Poetry and the Dynamics of Nature: Australia, Canada and New Zealand, 1920s to 1940s

Abstract

In The life of poetry, Muriel Rukeyser proposes that 'poems are always organic, as forms in nature are organic' and that 'the work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy'. The poems in this thesis, from six women poets of Australia, Anglophone Canada and New Zealand of the 1920s to 1940s, not only 'transfer human energy', but also portray and glimpse some of the energy dynamics that occur within the organic, natural world. The poets are Australians Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Mary Gilmore (1865-1962), Canadians Dorothy Livesay (1909-1996), and Anne Marriott (1913-1997) and Louise Morey Bowman 1882-1944, and New Zealand poet Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson 1906-1939) The energy dynamics suggested in the poems foreshadow the insights Of biosemiotics and complexity science, which had their seeds in the thought of a small number of scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, although still nascent, have been developed more systematically in the Iast fifty years. This project endeavours to apply some of the ideas of bio- or ecosemiotics and complexity thinking to the depictions of nature in the poems under discussion. The first chapter, the literature review, offers an overview of the history of relevant ecological terms, biosemiotics, complexity thinking in the sciences and ecological literary criticism. Chapter Two explores some of the energy dynamics of the Earth and Universe pictured in two poems. In Chapter Three, the poems suggest human emergence from and relationship to the blue and green Earth. In Chapter Four, the poems portray both connection and dislocation in the natural world; the human connection to nature is particularly uneasy in colonial or postcolonial lands where ecosystems are disrupted. The poems in Chapter Five intimate some of the energy dynamics of animals who participate in the making processes of the biosphere and geosphere. The poems in this study, intimating the energy dynamics of nature, suggest that humans also participate in these energy dynamics as humans reflect on and attempt to understand the dynamics of the natural world.