9 - The Verdant Imagination in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Summary

Abstract

This ecocritical analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets addresses the poems’ engagement with fundamental questions of organismic life. Approached as an ecosystem, the Sonnets predicate a new version of the relationship between self and world. Their interdependence is conveyed via Shakespeare’s reliance on botanical tropes and images, though these are provocatively reimagined. Tracking such moments of iconoclasm yields an updated conception of “art” and “nature” and generates fresh insights about “zoe” and “bios” (concepts important in ecocritical work). The omnipresent antinomies of “art/nature” and “zoe/bios” underscore the Sonnets’ quest for permanence, serving as a reminder that the ecological cannot be considered in isolation from the psychological. Ultimately, Shakespeare appropriates to the lyric mode the eternizing properties conventionally ascribed to the botanical world.

Keywords: ecocriticism, evolutionary aesthetics, time, death, art/nature, permanence

Poetry has long been assumed to mediate the relationship between humans and the natural world. To Ovid, for example, poetry subdues, bringing nature’s awesome power under control. By contrast, Philip Sidney evidently believed that poetry needed a champion, someone to retrieve it from the shoals of irrelevance. Much of his defense of this literary mode hinges on poetry’s ability to lift humans above the debasement of the material world. Not incidentally, in our own era, it seems that aggressor and victim, vis-a-vis the unfolding story of humans and nature, have swapped positions: now, poetry is being asked to rescue nature from humans’ ruinous assaults on it. An updated defense of poetry (that is, a theory of its prime usages) is provided by poet Glyn Maxwell. He emphasizes the elemental functions of the ancient but ever-relevant mode, concluding: “Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts.” Maxwell construes poetry as an intense form of chiaroscuro, one whose patterning displays of black ink against swaths of whiteness—the artfully devised arrangements of lines and line-breaks—can thus be understood as attempts to cope with the passage of time, or the daunting prospect of being banished from its sequential movements. All of these perspectives on poetry attest to its unique significance for ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism encompasses a diverse array of approaches, but they might be conveniently distilled to their shared emphasis on examining relationships between humans and the natural world.