Composting

Michael Cohen, UCLAThis paper will excavate an anxious question in the mid-nineteenth century: what to do with the dead. Romantic poetry has often been cast as the high-water mark of enthusiasm for the animating powers of... [ view full abstract ]

Michael Cohen, UCLA

This paper will excavate an anxious question in the mid-nineteenth century: what to do with the dead. Romantic poetry has often been cast as the high-water mark of enthusiasm for the animating powers of poetic language—both its capacity to render non-living entities into things that may speak (personification, prosopopeia), and also its ability to project a natural world responsive to human perception and expression (apostrophe, pathetic fallacy). Even studies like Jonathan Culler’s recent Theory of the Lyric, which seeks to de-humanize the model of a lyric poem, still does so by emphasizing the lyric poem’s poetic aliveness.

If nineteenth-century American poetry has an environmental consciousness, though, I want to look for it in poems that discover an uncanny horror in the natural world’s recursive non-responsiveness to the distinctions between being alive and being dead. My examples will be Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” and Herman Melville’s “Shiloh.” In these poems that conceive a world failing to acknowledge the poem’s own horror at the world’s failure to acknowledge life and death, we glimpse otherwise occluded visions of the non-humanness that underlies ordinary acts of poetic animation.