From Drifting Grounds: Revisiting the Human/Nature Relationship in Gary Snyder and Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

North American nature writers often ground their environmental thought on the assumption that Western civilization constitutes a means through which human beings have detached themselves from more natural ways of living. According to such views, a discourse between civilization and nature appears to be impossible due to the essential lack of shared traits that is attributed to them. In reason of the acceptance of a divide between Western civilization and nature, poets such as Gary Snyder embrace the notion of primitiveness, that is, the idea that primitive people were more attuned to nature and in themselves more natural than technologically advanced societies. In Snyder’s work, this belief leads to a conflicted poetics that bestows innate goodness to certain primitive or indigenous human cultures, which are often imbued with an aura of mysticism, and demonizes the products of industrialized civilization. Elizabeth Bishop’s work, however, provides us with a fresh outlook on the human-nature relationship. Although the conflict between civilization and nature is present in her work too, Bishop manages to merge the two worlds successfully. In fact, by using images that mingle the human and the natural milieus—such as the presence of human-made elements within the natural environment and her focus on both domesticated and wild animals—Bishop often turns human contamination into epiphanic elation, thus suggesting that coexistence between civilization and nature constitutes both a possibility and a factual necessity.