Can Poetry Save the Earth?

(LIT 202)

Our question mark begins to say it all. Can poems really save the earth? We shouldn’t rule that out. With their joys of wordplay, vocal melody, shaping, and imagery, poems can waken imagination, freshening and sharpening our consciousness of this ravaged, resilient planet — this primordial biosystem of sea and earth where homo sapiens is so recent a presence. And consciousness breeds conscience. In this course, we will be asking how the poetry of nature interacts with the nature of poetry, how poems can reveal our spirited yet troubling interactions with nonhuman nature — our stake in our surroundings. Starting from Native American songs, haiku, and psalms, we’ll trace the environmental imprint and impetus in the Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge), early Americans (Whitman, Dickinson), Modernists (Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Jeffers, Rexroth, Roethke, Lowell), in a female tradition (Moore, Millay, Bishop, Swenson, Levertov, Kaufman, Kumin, Kenyon) and our contemporaries (Haines, Ammons, Merwin, Kinnell, Hughes, Walcott, Snyder). We will hear the poets’ voices, a surprising series of images will illumine our discussion, and an environmental poet will visit the class. Students will also have a chance to share their own environmental poems.

John Felstiner, Professor of English

John Felstiner’s love for poetry and sense of environmental urgency gave rise to his book, Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. During his forty-five years at Stanford, he also taught in Chile and Jerusalem and at Yale. His award-winning books include Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu; Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.