Poesy Breathes In All: Ecocritical Explorations of Omnipoetic Birdsong in Romantic Poetry

Furman Hall 109

Born of an interdisciplinary project exploring ecoacoustic representations of birdsounds through biological records, Romantic poetry, and percussion compositions, this paper explores ecocritical figurations of birdsong by the lesser-canonical Romantic poets John Clare and Charlotte Smith. Because the Romantic period coincided with industrialization, its poetry surfaces British soundscapes harkening the Anthropocene. However, Clare and Smith transcend elegizing the lost, suggesting alternate human-nature relationships not of utopia or extinction, but of limited disturbance.A pairing of social marginalization and ornithological inclination compel Clare and Smith to pen more realist and empathetic accounts of nonhuman beings than more canonized contemporaries (Shelley, Keats, etc.). Their birds are physicalized, rather than idealized, and therefore vulnerable to human agency. Smith respects the autonomy of her birds apart from human conception; footnotes containing ornithological commentary, e.g. in The Swallow, entertain questions of Swallow migration. Rather than appropriating birdsounds, these poets provide a voice to the voiceless, channeling birdsong directly into their poetry through formal manipulation, figurative language, and auditory imagery-- Clare’s Progress of Rhyme echoes birdsong through lines of onomatopoeic verse, including the vivid, if ineloquent, Tee-rew Tee-rew and grig-grig grig-grig.Extending recent scholarship suggesting a Romantic preference of sound over sight, I emphasize that active listening enables Clare and Smith to respect the autonomy of avian umwelts (life-worlds). These naturalist poets critically anthropomorphize their avian subjects-- instead of metaphorically figuring poets as birds, they recognize birds as legitimate poets and fellow subjects in their own right. Inspired byFreya Mathews’ concept of the ontopoetic, I contend that Clare and Smith elevate poetry beyond human terms to figure it as the great interpreter of an ensounded natural world-- an omnipoetic universe-- which holds the potential to harmonize various discordant relationships between nature and mankind.