Birds of a Feather: Emily Dickinson, Alberto Manguel, and the Nature Poet's Dilemma

Abstract

“The impossible task of the ecopoet,” Jonathan Bate starkly asserts in The Song of the Earth, “is to speak the silence of the place” (151). In making this claim, however, he simultaneously allows for some flexibility in his position by offering Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” as an example of a text that comes as close, as he puts it, “as any poem has ever reached to such a speaking” (151). Nonetheless, Bate's declaration is a powerful statement of what may well be the central problem in ecocentric discourse, or in what he calls “ecopoesis” (149)—a problem that can be defined as the attempt to convey in words a reality that is foreign to words and that resists them. It may also be the case, though, that Wordsworth himself comes equally close to acknowledging the very same difficulty to which Bate refers. In what follows I shall be considering several key texts by Emily Dickinson and Alberto Manguel which, like Wordsworth's great poem, address the difficulty of their task by, to varying degrees, acknowledging it, or at least indicating some awareness of the distance between nature and their representations of it.