A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

that there never was a world for her

      Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

      (Stevens 1990, p. 98)

      What of the sense that the self is part of a larger cosmos? “There is a conflict,” Stevens writes in “The Course of a Particular,” there is “a resistance involved.” “One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.”

      The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,

      Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.

      It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves.

      (Stevens 1990, p. 367).

      Nature has its own independent life, to which we may not readily impute human meaning. It is inevitable, of course: the poet, at the end, hears the leaves “cry.” But Stevens also writes in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,

      There was a muddy centre before we breathed,

      There was a myth before the myth began,

      Venerable and articulate and complete

      From this the poem springs, that we live in a place

      That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

      And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

      (Stevens 1990, p. 210)

      For several decades at the close of the last century, critical opinion located A.R. Ammons in a tradition of American Romanticism that emphasized the figure of the “central man,” the orphic poet who, though often thwarted, remakes the world through the force of imagination. Harold Bloom acknowledges that in each of the “Emersonian poets” there is both a surge of confidence and a falling-away. Still, for him the greatness of these poets derives from their insistence on the power of the visionary self to assert its dominance (Bloom 1971b, p. 260). Similarly, Bonnie Costello locates Ammons in what she calls the central Emersonian theme of “motion as it mediates the one and the many” (Costello 2002, p. 130).

In my reading, however, Ammons belongs not primarily to this way of thinking and writing, but to another strain, one that also derives from the transcendentalist era but in a very different register. Elsewhere I call it “fluid transcendentalism,” and look to Thoreau as its primary figure in the mid-nineteenth century. Thoreau modeled a way of engaging and writing about the more-than-human world that would resonate with later generations of critics, social commentators, and poets (Ronda 2017). While earlier readers and critics dismissed Thoreau’s journals and later writing as unreadable and mere chronicles, scholars including Laura Dassow Walls, David Robinson, and Lawrence Buell have argued that those writings reveal Thoreau’s interest in attaining deeper knowledge of nature and discerning a less anthropocentric place in the scheme of things (Buell 1995; Robinson 2004; Walls 1995).

      “Fluid transcendentalism” is a step beyond what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “human flourishing,” in which human well-being rather than service to the divine is the ultimate goal and value of human life (Taylor 2007, pp. 12–16). For Thoreau and writers who eventually follow him, a better goal is “material flourishing.” While Emerson and others acknowledge the intimacy humans have with the more-than-human world, their project is really about celebrating human centrality. But Thoreauvian transcendentalism pushes beyond that goal to embrace the vital and enchanted “glow” of all matter. In this way, Thoreau anticipates contemporary “new materialists” like Jane Bennett and Serpil Oppermann, who propose a vital materiality to all things, a “thing-power,” as Bennett calls it. Building on their insights, Kate Rigby emphasizes a “material spirituality,” recognizing the interconnectedness of all things rather than the more common assumption that humans are the center of the cosmos (Bennett 2001, 2010; Opperman 2014; Rigby 2014).

      Seen in the light of this alternative transcendentalism, a poet like A.R. Ammons no longer so clearly belongs to the “central man” thesis of Bloom and his school. Certainly there are moments in Ammons’s poetry that seem to echo what Bloom most prizes, the struggle of the poet/speaker for space against a resisting nature, such as in the early poem, “So I Said I Am Ezra”:

      Turning to the sea I said

      I am Ezra

      But there were no echoes from the waves

      The words were swallowed up

      In the voice of the surf

      Or leaping over the swells

      Lost themselves oceanward

      (Ammons 1986, p. 1)

      But in “He Held Radical Light,” Ammons makes fun of this panic:

      Reality had little weight in his transcendence

      So he

      Had trouble keeping

      His feet on the ground, was

      Terrified by that

      And liked himself, and others, mostly

      Under roofs:

      (Ammons 1986, p. 60)

      More often, however, Ammons works toward a co-extensive voice, the human voice interacting with, answering, often falling silent, in the face of a world not of the poet’s own making, as Thoreau did. This approach can be seen in “Bees Stopped”:

      I looked out over the lake

      And beyond to the hills and trees

And nothing was moving

      So I looked closely

      Along the lakeside

      Under the old leaves of rushes

      And around clumps of drygrass

      And life was everywhere

      So I went on sometimes whistling

      (Ammons 1986, p. 2)

      For Ammons, the natural world is invested with its own singular beauty, process, and form. His task is to find language to convey “the forms/things want to come as/from what back wells of possibility,/how a thing will unfold” (Ammons 1986, p. 61).

      Contemporary American ecopoetics and poetry are treated elsewhere in this Companion, but here I will notice a few poets whose work seems most akin to Thoreau’s project of fluid transcendentalism and its reformulation by new materialists. W. S. Merwin made the Thoreau connection explicit in an interview with Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson: “For Thoreau, when he sees [the natural world], it’s alive, completely alive, not a detail in a piece of rhetoric. And he leaves open what its significance is. He realizes that the intensity with which he’s able to see it is its significance. This is an immense gesture of wisdom in Thoreau that I miss in Whitman” (Merwin 1987, p. 324).

      Merwin’s sense of the living body of the natural world and his rage at human despoliation made Lice (1967) a widely read and critically acclaimed book. In 2017, poet Matthew Zapruder called Merwin’s poems like “The Last One,” “legendary, foundational, proto-eco”:

      Well they cut everything because why not.

      Everything was theirs because they thought so.

      It fell into its shadows and they took both away.

      Some to have some for burning.

      (Merwin 2017, pp. xii, 10)

      The congruities between Mary Oliver’s poetry and the influence of Thoreauvian transcendentalism, especially in books like the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive (1983), are equally striking (Ronda 2017, pp. 181–185). There, in poems like “The Sea,” “The Honey Tree,” and “In Blackwater Woods,” Oliver explores the physicality of her body and the materiality of nature. Janet McNew observes that “Oliver’s visionary goal… involves constructing a subjectivity that does not depend