The Song of the Earth - Hardcover

Jonathan Bate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330372386 ISBN 13: 9780330372381

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

FIRST EDITION. 2000 Picador hardcover, British import, Jonathan Bate (Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare). As we enter a new millennium ruled by technology, will poetry still matter? The Song of the Earth answers eloquently in the affirmative. A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home. - Amazon

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Bate is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

Review:

The Song of the Earth begins from readings in the ecology of literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. Jane Austen, Cowper, Hardy, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray and others are explored for what they tell us about changing attitudes to landscape, to place, and what Bate calls, in a deliberate ecological metaphor, the "complex and delicate web" that holds together culture and environment...[this book] is the best of things, a book which will help its readers to think new thoughts--thoughts about poetry, about places, and about themselves. (Grevel Lindop Times Literary Supplement)

"This ambitious, erudite critical study...seeks to recast Romantic poetry from the Wordsworthian 'egotistical sublime' to an ecological one. Romantic literature's love of nature, its fierce individualism and its political radicalism make it a plausible candidate for planting the seeds of the Green movement...Amplifying on his astute readings of [poetry], Bate formulates his own idea of 'ecopoesis,' a poetics of human habitation within nature, instead of pastoralism's façade." (Publishers Weekly)

[Bate] establishes the reality of the ecological theme in English poetry. Building on a broad literature in philosophy and biology as well as literary studies, Bate defines ecological poetry as that which 'sees into the life of things' (Wordsworth) but also respects the integrity of the physical world...This book has a powerful impact...[Bates's] moral concerns, deeply held and deeply considered, never blur the sharp edges of literary or natural fact. His readings are compelling rediscoveries of poems we thought we knew already...The Song of the Earth fairly hums with intelligence and passion. It is itself a demonstration of the interplay between literature and nature that it celebrates. It could change your life. (Tom D'Evelyn Providence Journal 2000-11-26)

Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth provides a visionary agenda for all subsequent ecocritical writing. Bate has broadened the intellectual and critical foundation of his earlier ecocritical work...When Bate masters historical evidence and insightful analyses of discrete Romantic writing, as he does in Major Weather, he achieves a broad authority that is captivating and seductive. (Mark Lussier The Wordsworth Circle)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0330372386
• ISBN 13: 9780330372381
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335