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ABSTRACT

Poetry has been defined by Dryden as the “image of nature”. Nature both
as subject and poetic theory has been imperative to literature since the
dawn of poetry. Even much before Glotfelty’s definition of eco-criticism
simply as the study of the relationship between literature and physical
environment in late 20th century, literature and arts have been drawn to
the portrayals of human-environment interaction. We can see that
nature can be depicted as a cell because nature doesn’t need a help or
any intervention from human to continue, its self-sustainable, benefactor
of beauty and productivity. But there is also a dangerous side about
nature. Tumor exists because humans failed to take care of his body and
caused the cells to mutate into something dangerous. From this parable
we can understand that nature can be dangerous if humans keep feeding
it with things that could break a system inside nature itself. If nature
becomes entropic then all form of symbiosis would fall apart.

My article would primarily meditate upon abominable condition of the

environment due to anthropocentric factors as well as try to discover the
relevance of literary genre of green studies/Eco criticism as a white knight
for a beleaguered nature.

Keywords: - Nature, Anthropocentric, Green-Studies, Eco-Criticism, Environment, Literature

INTRODUCTION
As humans we all live in a misconception that in case things goes berserk we always have a key to restore
things back to normalcy. When Edison turned on the lamp could he turn it off, could Bell hung up after saying
“hello”? Certain things once initiated could never be reverted back. But we have the option to keep it in
moderation and prevent us from floundering in choppy seas. Human nature of curiosity encourages them to
explore ostensibly impossible areas. But there goes a saying “curiosity kills the cat” which match perfectly with
the ongoing conflict between the Nature and human nature. Human’s nature helps them improving science
but a too much curiosity could be dangerous.
The crux of my topic shall be regarding the efficacy of eco-reading / green studies in literature and how it can
be applied across all literary platforms to raise an alarm among the masses about the consequences of
slaughtering our environment. Therefore I have divided my work into three parts (a) Why are we Failing, shall
give an insight on the causes of our failure to protect our environment; (b) The White Knight, shall deal with
the crux of my paper; (c) Conclusion, shall show a way forward.
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WHY ARE WE FAILING?

We all are aware of the deteriorating condition of our Nature. One can write an entire book on the
issues impinging the environment, So without going into deep technicalities, I shall straightaway focus on the
complacent attitude of humans. We as humans have somehow able to convince ourselves that Environmental
issues are BIG only in newspapers, journals and debates. Unlike issues such as traffic congestion or crime
which are visible, environmental degradation is not what most people can easily see or feel in their everyday
lives. Therefore, when the consequences of such degradation beings to wreak havoc, it becomes difficult to
draw the correlation between nature’s vengeance with human failings. We experts talk about climate
changes, they talk about distances such as 50 years or 100 years from now, or by 2050 or 2100, this distances
maybe even span less than a blink of an eye in geological terms but as humans, we feel it to be eons from
now. We may feel for polar bears on melting ice floes, but they have little bearing on our day-to-day lives.
Psychological studies have shown as humans, the problem of dissonance might be an even bigger deal. What
we actually do every day conflicts with what we know we should do. This makes us feel a bit like hypocrites
because we know things we are doing is some way or the other is adversely affecting the surrounding, but yet
we do it, we do it all the time. This uncomfortable feeling of dissonance soon turns into denial and
environmental cautiousness seems more or less as captain obvious.
On May 21, 2019 a 34- member panel of Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) voted in favour of
designating a new geological epoch- The Anthropocene. But what is Anthropocene epoch? Why is it even a big
deal? Well firstly- an Epoch is a geoglogical timescale. Our to say the way a clock is divided into numbers from
1-12, similarly the earth time since its edifice has been divided into epochs and each epoch is dominated by a
group which is responsible for the fiat accompli. Anthropocene epoch marks the end of Holocene epoch.
Humanity’s impact on nature is now so profound that a new epoch has been declared “The Anthropocene”
and well humans impact is miles away from being fiat accompli. Unfortunately the markers of this epoch
would be plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by global proliferation
of domestic chicken.
Humans today have lost intimacy with nature. Value of virtual and political intimacy has surpassed the
aesthetic nature. Many new environmental movements in poetry tend to be controversial, even scandalous-
think of the receptions of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s deliberately anti-poetic
language in “lyrical ballads” (1798). Today writing for environment is some sort of Avant Garde in nature. It’s
an unfortunate time while I am writing this dissertation. Hue and cry, wailing, breast beating over
anthropocentric catastrophe has already begun. Failing monsoon, drying up reservoirs, Lands of beautiful
summer transmogrifying into ground of deadly tropical heat waves. If Shakespeare were to write his sonnet 18
“Shall I compare thee to summer’s day?” today, he would have definitely gave it a second thought and must
have dropped the idea. There are plethora of reasons which can be mooted, but as humans are we even
acknowledging that what is the cost of our failure? Perhaps NOT.
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THE WHITE KNIGHT

Can Nature be salvaged with the help of literature? Can Arts help resuscitate a besmirched
environment? Well maybe literature and arts not alone can achieve this herculean task but can definitely act
as cynosure. Although Arts and Science wasn’t cut from the same cloth, but both can work in tandem to
alleviate the duress on environment. As I always believe that while Science answers, Literature explains.
Environmental concerns have become both unavoidable for poetry, and implicated in profound questions as
to what a poetry is or can be. Although as a poet W.H Auden famously wrote “poetry makes nothing happen”,
yet literature and poetry in particular gives a vast compound to play with thoughts. Poetry isn’t slave to linear
of time nor to the set of established laws. Its muddles in the puddles of the vast expanse of human
consciousness. This liberty of experimentation can offer unique resource for activating concern and creative
thinking about environmental future. Literature can clear the big picture and as humans we can stop waiting
for the other shoe to drop. The idea of nature as a flux has influenced poets like Ovid, Dryden, Sidney, Shelley
and many more. A eclectic, pluriform, and cross-disciplinary understanding of literature can be achieved with
the help of eco-criticism. Eco-criticism gives a new alertness of analyzing a new dimension of a text, a
dimension which perhaps has not received the environmental sensitive reading.

ECO-CRITICISM:
All new poetry as well as works which we now consider passé in environmental sense, need to be
examined through the lenses of environment in some way or the other, simply because things cannot be read
in the old ways. Eco-criticism developed in 1980’s in U.S.A while in U.K as “Green studies” in 1990’s. early
ecocriticism was dominated by the Romantic-humanism which celebrated certain literary texts, especially
poetry. Two stalwarts Cheryll Glotfelty and Jonathan Bate changed the way one conceived poetry. Eco-
criticism can be traced back to William Rickards 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology An Experiment in Eco-
criticism”. Glotfelty revived the term Eco-criticism and gave it a new vigor. While Jonathan Bate, whose 1991
“Romantic Ecology” inaugurated British ecocriticism. While Britain takes its source from British Romanticism,
U.S.A trace it back to The Transcendentalists. One of the reason why ecocriticism developed into a cultural
phenomenon in US and Western Europe, is the relatively tolerant form of capitalism. Where public opinion
was capable of brewing a political storm. Albeit, I believe that capitalism itself is the cancerous cell which is
now opening hospitals to treat cancers. As a result of industrialization and mechanization, arable land shrank.
Deforestation, depleting ground water, besmirched air, it all began in the western capitalist economies itself.
The scientific revolution with the idea of progress soon translated into economic terms. Human believed that
with every new discovery, invention, transformation, a whole new realm of economic prosperity would open.
Modern economy is like hormone soused teenager which consummates everything which comes in its way.
Capitalism began as a theory which has a description as well as a prescription. But today its no longer a mere
theory working in a single field of human world. Today it encapsulates each and every aspect of our lives,
modern capitalism made a huge unsustainable digression from the Smith’s description of Capitalism. Today
the pie isn’t growing, instead its being extorted and stored by privileged few. This extortion is based on
exploitation and this exploitation gives birth to the mind set of justifying our exploitation of our environment.
Everyone wants the largest share of the pie. In this mad gold rush we have turned blind eye to the
environmental perils. “Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?” We try to resist ineluctable
danger by inveigled lies we tell ourselves. But what is the cost of lies?
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Soon after the Chernobyl disaster, a German novelist Christa Wolf, writing in what was then East
Germany, blends science and story-telling seamlessly in “Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day's
News, 1987),” relates a day in the life of an unnamed female narrator as she struggles simultaneously to
comprehend the enormity of a nuclear disaster and to pass the hours as her brother undergoes surgery for a
brain tumor. The narrative allows Wolf to juxtapose different perceptions of advanced technology. While on
one hand the same radiation salvages her brother, on the other hand a radiation from the Nuclear Power
Plant annihilates and massacres the entire city rendering Chernobyl uninhabitable for coming 24000 years.
This novel led to public and political outburst among the scientists, intellectuals and artists. Literature acts as a
mirror, it shows us the reflections of our deeds. “The climate maybe changing but, fundamentally speaking,
our outlook is not”. Poetry have one advantage over the prose narratives. Poetry isn’t stuck in the
conventional constraints as prose narratives. Therefore using various metaphors and imageries it is more open
to represent multiplicity, even contradiction and indeterminacy. Taking example of Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird,
came down the Walk”
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

The majority part of the poem depicts an approach between human speaker and the bird. The
metaphors like eyes like ‘beads’, a head of ‘velvet’ tries to domesticate the creature and establish a
connection. But towards the end the bird flies away and the poem’s metaphor come increasingly to emphasis
the non-human distance of the bird. Knickerbocker writes:
“First, rowboat imagery describes his homeward flight, and then the last stanza takes us into an ocean and its
swimming butterflies in a metamorphosis of metaphor. This movement at the level of figure suggests both the
actual motion of the receding bird as well as the shift to the speaker’s epistemological relationship to the bird
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from near- communion to unknowing. Furthermore, the incongruous pairing of figures, ‘ocean’ with ‘seam’,
‘Banks’ (place) with ‘Noon’ (time), and ‘butterflies’ with ‘swim’ – helps confound her earlier efforts to
domesticate the bird.”
This poem can be referred as a ‘Ecopheneomenlogical poetry’ as these types of poems engage with non-
human creatures, places, organisms in order to affirm them in terms other to human preconceptions. In
Hughes poem ‘Hawk Roosting’ , the Hawk is the speaker of the poem. His poem is a bit unconventional to that
of Dickinson’s as Dickinson’s poem emphasizes how deeply we use human categories to think about the non-
humans.
Nature has been a core theme of most of the poetries. They simply wait to be read through the
spectacles of ecocriticism. In old English Literature, the most successful natural description lies in the poems
such as ‘Beowulf’, ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’. The mediaeval works such as ‘Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight’, ‘Pearl’ celebrates nature with awe and astonishment in rhythmic melodies. Nature during the
Renassiance was used as a moral world. It reflected the spiritual turmoil as evident from the storm scene in
King Lear. Nature also took the role of an emissary of sacrilegious acts.
OLD MAN
'Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last,
A falcon, tow'ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

ROSS
And Duncan’s horses—a thing most strange and certain—
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would
Make war with mankind.

OLD MAN

'Tis said they eat each other.

Macbeth – Act 2 Sc. IV

For others the nature served as philosophical argument. To William Wordsworth nature reflected his
emotions. “To William Wordsworth, the greatest romantic poet, nature seemed to possess a conscious soul
which expressed itself in the primrose, the rippling lake or the cuckoo’ song with as much intelligence as
human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love”.
Through poetry and especially eco-poetry poets have tried to celebrate the bounties of nature as well
as show that at times nature can be ‘red in tooth and claw’. Tennyson in his works liked to differ from
Wordsworth and Coleridge in his portrayal of the nature. While Wordsworth treated nature as something
outside man, a place where one needs to go in order to find solace. Tennyson on the other hand treated
nature with wonderful delicacy and accuracy. Nature for him is always a background for reflecting some
human emotions. A poet’s emotional response of nature has varied from age to age. Poetries have always
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been the reflection of the age it was composed, it also acts as health report of our enviornment. If one traces
the poetries, he would find that portrayal of nature as gleeful and propitious, turns to gloomy, beleaguered
with clouds of doubt, uncertainty and certitude during the Victorian period or post The Great Industrial
Revolution. Indeed the Industrial Revolution proved to be the watershed moment for the environment. Earlier
humans walked barefoot. He felt the nature, he was in touch with the nature. But one day humans
manufactured slippers. He no longer walked barefoot, he no longer felt the soothing nectar of the fallen
flowers under his feet. He built more tanneries for the sleepers and slowly humans lost touch with the nature.
The day humans put on his slippers, he had lost the touch with nature. This lost touch today is wreaking the
havoc and poets and prose writers try to establish the lost connection back.
Apart from literary works, Tabloids, media, movies and a recent phenomenon Web-Series are adopting
from various literary works and presenting this hyper-real phenomenon of nature which is indeed grabbing
attention and consciousness among the masses. Netflix show ‘Leila’ based on an eponymous dystopian novel
by journalist Prayag Akbar catches the grim picture of our society in future fraught with decadence, jingoism,
environmental degradation, lack of drinking water, people murdering each other for a drop of water. This type
of shows are in tally with various governmental reports stating that by 2030, 40% of India’s population would
not have adequate water supply.
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CONCLUSION

Literature and arts can definitely give a nudge to the human behavior. Adam Smith in his book ‘Theory
of Moral Sentiment’, noted that a wide range of human choices are driven and limited by our mental
resources i.e., cognitive ability, attention and motivation. Insights from human psychology states that real
people do not always behave like robots, rational and unbiased individuals. Therefore here comes into play
the nudge theory or behavioral economics. Where a direction is provided through an institution to work in
accordance to set of guidelines (violating it may not attract any penalties). Here the institution being,
Literature and various forms of Arts. It can help concretizing the value of safe-guarding nature. School and
College curriculum should incorporate more of eco-poetries and encourage Green Studies. If we do not wake
up now, we have to prepared to face the consequences of nature wreaking great havoc on humanity. We
would not need nuclear bombs for our obliteration. I would now conclude my paper with a short poem
penned down by me, hoping the readers to sit down and ruminate on road we have taken.

You choked up my breath and smouldered my hues,

You spilled in my bloods and poisoned my soul;
Lost are his words as he sees fading worth of his muse,
Jost he waits their waiting for my grandeur to stole;

Toddler steps you took and clasped my bough,

Crawler were you when thou teethed forbidden drupe;
Lost is thy innocence as the reddened claws arouse,
Holocaust mine footing finding myself in covetous loop;

Coughing in, apprehending cyst I hath found my protector,

Preserving and celebrating me like a babe born new;
Lake poets were they called but now none to bother,
Ache churning my heart awaiting pallor until eternal snew;

Silent was I when thou commenced piercing my soul,

Silent will I be still while thou embark on your voyage to toll;
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Buell, Lawrence ; Heise , Ursula; Thornber, Karen. Literature and Enviornment. Annual Review of
Enviornment and Resources.
http://environment.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Buell_Heise_Thornber_ARER_2011_Lit_and
_Envt.pdf. August 1, 2011. June 15,2019
 Clarke, Timothy. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Print
 Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. Harper, 2014. Print
 Economic Survey 2018-19. Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2019. Print
 Ecocriticism Part A, NPTEL. www.youtube.com. February 25, 2015. June 16, 2019
 Prasad, R. Scientists give the thumbs-up for Anthropocene Epoch. The Hindu May 29, 2019