1816 was a miserable summer, with temperatures an unaccountable five degrees below normal. Shivering in Geneva, Byron wrote the poem Darkness, in which he imagined the sun going out and the earth left blind and blackening in the moonless air. Also bored in Geneva, Mary Shelley turned her hand to writing Frankenstein, that quintessential novel of the Romantic thunderstorm. Seldom has bad weather had more enjoyable side-effects.
Darkness and Frankenstein both feature in The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate's ambitious manifesto for ecopoetics. This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology, he writes in the introduction, a book about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home. Far from being simply natural, however, the concept of nature has a long and complex history, which Bate surveys adroitly. As they should be, the Romantics are at the heart of the book. What makes them the great writers they are, Bate reminds us, is as much alienation from nature as nature itself. "Cut off from its inspiration, afflictions bow me down to earth," moaned Coleridge; "its aching joys are no more," wrote Wordsworth of his vanished childhood. But without this sense of loss there would have been no Dejection: An Ode or Tintern Abbey. In Wordsworth's case, there is also the small irony of his guidebook to the Lake District helping to destroy the very unspoiled nature he celebrated, as he came to think. The idea of unspoiled nature lends itself all too well to appropriation and commodification.
Bate's examples of contemporary eco-poets are Bishop, Heaney, Murray and Hughes, even if Hughes's fondness for the fishing rod (and strangling ducks, if we are to believe John Sutherland) would seem to align him more with Country Life than Swampy or the eco-warriors of the Glen of the Downs.
Bate's final chapter brings him to the most notorious of all modern environmental thinkers. Reading Heidegger as an anti-Enlightenment sage, he acknowledges but fails to resolve the obvious problem with him as a Green mascot: far from his Nazism and his nature mysticism being in conflict, they come from one and the same impulse. Luc Ferry has cheekily argued that Hitler was the greenest political leader of the modern era, but Bate's trust in nature is far too buoyant to dwell on such dark ironies. Instead he concludes that poetry is the place where we save the earth. My own feeling is that poetry is the place where we fail, utterly, embarrassingly, to save the earth. Not even Wordsworth and Coleridge managed it, after all. What Bate does achieve, to his credit, is to remind us why it's worth trying.
David Wheatley is a poet and academic