Man-Nature Physical Connection in the Poetry of Maggie O’ Sullivan and Gary Snyder: A Material-Ecocriticism Reading

الملخص

This paper seeks to prove the effectiveness and convenience of material ecocriticism through looking at the environmentalist work of both the green Anglo-Irish poet, Maggie O’ Sullivan and the nomadist  American poet, Gary Snyder. It attempts to spotlight the importance of corporeal, rather than affective, interaction between people and the earth.  The loss or lack of that substantial man-nature coexistence of premodernity and preindustialism might have led to the human negligence and belittling of the planet, and hence the ecological predicament. Snyder’s call to return back to primitive lifestyles and O’Sullivan’s unfamiliar out-of-lexicon diction – that might represent the language of the earth’s elements – both hint at the inevitability of human-ecology bodily contact and down-to-earth care  in order to be able to comprehend the ‘storied’ or natural history recorded everywhere on the planet, and thus deal with environmentalist issues more positively. As G.M. Hopkins suggests in his famous poem “God’s Grandeur”, that being “shod”, humans might not be able to perceive the earth’s plight. The selected works of both O’Sullivan and Snyder best represent the two poets’ ecological vision and, how this reflects their concern with a material interaction with the natural world. The work of Maggie O’ Sullivan shows an infatuation with the realistic description of the down-to-earth dealing with the world of nature, as well as the use of verses and expression to depict how promulgation could be utilized as a signifier of communal sense. Snyder’s ecopoetry has been inspired by his hand work in natural sites where he has enjoyed moments of solitary meditation while actively touching the wild.