Cognitive Ecopoetics: A New Theory of Lyric

This book arises at the confluence of three distinct tributaries: ecopoetics, cognitive poetics, and the theory of the lyric. Common to many advocates and practitioners of ecopoetry is the view that it might serve to negotiate a relationship with the physical world, nudging its makers and hearers alike into alignment with “nature,” the definition of which is then contested. The belief is not simply a Romantic holdover, or Jonathan Bate’s notion of the poem as a park in which we may “accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated” (10), for it is shared, for instance, by Olsonian poetics bent on undoing the subject. In fact, the aim of reconciliation with a physical reality reaches an extreme when it is framed as ecological: “For ecopoetics reflects yet another in a series of human decenterings, as from an ecological perspective, the self dissolves into the gene pool and the species into the ecosystem” (Reilly 257).