Conclusion

Summary

One of the underlying arguments of this book is that poetry’s value is bound up in its “negative capability,” in its presentation of complexity. It isn’t that the ambiguity or uncertainty embedded in a poem is part of some devious machination on the part of the poet, but that poetry is founded in a fissure, as the previous chapter show in a variety of ways. This argument comes under heavy pressure in a time of global political and ecological crisis. Never has it been more stupifyingly clear that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden wrote. And never have the deep foundations of poetry seemed so precarious. The importance of nature for poetry is so deep as to be nearly unnoticeable, not only poetry’s reliance on the ideologies of the pastoral, but also poetry’s leveraging its own significance by way of the sublimity of the natural world. What happens when nature is under planetary threat? What is the status of a nature poem well after the death of nature? How might we understand poetry within the context of ongoing ecological devastation? This chapter considers these questions through reading of poems by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort, Ed Roberson, and Juliana Spahr.