The Song of the Earth
Jonathan Bate Picador, 338pp, £18
ISBN 0330372386
Rarely has a book of this kind been so topical. Jonathan Bate, whose books on Shakespeare have made him one of the youngest English professors in the country, writes here on a subject he calls ecopoetics. "This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern western man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home," he says in the preface. You cannot fault his ambition, although the sonorous tone may be off-putting.
As you might guess from the rhetorical style, a number of these chapters have already been delivered as lectures. The Song of the Earth is not only loaded with the kind of passion to which the young will respond, it is also the most interesting book of its kind since Raymond Williams's The Country and the City in the Modern Novel. It may seem obvious to look at Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy from the perspective of the attachment they both had to their native soil (both being suspicious of mobility and the city), but Bate's thesis covers writers both inside and outside the canon. William Henry Hudson's prophetic fantasy, Green Mansions, set in the Guyanese rainforest, makes a rich contrast to the icy splendours of Frankenstein. Bate's observations on the uses that black writers such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Aime Cesaire have made of Caliban are, as in The Genius of Shakespeare, rewarding. As he says: "An eco-poetic reading of The Tempest might . . . take the form of a rewriting of the play for the theatre of negritude."
Having been launched on Shakespeare and the Romantics, Bate excels in his readings of them, and of the effects of both Rousseau and the Enlightenment. At the heart of the book lies an impassioned argument for the marginal figure of John Clare. Excluded from the literary canon, committed to an asylum for the insane for much of his life, his is, as Bate says, the tragedy of "the most authentically working class of all major English poets". For Clare, unlike middle-class Romantics, the bond with nature is the antithesis of escapism and the retreat from social commitment. He does not write self-consciously about the egotistical sublime, but about nature for its own sake - something that has caused him to be seen by many as merely rustic and naive.
Bate shows, brilliantly and movingly, how wrong this is, and how Clare's laments against enclosure and exile foreshadow scientific ecology in his knowledge that an organism has meaning and value only in its proper home, in symbiotic association with all the creatures that surround and nourish it. In one of many pieces of engaging research, he tells us that Swordy Well, immortalised in Clare's ballad of that name, is now partly a stone quarry and partly a refuse dump.
One would have liked more on other refuse dumps, particularly those in Hard Times and D H Lawrence; more on children's literature such as The Secret Garden and children's instinctive passion for the earth; more on gardens generally. It is a pity that so many academics continue to ignore J R R Tolkien, who probably wrote more feelingly about the earth than anyone in the past century.
The book does not cohere as well as The Genius of Shakespeare, possibly because of its evident origins as a series of lectures. Yet this is a brave, original work, written with both poetic passion and scholarly reflection.
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