Ian Hamilton Finlay's Topographical Poetics at Stonypath/Little Sparta

Abstract

While Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden Little Sparta is often more readily associated with the sculptural and plastic arts, Finlay always took care to describe the works in the garden as ‘poems’. This article shows how this fact is far from trivial, but rather is fundamental to understanding the garden and its purpose. It defines the poetics of Little Sparta as topographical poetics, showing how the formal development of modernist and concrete poetry leads directly to the sculptural and site-specific poetry of the garden, and proposing a formal model of topographical poetics – considered as a compound of name, material, and environment – through which the garden poems can be read. It demonstrates this through close readings of ‘MARE NOSTRUM’, ‘signpost’ and other garden poems, showing how topographical poetics shifts the locus of the poetic from the voice to the place and, by extension, the self to the home, and goes on to examine some primary characteristics of the model, among them miniaturism, scalar oscillations and weather. It argues, moreover, that this poetic model was developed by Finlay to realise an ontological project (here defined as a tension between the ‘poetic’ and the ‘homely’) of realising a longing or homesickness for Arcadian and Utopian absolutes in order to become reconciled to their impossibility in the process of making a home in the everyday world. In so doing, it reveals how the garden realises tensions between culture and nature, classical and modern, absolutism and pragmatism, and art and life, and asserts Finlay’s singular contribution to twentieth-century poetics.