The Theory of Nature: From Romantic Idealism to Contemporary Ecologies in the Works of Juliana Spahr and Alice Oswald

Abstract

This paper focuses on how Juliana Spahr and Alice Oswald’s work modernizes the Romantic ideals of ‘Nature’ about ecopoetics. For Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Emerson, ‘Nature’ promised transcendence, the ethereal, and the virtuous. In the twenty-first century, poets see ‘Nature’ as delicate, tangled, and chaotic due to the ecological crisis and human touch. Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs imagines the atmosphere as a lyrical commons of breath where intimacy and global violence, ecological intimacy, and domination coexist. Alice Oswald’s Dart creates a polyphonic ecology where a river, workers, and other-than-humans speak to one another, dramatizing the interpenetrating and collaborative world we share. This study claims, based on ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism, that both poets extend the lyric to move ‘beyond’ representation in order to think nature as interdependence, agency, and shared responsibility. Oswald and Spahr are positioned within the longer line of Romantic idealism and Anthropocene ecologies to show how contemporary lyric poetry serves as a type of ecological theory.