration, and the prospect of extinction.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 413-427) and index.

ISBN:

9786612726187

9781282726185

1282726188

9780820336718

0820336718

OCLC:

647901167