Towards an Eco-Poetic Vision of the Poetic Works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: a Comparative Study

Towards an Eco-Poetic Vision of the Poetic Works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: A Comparative Study

A Thesis submitted to the Central University of Punjab For the award of

Doctor of Philosophy

Comparative Literature

Aadil Muzafar Pala

Supervisor

Dr. Zameerpal Kaur

(Associate Professor)

Department of Languages and Comparative Literature

School of Languages, Literature and Culture

Central University of Punjab, Bathinda

August, 2019

Declaration

I declare that the thesis entitled ‘Towards an Eco-Poetic Vision of the Poetic Works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: A Comparative Study’ has been prepared by me under the guidance of Dr. Zameerpal Kaur, Associate Professor, Department of Languages and Comparative Literature, Central University of Punjab. No part of the thesis has formed the basis for the award of any degree or fellowship previously.

(Aadil Muzafar Pala)

Department of Languages and Comparative Literature

School of Languages, Literature and Culture

Central University of Punjab

Bathinda-151001

Punjab, India.

Date:

Certificate

I certify that Aadil Muzafar Pala has prepared his dissertation entitled ‘Towards an

Eco-Poetic Vision of the Poetic Works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: A Comparative Study’ for the award of Ph.D. Degree under my supervision. He has carried out this work at the Department of Languages and Comparative Literature, School of Languages, Literature and Culture, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda.

(Dr. Zameerpal Kaur)

Associate Professor

Department of Languages and Comparative Literature,

School of Languages, Literature and Culture,

Central University of Punjab,

Bathinda-151001

Date:

ABSTRACT

Towards an Eco-Poetic Vision of the Poetic Works of Agha Shahid Ali and

Sylvia Plath: A Comparative Study

Name of student : Aadil Muzafar Pala

Registration Number : CUPB/Mph-PhD/SLLC/CPL/2013-14/14

Degree for which: : Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Name of supervisor : Dr. Zameerpal Kaur

Department : Department of Languages and

Comparative Literature

School of Studies : School of Languages, Literature and Culture

Key Words:- Agha Shahid Ali, Desert Landscape, Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, Ecopsychology, Environment, Mashrooms, Nature, Narrative, Snow Man, Sylvia Plath, Tulips.

The environmental problems became of supreme importance with the dawn of twenty first century. These issues which are faced by both biosphere and human life are flourishing at an alarming speed and are posing a threat to the life proportions upon the earth. There was a time when man was considered as having a close relationship with his surroundings and was nurtured and nourished by it, but with the passage of time man came under the influences of many newly introduced experiences and philosophies that altogether changed the vision of the civilisations towards anthropocentrism. Human being began to develop egotism which ultimately paved way for him to think himself as superior to the entire visible world and hence exploit it to meet his own ends. This new idea replaced man’s earlier thinking of being sentimental towards his survival without the presence of the nature. Nature by no means can be treated as a pleasure giving property to the human being rather it is the precondition for his very survival and prosperity. With the gradual growth of human civilisations on the earth the plundering and exploitation of the natural resources significantly increased by man’s self- glorification and self-indulgence by destroying the trees for his shelter and for

iii industry, devastating the beautiful landscapes replacing them with the setting up of industrial establishments, roads, buildings etc.

Ecocrticism is an approach to spread awareness and play a role to save the planet earth as it can be seen concerned with the relationships which show how the physical environment is dealt with in literature. It is a unique study which seems to project a natural science and a discipline based on humanistic approach. The present research work focuses on the theoretical framework of Ecocriticism considering its concepts like Ecopoetics and Ecopsychology and their application upon the poems of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath. It further focuses on the narratives which explores the elements of nature and environment and the aspects of man nature relationship in the poetry of the selected poets. There can be seen an oriented quest where the ways emotions and feelings get an impact from the nature and vice-versa, the impact of culture on the nature which is seen proving helpful in creating the poetic stance.

Researcher Supervisor

Aadil Muzafar Pala Dr. Zameerpal Kaur

Dedication

I dedicate this humble effort to my loving mother HASINA BANU and to my benign father MUZAFAR AHMAD PALA.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I kneel in reverence before ALMIGHTY ALLAH and thank Him for inculcating in me the patience, courage, and strength to complete this research work. I pay my deep sense of gratitude to my grandparents whose prayers show me the way and particular appreciation to my loving mother Haseena Banu whose determination and courage inspires me every day and my dear father Muzafar Ahmad who always stands like a pillar to provide me all kinds of support and encouragement and my sister Bilquees and my brother Hammid for their unconditional love.

I pay my profound gratitude to my Supervisor, Dr. Zameerpal Kaur Associate Professor, Department of Languages and Comparative Literature for her endless generosity and patience provided to me during the entire research work. The overall support I receive from her with lucrative suggestions and noble guidance, keen interest, constructive criticism comprising healthy discussions during the research work.

I express my earnest thanks to all the faculty members of the Department of Languages and Comparative Literature, Central University of Punjab Dr. Amandeep Singh, Dr. Alpna Saini, Dr. Rajinder Kumar, Dr. Dinesh Babu, Dr. Ramanpreet Kaur and Dr. Shahila Zafar for their help and valuable implications for my research work. I am also deeply grateful to Prof. R. K. Kohli, Vice Chancellor and Prof. P. Ramarao (Dean, Academic Affairs), Central University of Punjab for providing me the required research facilities as well as kind support and encouragement.

I would also like to pay my deepest gratitude to my co-scholars and friends especially Shafayat, Kavita, Smriti, Satya, and Neha for their diligence, guidance and an encouraging moral support throughout the research work. I whole heartedly pay my gratitude to my seniors and room-mates for their cheery and appreciated assistance and time to time support.

I express my gratitude and thanks to Dr. Irshad, Dr. Nadeem and Dr. Tajamul for their valuable help and insightful advices, I am also indebted to my friends, the group ‘MD’ Advocate Aasif, Er. Aarif, TSM Mudasir and Master Hilal for their motivation and cheerful friendliness throughout this research work.

Table of Contents

S. No. Content Page No.

1. Declaration i

2. Certificate ii

3. Abstract iii-iv

4. Dedication V

5. Acknowledgement vi

6. Contents vii

7. Introduction 1-9

8. CHAPTER 1: Environment and Literature: A Theoretical 10-43 Exploration

9. CHAPTER 2: Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: A 44-67 Comprehensive Comparison

10. CHAPTER 3: An Ecological Assertion: Nature and 68-93 Narrative

11. CHAPTER4: Eco-Psychology: Eco-Human Camaraderie 94-119

12. Conclusion 120-124

13. Bibliography 125-140

vii

Introduction

Ecocritical approaches have increasingly occupied studies in literature, culture, and the arts in recent years. The environmental challenges of pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss affect certain areas of the globe more than others and literature provides a unique forum for theorising about and seeking solutions to these environmental crisis. This research work primarily focuses on the theoretical framework of Ecocriticism with special emphasis on its concepts of Ecopoetics and Ecopsychology and the application of these two concepts upon the poetic works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath. In ancient times man was close to nature and hence was unintentionally aware of the essential relationship between nature and him. He protected nurtured and cherished nature so that nature might protect and nourish the human race. The interdependence was highlighted in classical writing of both east and the west. But new philosophies and new experiences have shifted the focus and made the civilisations more and more anthropocentric. They improved the egotism of the human beings, making them believe that they are not only the best of God‗s creation, but are the monarchs of the entire visible world. This idea replaced the earlier concepts and sentiments that survival on earth is inconceivable without the presence of the nature. Nature is not a sole property for the human being providing it pleasures in different ways. But, nature is a precondition for the very survival of the human race. Furthermore, adding to its predicament, with the gradual growth of human civilization there has been a significant sign of plunder and exploitation of nature by human being for its self aggrandisement, self-glorification and self-indulgence. He rifled the earth for metal, destroyed the trees for his habitats and for industry; he destroyed the natural beauty of landscape with the setting up of industrial establishments, polluting land, water and air. It is a black chapter in the story of human race where violence and exploitation were the main themes. ‗Eco‘ is short of ‗ecology‘, which is concerned with the relationships among the living organisms on Earth and between living organisms in their natural environment. Comparatively, Eco-criticism is seen as concerned with those relationships which show how the physical environment is portrayed in literature. These are obviously interdisciplinary studies. Unique is the study as it projects a

1 natural science and a discipline based on humanistic approach. The sphere of eco-criticism is very wide because it is not limited to any literary genre. The most famous and well recognized eco-critics include Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, Simon C. Estok, Harold Fromm, William Howarth, William Rueckert, Suellen Campbell, Michael P. Branch and Glen A. Love. It is appropriate here to stress that it was only in the 1990s that Eco-criticism emerged as a separate discipline although it is a fact that the relationship between man and his physical environment had always been interesting to literary critics, this interest, both at the basic scientific level and in the metaphorical form in literature, can be explained in following ways: Man always exists within some natural environment or, there cannot be ‗is ‘without ‗where‘. The last decade of the twentieth century was the time when it became obvious that the greatest problem of the twenty-first century would be the survival of the earth. The first explanation is concerned with man's essential quest of or personal identity or with his need and failure to find his roots. That is the reason why he is a life-long wanderer, on the one hand, and why he is always identified with the familiar physical and cultural environment, on the other. The latter explanation results from the fact that man feels vitally threatened in the ecologically degraded world. Overexploitation of natural resources and man's disregard of the air, water and soil that sustain him have given rise to the question of the survival of both man and the planet (earth). The end of the twentieth century showed clearly that everyone had to do something to help the earth survive. Eco- criticism is one of the ways in which humanists fight for the world in which they live. The reflection of that difficult struggle in the area of culture and spirit speaks for the urgency of action or the urgent need to do something in this respect. It is a fact that today Eco-criticism or Eco-literature has become movement like Feminist literature and Feminist criticism because of the increasing threat perceptions of the environment polluting and destroying forces, and holds an important position among the literary and cultural theories of today and it is deeply connected with the problems of ecological world. The fact is that the eco consciousness and deep concerns for ecology are seen in detail and depth in the origin and growth of our culture and civilization which is reflected in the ancient literary texts as well as religious scriptures such as; Vedic literature, The Geeta, The Bhagvad Mahapuranas, The Ramayana and The Upnishads, or The Bible, The Quran and The Guru Granth Sahib. Eco-critics propound various concepts

2 under which they classify the ecological ingredients in literary works like Deep Ecology, Anthropocentrism, Eco-Feminism, Eco-Philosophy, Eco-Spirituality, Eco- Poetics, and Eco-Psychology etc. This study is an endeavor to deal in detail with the concept of Eco-Poetics and Eco-Psychology as depicted in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath. Eco-Poetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world particularly in the work of modern American poets. These poets relate to nature as a deep wellspring of meaning, although they all avoid using language the way most nature writers do, merely to reflect or refer directly to the world. Each of these poets, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what Scott Knickerbocker terms ‗sensuous poesis‘, the process of materializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to non-human nature. Eco-critics and other scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. They believe that it is time for the next step in Eco-criticism where scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways. This is the concept which will be focused on during the course of this research work. Eco-Psychology considers the connection between man‘s self and the rest of nature to be essential to mental and thus ecological health. Man is not only a body, but also, and primarily, a consciousness or soul. The man lives not only in close contact with air, water, soil, animals, plants etc., but also interacts with non- embodied individual consciousness. In reality man lives in multidimensional environment, the material one and the one that remains out of his perception, although filled with life that can influence him. The profound and persistent psychological questions like, Who we are?, How we grow?, Why we suffer?, and How we heal? – cannot be separated from our relationships with the world we live in. Similarly, the persistent environmental questions, the sources, consequences, and solutions to environmental problems, can be seen deeply rooted in the psyche, the images of self and nature, and in our behaviors. Eco-psychology mixes ecology and psychology and responds to both sets of questions. Eco- psychology aims to shift the environmental action from anxiety, blame, and coercion to invitation, joy, devotion and love. It also nurtures ecological thinking and direct contact with the natural world in psychotherapy and personal growth.

One of its major aims is supporting life styles which are both ecologically and psychologically healthy and sustainable.

Selected Poets Both the selected poets belong to different socio-political backgrounds and it would be very interesting to find out how they approach nature while dealing with the portrayal of their personal experiences in their poetry. Agha Shahid Ali portrays the suffering of his homeland, while Plath deals with her own sufferings of troubled life. Both the poets make a very rich use of natural imagery. The first poet selected for this research work is Agha Shahid Ali. Ali was originally from Kashmir, but was born in New Delhi in 1949. Back home in Srinagar his family was highly educated. Ali himself was well educated as he received his education from various universities including the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi, the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Ali identified himself as an American poet who wrote in English and he became famous in America. Ali received many awards and fellowships and he also was the finalist of National Book Award. Later in his career Ali taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Princeton College and at Warren Wilson College. Ali was very much known as a poet who has a unique feature of the influence of multiple ethnicities in both traditional forms and free verse. Ali‘s poetry shows the influences in terms of Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. His poetry revolves around the obsessions and insecurities, ancestors, family, death, memory, friendships, dreams, nostalgia for a past he longs to be a part of. Ali‘s poetic collections include: A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), and Rooms Are Never Finished (2001). The second poet under study in this research work will be Sylvia Plath. Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work. Her interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by keeping a journal. After publishing a number of works, Plath won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950. While she was a student, Sylvia Plath

4 spent time in New York City during the summer of 1953 working for Mademoiselle Magazine as a guest editor. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in 1955. A poet on the rise, Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with one young woman's mental breakdown. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. Her works in poetry include The Colossus (1962), Ariel (1966), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1972), The Collected Poems (1981) and in prose The Bell Jar (1971),Letters Home (1975), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979), The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000).

Review of Literature Eco-criticism has captured the attention of many scholars over the last three decades. Eco-criticism by and large is concerned with the relationship between humans and the landscape. Race, Gender, Class etc. were the important criteria of critical analysis of early theories in literary studies. The late twentieth century is facing a new threat: ecological disaster and eco-criticism is the result of this new consciousness that in near future there will be nothing beautiful in nature to discuss, unless we are careful. Unto the present time there are many works published on eco-criticism among which Eco-criticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology by Cheryll Glottfelty and Harold Fromm is considered to be the most prominent. This particular work has said to be sown the seeds of the theory of eco-criticism and also is treated as an anthology of classics in the emerging field of literary ecology. The concept of the relationship between literature and physical environment holds the main center in this book.

Greg Gerard‘s book Eco-criticism illustrates this theory very explicitly and puts emphasis on almost every aspect of it. Gerard in this book explores the way in which eco-criticism imagines and portrays the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural production. The book traces the development of the movement and explores its key concepts. The introduction offered by this book for the students of literary and cultural studies is very concise, clear and authoritative. Lawrence Buell in his book The Future of Environmental criticism traces the eco-critical movement back to its roots in 1970. Buell in his book captures the movement‘s current state in an international context and test out alliances with various scientific fields. He takes the historical perspective of eco-criticism into consideration and demonstrates how eco-criticism comprises literary history and discourse as its arena. While commenting on the future of eco-criticism, Buell states that the environmental discourse will become a permanent part of literary and cultural study, which it has become. The Green Symphony (Essays in Eco-criticism) by V. Rajakrishnan and Ujjwal Jana is a collection of various essays on Eco-criticism, the focus is on the application of ecology to literary aesthetics. This collection of essays indicates the level of rhetoric eco-criticism developed in the course of its attempt to keep pace with other forms of postmodern discourses. These essays put forth some new terms in eco-criticism like ‗Eco-Terrorism‘, which refers to acts of violence perpetrated against the environment by individuals and groups. There are some brilliant articles in this collection which touch upon the ways in which poets and novelists carry out their engagement with the plant and animal kingdom. The overlook of various genre forms from poetry to children literature is presented by U. Sumathy‘s Eco-criticism in Practice. This book presents an application of eco-critical theory to the selected literary texts. Sumathy in this book effectively exhibits how literature creates awareness about the environment. This book puts forward various concepts of Eco-literature like eco-poetry, eco-fiction, eco-drama and eco-literature for children. These topics develop insight in the field of Eco-criticism. As far as Agha Shahid Ali‘s works are concerned, he has written five collections of poetry. He has used the landscapes and the natural beauty at a large scale in his poems to connect him with his native land. It is very unfortunate

6 that not much work has been done on his poetic collections and if there are some, they are inaccessible save some journal articles like An Interview with Agha Shahid Ali published in The Massachusetts Review by Christine Benvenuto on 11 June 2007. The conversation with Agha Shahid took place at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts in the late 1990s. His third collection of poems, The Country without a Post Office, had brought him critical acclaim and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was preparing an anthology of ghazals for publication and writing the poems about his mother's death from a brain tumor that would become his last volume, Rooms Are Never Finished, published by Norton in November, 2001. The works on other perspectives of his poetry include articles like Paradigm of Longing: The Poetic world of Agha Shahid Ali by Santosh Kumar Mishra published in Multidisciplinary Journal. This article portrays the longing of identity in the poems of Shahid Ali. Shaden M Tageldin‘s work in comparative literature studies titled as Reversing the Sentence of Impossible Nostalgia: The Poetics of Postcolonial Migration in Sakinna Boukhedenna and Agha Shahid Ali is published by Penn State University Press in 2003. This work reveals the remembrances of childhood and homeland nostalgia in Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry. As far as Sylvia Plath is considered, Tracy Brain is the only critic so far who treat Plath ecocritically and has written a full length study of Plath‘s connection to the outer world, the book called The Other Sylvia Plath, including a chapter titled ‗Plath‘s Environmentalism‘. Plath has produced five collections of poetry and near about five prose works including her famous novel The Bell Jar. Plath has used natural imagery in abundance in her works and the notable thing is that Plath was aware of and concerned about the upshots of nuclear fallout on humans and the environment. Not much work has been done on Sylvia Plath through ecocritical perspective, though we find a chapter titled ‗Sylvia Plath‘s Physical Words‘ in a book ‗Ecopoetics‘ by Scott Knickerbocker, where he justifies that there is a complex relationship between the artifice and the natural world.

Research Methodology This work is a critical and qualitative investigation of the eco-critical issues of the poetic works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath. This research focuses on

7 the different spheres of the theory of eco-criticism with a special emphasis on the concept of Eco-Poetics and an attempt has been made to project the selected poems in the light of Eco-Psychology. The study is primarily an analysis of the poems of the selected poets that deals with the environmental concerns and also portrays an aspect of intimate and radical human and non-human relationship. The study not only focuses on the comparison between the two poets but also emphasizes on the interdisciplinary approach of the established discipline of comparative literature. The study will deal with the thematic analysis, procedures and justifications for the rhetorical artifact employed in the study and comparative analysis. The old reviews of research journals, newspapers and magazines will be consulted. The already published interviews of both the poets under study will further broaden our understanding about their visions and the themes and issues discussed by them in their poetic works.

Significance of the Study With the commencement of twenty first century, the environmental issues have become of supreme significance. The problems faced by globe are harmful to biosphere and human life and these problems are accelerating at such an alarming pace that these proportions will soon become unsolvable. In spite of the substantial contribution of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath to poetry in English, their works have not been explored in terms of dealing with the environmental issues. The proposed research is an effort to determine in detail the eco-critical concerns in the poetic works of both the selected poets. The present study will make a rich contribution to the growing nature oriented literature writing. This study will also highlight the perspective that how nature literature writers are writing with a strong preference for nature as a foreground that proves helpful and valuable in understanding the environmental threats. The present study will further supply the aesthetic simulation to the scholars and researchers.

Objectives of the Study . To examine the depiction of oceans, rivers, landscapes and other natural objects and their role in creating poetic stance. . To explore the issues of destruction of the Nature by mankind.

. To figure out the track of radical and intimate encounters with the non- human. . To study how the attitudes about language, nature, emotion and spirit intersect in the selected poetic works. Keeping the objectives in mind the First Chapter is conceived. In the chapter all the theoretical discussions related to the nature narrative have been undergone a critical survey. And all the aspects of Ecocriticism or the nature-literature narratives are gone through the critical discussion Likewise, the Second Chapter focuses on the thematic comparison between the selected poets. In addition to this, a background study on the selected poets has been given sufficient space in the chapter. However, the Third and the Fourth Chapter are the ones which directly achieve these objectives in detail. The Third Chapter focuses on the narratives which abundantly explores the elements of nature and environment in the poetry of selected poets whereas the Fourth Chapter contains the aspects of man nature relationship. In the Fourth Chapter the quest is oriented to understand the ways emotions and feelings get some impact from the nature and vise-versa, the impact of culture on the nature. All the objectives are synthesised within the specific chapters with sufficient text from the poetry evident from the different textual as well as critical sources about the study.

CHAPTER 1 Environment and Literature: A Theoretical Exploration.

This chapter provides the theoretical framework to the present study; the term ‗ecocriticism‘ will be discussed with respect to its meaning and its historical development as a critical theory. The analysis of the theory with regard to its propagation and development will be done keeping in view the several works on environmental concerns and the specific objectives of the critical thinkers. The works of different authors will be taken into consideration to assess the range of the theory of Ecocrticism and its new directions. Further its various concepts will be discussed specifically Ecopoetics. Eco-criticism is ecology and environment based term. The term ecology was coined by the German Zoologist Ernst Haeckel 1869. Joseph Meeker introduced the term Literary Ecology in 1972. Another American scholar William Ruekert has coined the term Eco-criticism, he also coined the term Ecological Poetics. An eco-critic may ask questions, how ecology be treated in literature? Do the writers treat ecology with sympathetic understanding as the writers treat human beings in literature? Do they use nature only as a passive setting or background or as a living character influencing or affecting the Homo sapiens in literature? Ecocriticism has been getting the attention of many scholars over the last few of decades. The approach by and large is concerned with the relation between the human and the nature. In the literary studies of the earlier times, race, gender, class etcetera have been focused upon as important criteria for critical analysis. With coming into the second half of the twentieth century the literary study gains expands its attention to a newer issue that is nature. Looking upon the contemporary condition of the earth in the verge of emerging ecological disasters a consciousness was aroused in the form of Ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is the criticism of the ‗house‘, the environment, as represented in literature. The word ‗environment‘ refers to the totality of the physical surroundings, circumstances, conditions, on the earth or a part of it, especially as affected by human activity. A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment is called ecosystem. According to Collins Dictionary of

Environmental Science ‗physical environment‘ is the combination of external conditions that influence the life of individual organism. The fundamental concept of ecology pronounces that everything is interrelated on the earth and nothing is independent from this web. The concern for nature has been subject of study in literature for a long period of time in the past. But it has been continuing without any serious and conscious attention both from the literary writers, critics, and the readers as well. However, the ecological movement in the last few decades has gained considerable momentum. It has become able in drawing the attention of many intellectuals, academics, writers, and scientists to its grave issue of man- nature relationship. The connotation of Ecology is a wide one. Everything related to the earth, water and sky, all the non-human elements comes under its connotation. So, the ancient buildings, traditional county houses, agriculture and agricultural lands, Flora and Fauna, caves and hills, plants and trees, rivers and seas, birds and animals, serpents and reptiles, winds and seasons, all are the part of it constituting a beautiful gallery of portraits in eco-literature. Eco-criticism is a kind and congenial negotiation between human and non-human worlds. One of the crucial work done by the theory of eco-criticism is that it interweaves in itself the two parts of the duality nature-culture. A viable approach, it challenges this duality and also negate it by exploring the role of nature in texts that are more concerned with the human cultures and also by looking at the role of culture in nature. In addition to this, it also re-evaluate the nature oriented texts so as to find the cultural elements in them. However, it refers to the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary aspect. All the academic subjects from both the genres of science and humanities come together to analyse the environment in their own logic thereby finding possible solutions for the environmental crisis. It focuses on the application of the ecological concepts to the study of literature. Thus, the theory of Ecocriticism refers to the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment. Moreover, a wide range of topics like the frontier, animals, cities, specific geographical regions, rivers, mountains, deserts, technology, garbage are comes under its speculation and thereby positing a number of related disciplines like deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology and environmental justice. It can be said that Ecocriticism comprises both our interior and exterior contexts: we are to stay interconnected

11 with everything around us; how human beings are affected by the environment and how we interact with the environment. In this connection, it also promotes and teaches the interdependence and connectedness of all living things. It also implies that any study of human existence would be insufficient if it does not place human beings within an environmental context. Therefore, it is necessary to draw upon its various theoretical perspectives. The notion which strongly believes in the social and linguistic aspect in the construction of everything is sternly challenged by the eco-critics. For eco-critics nature really exists, out there beyond us. There have been set-piece confrontations on this issue. The most heated exchanges can be seen between Alan Liu and some other prominent eco-critics including Jonathan Bate and Terry Gifford. This notion of reality supported by the linguists as well as sociologists however has been tended to generate confusion among the eco-critics. It is a fact that attitudes to nature vary, and some of the variations are culturally determined. Eco-criticism has an ability to describe a range of approaches to literature and this ability is one of its strengths. It is sometimes perceived as amorous, the vast range of critical approaches within eco-criticism reflects the multiple fields within ecology itself. The different critical approaches and their acceptance lead not to a competition among eco-critics but to an appreciation of the centrality of ecology within literary texts. The view that eco-critical movement should provide an apparent legitimacy in the academy was advocated by few eco-critics. Arne Naes, the founder of deep ecology, called for a range of ecological philosophies or ‗eco-sophies‘ in order to address the environmental problems facing the modern world, so eco-criticism calls for a range of approaches that share a common concern for the relationship between human and non-human (Sarver). The earliest eco-critics thought ‗environment‘ as ‗natural environment‘ (i.e., plants, trees, forests, lakes, ponds, streams etc.). This was driven by a ―theory known as deep ecology and is very much based in the life sciences, focusing on self realisation and the biotic community‖ (Bennett, 208), more so than Marx‘s and Williams‘ works that precede it and more so than the eco-criticism that follows it. Deep ecology is less interested in anthropocentric concerns and strictly focuses on the ‗deepest shade of green‘ for which nature writers journeyed outside their communities to explore. This type of eco-criticism, ―embraced those environments at furthest remove from human habitation – the pastoral and the wild – as

12 represented by a narrowly defined genre of nature writing‖ (Bennett 208). The approach of later eco-critics, on the other hand, combines man – made environments with natural environments by focusing on the interconnection between urban and non-urban space, humans and non-humans, traditional and experimental genres, as well as the impact of race, class, gender, and sexuality on how we use and abuse nature‖ (Bennett 208). Thus the study of urban and cosmopolitan environments in later eco-criticism, which embraces ‗deepest shade of green‘, as eco-critic Micheal Bennett explains, gives rise to a more human – centered rather than earth centered basis for environmental – literary and cultural studies. Lawrence Buell defines eco-criticism in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination as ―the environmentally oriented study of literature and (less often) the arts more generally, and to the theories that underlie such critical practice‖ (138). Rachael Carson‘s ‗Silent Spring‘ is considered as an exemplary study on environmentalism by Lawrence Buell which steadily came into literary discourses. He shows the influence of post structuralism and its claim that nature and biology in historical and cultural perspectives are mere ideological and it prevents the environmental threat in literary studies in reality. Buell talks about the issues that are related to literary realism and its representation in its relation to nature. He believes that place, space, imagination, politics and ethics are of integral prominence in ecocritical study. In the book he talks about two phases of Ecocriticism. In the first wave of Ecocriticism the concerned ecocritics put focus on the nature writings, nature poetry and wilderness fictions. And in the second wave the focus is shifted to the issues of environmental justice and the urban and degraded landscapes are taken also into consideration as a part of natural landscapes in the following manner:

―environment‖ effectively meant ―natural environment‖. In practice if not in principle, the realms of the ―natural‖ and the ―human‖ looked more disjunct than they have come to seem for more recent environmental critics –one of the reasons for preferring ―environmental criticism‖ to ―ecocriticism‖ as more indicative of present practice (21). He also views the second-wave ecocriticism as:

[It] tended to question organicist models of conceiving environment and environmentalism Literature-and-environment studies must develop a ―social ecocriticism‖ that takes urban and degraded landscapes just as seriously as ―natural‖ landscapes (22). As Buell believes, Ecocriticism succeeds in portraying new textual archives, but raises questions related to the existing archive that had previously been neglected in literary and cultural studies. He says:

Environmental criticism at the turn of the twenty-first century will also come to be looked back upon as a moment that did produce a cluster of challenging intellectual work, a constellation rather than a single titanic book or figure, that established environmentality as a permanent concern for literary and other humanists, and through that even more than through acts of pedagogical or activist outreach helped instill and reinforce public concern about the fate of the earth, about humankind‘s responsibility to act on that awareness, about the shame of environmental injustice, and about the importance of vision and imagination in changing minds, lives, and policy as well as composing words, poems and books (133). In his book, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond, Buell has dealt with ecocritical poetics and has widened its range as a genre of nature writing to other forms of literature. Buell‘s study of Ecocriticism in comparison to Garrard‘s study of Ecocriticism seems to differ a good deal. Garrard examines the recurrent genres of Ecocriticism and calls them ‗tropes‘, which include pollution, pastoral, wilderness, apocalypse, dwelling, animals and the earth. Besides many differences, there are issues which show similarity between the thoughts of both the critics like in their thoughts of gender and nature and similarity can also be found in the thought of their shift from deep ecological to socio-ecological perspective and their interest in ecocritical imagination. Dana Philips in his famous work, Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology (2003) portrays that ecology in its true nature is much more complex than it is being projected and made us believe, as it can be actually seen as a whole implicated in culture and then in turn implicated in nature. He believes

14 that the projection and representation of nature is one of the major concerns of literary theory though ecocritics are among ones who are often labeled as reacting on behalf of nature. According to Phillips ecocritics consider nature as the basic tenet of postmodernism, post-structuralism and other literary theories. In The Eco-criticism Reader, David Mazel declares that Ecocriticism is the analysis of literature as though nature mattered. As he writes:

Our reading of environmental literature should help us realize that the concerns are not exclusively of the order of ― Shall these trees be cut? Or shall this river be dammed? Important as such questions are - but also of the order of ― What has counted as the environment, and what may count? Who marks off the conceptual boundaries, and under what authority, and for what reasons? Have those boundaries and that authority been contested, and if so, by whom? With what success and by virtue of what strategies of resistance? These are the levels on which I would like to see eco- criticism theorise the environment (143). In his essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Eco-criticism William Rueckert writes that eco-criticism entailed the ―application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature, because ecology has the greatest relevance to the present and future of the world we all live‖ (Rueckert 107). Rueckert‗s definition includes all possible relations between literature and the physical world. Some scholars question how one can contribute to environmental restoration within one‗s capacity of being a scholar of literature without arousing general awareness to the approaching crisis. However, various approaches like environmental ethics, deep ecology, eco-feminism and social ecology are emerged from the consistent endeavor from the scholars in understand and analysing the root causes of environmental degradation. Their effort in formulating an alternative view of existence which provides the conceptual and also the ethical base to develop a new consciousness of the relationship between human and the earth The literary history of Ecocriticism can be traced from the fact that all religions of the world have their roots in Nature. Nature was treated with love and respect in the past, but now it has been brutally and most mercilessly exploited,

15 ravished and tortured by the so called anthropocentric world. Industrialisation and urbanisation can be hold responsible for the bareness and pollution of air and water. The relation of Nature and man can be considered as that of a mother and child because Nature was made first and then man originated. In the Atharva Veda, earth is seen as mother:

O Mother Earth! Born of you and living of you, we all creatures --- human beings, birds and animals are being nourished by your water, air and the sun energy. (Atharva Veda 12.1.15) The Vedic literature which is considered the first literature on earth gives the detailed overview of Nature and its treatment at that time. According to the Sutras of Vedas Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Sky were worshipped as powerful gods and goddesses. It further puts emphasis on the medicinal value of the trees and plants that are found in the houses of the people. The prayer in Yajurved also emphasised the same thought as:

O Lord of Peace! May there be peace in heaven and earth. May the herbs give health and life to us. May all the divine and material forces be merciful to us. May all the forces and law of the universe be benevolent to us. May peace itself bestow eternal peace on us. And may that all embracing peace remain eternally with us. (Yajurved 36.17) This prayer is seeking for peace and balance in the ecological and human world because there can be no peace in the human world unless there is peace in Nature. Unfortunately the people are violating Nature and natural resources in every way and expecting it to be peaceful and benevolent. The existence of man like the existence of the biosphere depends upon the harmonious relation between the two. The relationship among humanity and the environment is considered very sacred in Sikhism, they believe that this relationship is very much important not only for the survival of the planet but also for the survival of the humanity. In Guru Granth Sahib, man and the material world around him are not considered two separate entities, but treated as being involved in a relationship which is inter- dependent in its formation: ―Air is vital force, Water the progenitor, the vast Earth is

16 the mother of all, Days and Nights are nurses, fondling all creation in their lap‖ (SGGS 8). Sri Guru Granth Sahib throws light upon the basic purpose of human beings which according to it is to be in harmony with all the living and non-living creation without any dominance. The Sikh Gurus always put emphasis upon the recognition of human responsibility towards the non-human world and its functioning and phenomena. To substantiate this claim, there is the emphasis upon the importance of Air, Water and Earth in the Guru Granth Sahib over and over again, the earth is considered to as the mother and deserves the motherly treatment. The Gurus further talk about the care that need to be taken to ensure the safety of the environment while a follower is performing the course of his daily life. Sikhism is very much concerned about the plundering and polluting these three basic elements of the environment where the importance of the abiotic components is being emphasised upon as: ―Air, Water, Earth and Sky are God‘s home and temple – sacred places which need to be looked after‖ (SGGS 723). In the Holy Quran there is a detailed description given by Almighty Allah about the importance of Nature. The Nature is treated as a sacred institution and it must be given due respect, love and justice. By describing Natural resources and their fair order in the universe, Allah wants mankind to understand their relationship with Nature. Allah also puts emphasis on the close observation of nature and its phenomena in order to make man understand that there is some supreme power behind all the proceedings and processes of Nature and in this way Nature takes man close to God. Allah says:

It is He who has spread out earth for his creatures: Therein is fruit and date palms, producing spathes (enclosing dates) Also corn, with (its) leaves and stalk for fodder and sweet smelling plants (The Holy Quran: 55: 10-15) The above textual discussion clearly show that from the beginning of the earth‘s creation there had been a strong concern for the importance and safety of Mother Nature in the interest of mankind and it is this movement which was later given the name of Ecocriticism or Ecological literature. All the religious texts referenced above accept the view that there should be an approach of oneness

17 with Nature and men must adopt and develop an attitude of respect, love and care to the whole ecological world. According to Peter Barry eco-criticism began in the United States of America in the late 1980‗s, and Green Studies in the United Kingdom in the early 1990‘s (Barry 143). Eco-criticism has existed in the Unites States of America for quite a long time, and takes its literary bearings from the nineteenth century American writers whose work celebrates nature, the life force, and the wilderness as manifested in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. All of the three are known as the Transcendentalists. Emerson‗s first short book Nature (1836) is a reflective essay on the deep impact of the natural world upon his life and consciousness. The voice in the book is often powerful as well as dramatic. In this work, Emerson talks about the mystical unity of nature and urges his readers to enjoy a relationship with the environment. Fuller‗s first book was Summer on the Lake (1843), a powerfully written journal of her encounter with the American landscape. Thoreau‗s Walden (1854) is an account of his two year stay (1845-47) in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. The book centers on dropping out of modern society and seeking to renew the self by a ‗return to nature‘. These three books can be called the foundational works of American ‗eco-centered‘ writing. Ecocriticism or Green Studies in the United Kingdom takes its origin from the British Romanticism of the 1790‗s rather than from the American Transcendentalism of the 1840‗s. Jonathan Bate of Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental tradition (1991) is the founding figure of this new field in Britain. The study on eco-criticism in the United Kingdom is much less extensive than in the United States of America, though the study is introduced in schools of higher education. Hence most of the active British proponents of eco- criticism are based at a few institutions which offer the study. A Collection of essays by Laurence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Eco-criticism (2000) shows the evolution of eco-criticism from Romanticism in United Kingdom. Romantic eco-critics examine the ways in which romantic writers and thinkers participated in and responded to the history of ecological science and environmental ethics. And this is given the name ‗Green Studies‘. The term ‗Green Studies‘ is used by the British writers, whereas, the American writers use the term ‗ecocriticism‘.

The word ‗nature‘ comes via Old French from the Latin ‗natura‘ (meaning conditions of birth, quality, character, natural order, and world). In Sanskrit it is called Prakriti from which the physical and mental universe evolved under the influence of Purusha. In the imaginative literature of the eighteenth century nature meant the presentation and construction of the actual characters of people corresponding to reality. Since pre-Christian or the Vedic times nature has always been accorded the status of the Great Mother. In Christianity there is the implication that nature is created for human beings who are ‗her‘ children. In the Vedas it is mentioned that there is a harmony between human beings and nature. Glotfelty draws the link between nature and culture. She views eco-criticism as:

Despite the broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication, an ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Eco-criticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture. Understanding how nature and culture constantly influence and construct each other is essential to an informed eco-criticism. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land. As a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman (Glotfelty, xix). An ecocriticism that sees humans fundamentally as part of nature will attend to representations of human cultures in all their diverse interaction with nature rather than focusing only on texts that show humans observing or experiencing nature in the wild or rural setting. In the 1970‗s the relationship between literature and environment emerged as a topic of serious and widespread interest among writers and scholars. The writings of Joseph Meeker, William Rueckert, and Neil Evernden are the seminal works of eco-criticism. Joseph Meeker in his seminal work, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1974) affirms that as the world‗s only literary creatures, human beings have the responsibility to discover the role of literature in the welfare and survival of mankind and the natural environment and also to examine the ―insight it offers into human relationships with other species and with the world around us‖ (3-4).

Ecocriticism had its official beginnings as a discipline in the 1990's. The writings of Thoreau and Emerson fall into the eco-critical mould. Thoreau‗s Journal marks the obvious beginning point of this psychological tradition in American nature writing because it records the authors‗ sustained empirical scrutiny of his own internal responses to the world. Scott Slovic writes:

With the 1990 Earth Day celebration now more than five years behind us, it is clear that the Thoreauvian process of awakening is not merely a timeless private quest, but a timely--even urgent-- requirement if we are to prevent or at least retard the further destruction of our planet. But how can nature writers lead the way in this awakening, this conversion process? (15). In 1990 the University of Nevada, Reno, created the first academic position in literature and environment. In 1991 MLA (Modern Language Association) special session was organised by Harold Fromm, entitled ―Eco-criticism: The Greening of Literary Studies,‖ and in 1992 American Literature Association Symposium chaired by Glen Love conducted a session, entitled ―American Nature Writing: New contexts, New approaches.‖ In 1992 at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association, a new Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) was formed with Scott Slovic elected as the first president. Within one year ASLE had more than 300 members. In 1995 its members numbered over 750 and ASLE held its first conference in the same year. The mission of ASLE is to promote the exchange of ideas and information pertaining to literature that considers the relationship between human beings and the natural world and to encourage new nature writing, traditional and innovative scholarly approaches to environmental literature, and inter disciplinary environmental research. In the initial phase eco-criticism was a meeting place for American critics dealing exclusively with American Literature. Being serious proponents of this theory and trying to demonstrate and enable the verification of their results, eco-critics have founded their association ASLE (Association for the study of Literature and Environment) and their journal ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment). ASLE is an invaluable platform for eco- criticism. Today, it has grown to a membership of 1004 from different parts of the world. The members are interested in the natural world and they contribute to its

20 study. Founded in 1992, ASLE seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to the study of nature and culture through forms such as nature writing, art, eco-critical scholarship, poetry, and creative writing. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) seeks to explore the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Michael Branch says:

Many scholars ask questions from countries such as Brazil, Sweden, China, Turkey, Finland, India, Poland, Germany, Estonia and Taiwan on What exactly is an eco-critical approach? Which texts should I read to support my own green reading? How does eco-criticism interact with other disciplines and with other modes of literary criticism? What are some of the new directions in eco-criticism? (The ISLE Reader xiii). The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment is started at a meeting of the Western Literature association, and some of the most prominent departments in eco-criticism are in the West at Reno, the University of Oregon, and the University of California at Davis. Literary scholars in the association have tried to define the term eco-criticism. From the point of view of academics, eco-criticism is dominated by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), a professional association that started in America but now has significant branches in the UK and Japan. It organises regular conferences and publishes a journal that includes literary analysis, creative writing and articles on environmental education and activism. Many early works of eco-criticism were characterised by an exclusive interest in Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, but in the last few years ASLE has turned towards a more general cultural eco-criticism, with studies of popular scientific writing, film, TV, art, architecture and other cultural artifacts such as theme parks, zoos and shopping malls. As eco-critics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to analyse and criticise the world in which we live, attention is increasingly given to the broad range of cultural processes and products in which, and through which, the complex negotiations of nature and culture take place. The area of Ecocriticism is very wide because it is not limited to any literary genre. Apart from Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty and William Howarth, Simon

C. Estok, William Rueckert, Suellen Campbell, Michael P. Branch and Glen A. Love, have equally contributed eco-critical pursuit. Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty became the first American Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. Glotfelty‗s substantial influence on the ecological nature-writing wing of American studies through her many conference papers and networking activities has touched a large number of other people as well. She points out that in our postmodern age the profession of English Literature must ―redraw the boundaries‖ to ―remap‖ the rapidly changing contours of literary studies. The global environmental crisis is apparently ignored by scholars. Until very recently there has been no sign that the institution of literary studies has even been aware of the environmental crisis. For instance, there have been no journals, no professional societies and no conferences on literature and environment. Burgess points out that the English profession has failed to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment, the acknowledgement of our place within the natural world and our need to live heedfully within it, at peril of our very survival. Cheryll Glotfelty recognises this profoundly different new relationship that humans have developed with the rest of the natural world, stating, ―we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet‘s basic life support systems‖ (ASLE). It is through an engagement with literary, ecological, philosophical, and political environmentalism that eco-critical practice distinguishes itself from Romanticism of the nineteenth century (Mazel 137). Though significantly influenced by the spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic appreciation of nature that comes from pre- ecology Romanticism, eco-criticism is also informed by ecology and the contemporary environmental crisis. Transforming all of those influences to the study of literature, one of eco-criticism‘s main goals is to identify and analyse ―our own attitudes toward nature and to engender a sense of accountability for the havoc the culture‘s left hand wreaks on its right hand through shortsighted technological practices‖ (Arnold 1090). As such, eco-criticism is more accurately described as a form of literary environmentalism. While not yet fully engaging the science of ecology, this literary environmentalism applies philosophy and theory to nature-centered literature. As Stephanie Sarver has noted, eco-criticism does not constitute a new critical field, but has relied heavily on Marxist, poststructuralist,

22 psychoanalytic, and historicist theories. Its greatest challenge—to fully engage the biological sciences has yet to be met. English studies has long integrated ‗soft‘ disciplines of history, philosophy, and anthropology in order to examine literature but has found it more challenging to engage the ‗hard‘ disciplines, ―partly because of the difficulties involved in acquiring adequate grounding in the sciences to follow multidisciplinary arguments‖ (McDowell, 372). Sarver fears that until such literary engagement with the biological sciences occurs, eco-criticism risks becoming just another jargon-filled critical literary field—another "ism" in literary studies. Kathleen R. Wallace writes in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Eco-criticism that

beyond nature writing the contributors share the belief that eco- criticism offers a critical perspective that can enliven any literary and theoretical field. Environment need not only refer to ‗natural‘ or ‗wilderness‘ areas; environment also includes cultivated and built landscapes, and cultural interactions with those natural elements (Kathleen 18). At the same time, Sarver and many ecocritical scholars recognise the need for literary criticism to address the pressing environmental issues of today. One way to do so is to refocus our study of literature on texts in which nature plays a dominant role: ―our profession must soon direct its attention to that literature which recognises and dramatises the integration of human with natural cycles of life‖ (Love 235). Many eco-critics view current literary criticism as overly specialised, inaccessible even to some within the discipline, and generally irrelevant to the larger issues confronting the modern world; for those scholars, ecological literary criticism is an attempt to escape ―from the esoteric abstractness that afflicts current theorising about literature, seizing opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more Socially responsible‖ (Kroeber 1). As William Rueckert explains; ―in literary study there must be a shift in our locus of motivation from newness, or theoretical elegance, or even coherence to a principle of relevance‖ (107). Others have also identified the need for literary criticism to ―recognize… our discipline‘s limited humanistic vision, our narrowly anthropocentric view of what‘s consequential in life‖ (Love 229).

David Mazel in A Century of Early Criticism (2003) demonstrates that studies of nature in literature have long flourished under critical title as American studies, and pastoral criticism. However, since the 1960‗s and 1970‗s eco-criticism seems clearly an offshoot of environmental awareness. The century in the title of the book refers to 1864-1964, a period he represents by the work of ―more than thirty proto-eco-critics.‖ Glen A. Love, a leader in the development of eco-criticism, has been teaching and writing for years with the intent of bringing communication between the natural sciences and the humanities closer together. What does human nature have to do with eco-criticism? This is the question at the heart of Glen Love‗s book Practical Eco-criticism. In the introduction he says:

At the beginning of the third millennium and of a new century often heralded as ― the century of the environment, a coherent and broadly based movement embracing literary environmental interconnections, commonly termed ― eco-criticism is emerging …Eco-criticism, unlike all other forms of literary inquiry, encompasses non-human as well as human contexts and considerations. On this claim, eco-criticism bases its challenge to much postmodern critical discourse as well as to the critical systems of the past (Love 3). He begins with the premise that ― ―human behavior is not an empty vessel whose only input will be that provided by culture, but is strongly influenced by genetic orientations that underlie and modify, or are modified by cultural influences‖ (Love 3). His Practical Eco-criticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, clearly outlines the issues the ‗two cultures‘ face together. He points out that a great deal of world literature deals with the pastoral and with the relationship between human and non-human beings. According to him eco-critics are trying to read literature with a fresh sensitivity to the emergent voice of nature. Inevitably this ‗voice‘ can only be expressed, in literature at the least, through human representations of non-human creatures and landscapes. He focuses on eco-criticism as a multifarious approach:

What is emerging is a multiplicity of approaches and subjects, including-under the big tent of environmental literature – nature writing, deep ecology, the ecology of cities, eco-feminism, the literature of toxicity, environmental justice, bioregionalism, the lives of animals, the revaluation of place, interdisciplinary, eco-theory, the expansion of the canon to include previously unheard voices, and the reinterpretation of canonical works from the past (Love 5). It is not merely an exercise in analysing nature in literature but a move towards a more bio-centric world-view, an extension of ethics, a broadening of mans' concept of global community to include nonhuman life forms and the physical environment. Gary Snyder uses the term ‗Gift Economy‘ to bring a fresh perspective to the meaning of ecology. Snyder defines a gift economy as that which saves the world instead of depleting and devouring it. In this context, the role of a writer is of paramount importance: ―Art takes nothing from the world: it is a gift and an exchange. It leaves the world nourished (Snyder 39). In Greg Garrard‗s opinion eco-critics may not be qualified to contribute to debates about "problems in ecology" but ― ―they must nevertheless transgress disciplinary boundaries and develop their own 'ecological literacy' as far as possible‖ (Garrard 5). In this book he discusses broadly the extent to which one uses, saves, or ignores the environment. According to him this capacity to ― ―define, explore and even resolve ecological problems in this wider sense,‖ contributes to the uniqueness of eco-criticism among contemporary literary and cultural theories (Garrard 6). The question is how one can contribute to environmental restoration, within the capacity of being teachers of literature. The answer lies in recognising that current environmental problems are largely a by-product of culture. As historian Donald Worster explains:

We are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as possible, but even more, it requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them. Historians, along with literary scholars, anthropologists,

and philosophers, cannot do the reforming, of course, but they can help with the understanding. (The Eco-criticism Reader 1996: xxi). Eco-criticism has a broad scope of inquiry and many levels of sophistication, all ecological criticism shares the fundamental base that human culture is connected to the physical world, and they both affect each other. Eco- criticism takes specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature as its subject and the interconnections between nature and culture. As a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human; as a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land. Ecocritics propound various concepts under which they classify the ecological ingredients in literary works; some of them are introduced as:

Ecopoetics The Eco-critical ideologies are primarily Euro-American in nature and perception which led to the production of terms like ‗ecolit‘, ‗ecocrit‘, ‗ecopoetics‘,‗ecofeminism‘, etc. Ecopoetics was launched in the inaugural meeting of the Western Literature Association in 1980 where the simple method of Nature Writing was argued by the concepts of ecocriticism. Eco-Poetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world particularly in the work of modern American poets. These poets relate to nature as a deep wellspring of meaning, although they all avoid using language the way most nature writers do, merely to reflect or refer directly to the world. Each of these poets, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what Scott Knickerbocker terms ‗sensuous poesis‘ (Knickerbocker), the process of materializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to non-human nature. Eco-critics and other scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. They believe that it is time for the next step in Eco-criticism where scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways. The power of language to make nature matter to us depends on the defamiliarising figurative language and rhetorical devices, which are often associated with artificiality. Ecological poetry posits a relationship between ethics and aesthetics. The unnecessary tension between

26 ethics and aesthetics is not limited to ecocriticism, aestheticism is too often dismissed as a reactionary wolf in the sheep‘s skin of apoliticism. Ecocriticism especially ecopoetics, is a ―natural‖ place to strive for a rapprochement between ethics and aesthetics. Ecopoetics sustain on the thought that the same intellectual capabilities which are being used in the intense understanding of poetry are required to relate to nature and the environmental dilemmas. The poetry and its reading closely is purely a process that needs the focus on the thinking, the attention with all senses and grow in imagination. At times, beauty can be the main point that tries to come up from the deep bottom of meaning to the upper brim. Humans feel an attraction towards the non-human world that is termed as ‗biophillia‘ by a biologist called E.O. Wilson. The arts help us realise the relationship with the earth in an improved form and the biophilic urges play a major role. The idea of a special connection between ecology and poetry has been elaborated by more recent critics into an idea of ecological poetics, suggesting that ecopoetry somehow reflects or even takes part in ecological relationships in an intrinsic way. Angus Fletcher has argued for a particularly strong form of such ecopoetics, stating that ―poetry takes environmentalist concerns to a higher level‖ (Fletcher, 3). For Fletcher (as for Hughes), poetry is not merely a description or representation of nature, it actually is nature; the poem constitutes an ―environmental form‖ (Fletcher, 6). Fletcher identifies what he calls ―the environment-poem, a genre where the poet neither writes about the surrounding world, thematising it, nor analytically represents the world, but actually shapes the poem to be an Emersonian or esemplastic circle‖ (Fletcher, 9). Environment- poems, according to Fletcher, ―aspire to surround the reader so that to read them is to have an experience much like suddenly recognizing that one actually has an environment, instead of not perceiving the surround at all‖ (Fletcher). Timothy Morton has described a similar notion of art as ―ambient poetics,‖ suggesting a kind of art that ―is about making the imperceptible perceptible, while retaining the form of its imperceptibility—to make the invisible visible, the inaudible audible‖ (Morton, 96). Reading William Wordsworth as an ecologically-minded naturalist, John Elder traces changing attentiveness to nature and increasingly conflicted attitudes toward tradition from T.S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers through the intricacies of

27 nature‘s processes in the poems of Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Robert Pack, and Wendell Berry. The intellectual context for Guy Rotella‘s 1991 ‗Reading and Writing Nature is American‘, nature poetry from the Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor to Emerson and Dickinson. His study traces the broad epistemological and aesthetic implications of this early work in the poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. These four poets turn to nature to explore the possibilities and limits of language and meaning and envision poetic forms that are, in Rotella‘s reading, ―at best conditional or ‗fictive‘ consolations, not redemptive truths‖ (xi). Bernard W. Quetchenbach‘s ‗Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century‘ (2000), then extends Rotella‘s study of American nature poetry into the post-war poetry of Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry that incorporates the public rhetoric of environmentalism. Other literary critics who reread modern poetry using the insights and general principles of ecology include Gyorgyi Voros, whose,‗Notations of the Wild: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens‘ (1997), describes six familiar aspects of Steven‘s work that ―readily lend themselves to an ecological reading‖ (83–86). Jane Frazier, in ‗From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin‘ (1999), follows the development of Merwin‘s ecological world view. Frost, Stevens and Moore are read together in Bonnie Costello‘s ‗Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry‘ (2003), demonstrate how landscape serves both as structure and meaning in the later generation of poets. Costello‘s book, although not explicitly a study of Ecopoetics, explores poetic responses to the modern world in Charles Wright, Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery as they create new representations of the landscape. In Stevens‘ work, as in Frost‘s, Costello explains, ―the desire for the real, and for nature, must reckon always with the frame, with landscape‖ (15). Scott Bryson‘s ‗The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry‘ (2005), also turns to poems that ―become models for how to approach the landscape surrounding us so that we view it as a meaningful place rather than abstract place‖ (12).

Deep Ecology It is the radical idea that all the creatures on earth have the right to exist, and there is no such specific species which has to be given more importance on

28 the matter of living on this earth. This concept also favors the view that the existence of Nature merely does not mean a service to the human. Rather, humans are a part and parcel of it, one species among many and all species have their own rights to exist regardless their usefulness to the humanity. "Deep ecology is a radical form of ecology which challenges anthropocentrism and which insists that human beings must subordinate their interests to those of the planets" (Coupe 302). Arne Naess in 1972 stated that there are two ecology movements which deserve our attention. The first is concerned mostly with pollution, resource depletion and the usefulness of the earth to humans, this is known as Anthropocentricism. The second is concerned with the diversity, richness, and intrinsic value of all the earth. This is the Deep Ecology movement. Deep Ecology focuses on the principles of well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on earth have value in themselves; these values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realisation of these values and are also values in themselves. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. Timothy Clark has noted that for deep ecologists:

the essential problem is anthropocentrism, the almost all- pervading assumption that it is only in relation to humans that anything else has value. Deep ecologists urge a drastic change in human self-understanding: one should see oneself not as an atomistic individual engaged in the world as a resource for consumption and self-assertion, but as part of a greater living identity. All human actions should be guided by a sense of what is good for the biosphere as a whole. Such a biocentrism would affirm the intrinsic value of all natural life and displace the current preference of even the most trivial human demands over the needs of other species or integrity of place (Clark, 2). Joni Seager describes deep ecology as:

Deep ecology is rooted in recasting the religious and philosophical interpretation of human relations with the necessity of shifting from

human centrism to biocentrism, a commitment to revaluing humanity's oneness with nature and an appreciation of the intrinsic worth of all life forms (223-224). Poetry that adopts this stance, whether explicitly environmentalist or not, has often been described as ecopoetry. While including a variety of styles, many ecopoems have in common an aim to inspire wonder and appreciation for the non-human world, and to highlight its otherness by recognising the distinct perspectives, or of other species. Drawing, however agonistically, on Romantic traditions of nature writing, their tone is often celebratory, and they often focus on forms of nature that are relatively straightforward to visualise and relate to.

Eco Spirituality ―Eco Spirituality is a manifestation of the spiritual connection between human beings and the environment. It incorporates an intuitive and embodied awareness of all life and engages a relational view of person to planet, inner to outer land-scape, and soul to soil‖ (Lincoln, 2000). It is based in a fundamental belief in the sacredness of nature, Earth and the universe. From the Ecospiritual perspective, ultimate reality is not just the source of creation it is very much also a part of creation; a part through which we can interact on a daily basis through our senses and from such experiences gain greater insight into the wonder of reality. On a personal level this inherent sacredness of nature generally leads to a spiritually motivated engagement in the current environmental crises of our planet and a dedication to the justice and long view of a sustainable prosperity for all. Eco Spirituality is an attitude towards the Earth which is humble and caring in its approach. It is the domain where the spirit and its resources intersect with the modern ecology and plead to all of us to shun the approach which is devastating and destructive for the natural world and also to change our attitudes for a better future of the environment. Eco Spirituality focuses upon the transformation of human minds and hearts with regard to all their relationships towards the universe which brings people into a harmony with the God‘s will in all these relationships. Eco Spirituality inculcates reverence for life in all forms, it seeks to find ways that helps us to find a commitment to accomplish our moral responsibility to safeguard, protect and nurture our planet. It fosters in us a quest for a compassionate and

30 sometimes wiser approach towards the world which remains full with love, cooperation, mutual support, peace and non-violence. Eco Spirituality helps in the solution of a conflict between persons, between nations and between humans and other species. It forms a platform where both the joys and sorrows of one‘s life and sometimes of others become enjoyable.

Eco Psychology The deep and enduring psychological questions – who we are? How we grow? Why we suffer? How we heal? – are inseparable from our relationships with the physical world. Similarly, the over-riding environmental questions – the sources of, consequences of, and solutions to environmental problems – are deeply rooted in the psyche, our images of self and nature, and our behaviors. Ecopsychology integrates ecology and psychology in responding to both sets of questions. Ecopsychology aims at shifting environmental action from anxiety, blame, and coercion to invitation, joy, devotion and love. It also fosters ecological thinking and direct contact with the natural world in psychotherapy and personal growth. One of its major aims is supporting life styles which are both ecologically and psychologically healthy and sustainable. Ecopsychology is an emerging field that gives a notion that one cannot attain meaning without a meaningful relationship with the environment. It is an attempt to give a new definition and sees the reason and rationality through an environmental lens. It believes that human is a part and parcel of the ecological system and seeks to heal the soul with correspondence to it. There is an inter- relation between the healing of the self and the healing of the earth. ―Ecopsychology tells us that the healing of the self and the healing of the planet go together‖ (Anthony 264). According to John E. Mack, ―… psychology of the environment would be an expanded psychology of relationship, a conversation or experiencing in the deepest parts of our being, of our connection with the Earth as sacred‖ (283). Critics believe that Ecopsychology is not a new field, but it has evolved for a long time. ―I have been calling ecopsychology ―new‖, but in fact its sources are old enough to be called aboriginal. Once upon a time all psychology was ―ecopsychology‖. No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the

31 world, the people our society once called ―witch doctors‖, knew no other way to heal than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity‖ (Roszak 6). Lester Brown shows that emotions play an important role in the bond between human beings and the natural environment out of which they evolve under the concept of Ecopsychology (Brown xvi). The human psyche is considered as an integral part of the circle of nature reexamined by the ecological sciences (Brown xvi). The term ecopsychology is attributed to the synthesis between the ecological and the psychological. The environmental politics is being brought together on philosophical grounds. ―Ecopsychology brings together the sensitivity of therapists, the expertise of ecologists, and the ethical energy of environmental activists‖ (Brown xvi). The Australian rainforest activist John Seed put it this way:

―It is obvious to me that the forests cannot be saved one at a time, nor can the planet be saved one issue at a time: without a profound revolution in human consciousness, all the forests will soon disappear. Psychologists in service to the Earth helping ecologists to gain deeper understanding of how to facilitate profound change in the human heart and mind seems to be the key at this point‖ (qtd. in Roszak 3). Ecopsychology like other forms of psychology also shows concerns about the fundamentals of human behavior and nature. It moves one step forward and surpasses the belief that the deep roots of psyche remain bonded to the earth with all the sympathies for it as it is the prime cause of our existence. Theodore Roszak says, ―Ecopsychology suggests that we can read our transactions with the natural environment – the way we use or abuse the planet – as projections of unconscious needs and desires, in much the same way we can read dreams and hallucinations to learn about our deep motivations, fears, and hatreds‖ (Roszak 5). The hierarchies that are prevalent among the societies which are distributed in dominant and marginalised ones play a major role in the treatment that earth receives. The marginalised groups and their lands are often being exploited by the dominant groups. Ecopsychologists are very much concerned and conscious of the problem and makes efforts to bridge the gap between the dominant societies and the dominant cultures of the world. John E Mack suggests that,

a psychology of the environment, to be comprehensive, must consist of an appreciation that we do, in fact, have a relationship with the Earth itself. It must contain an analysis of traditional attitudes toward the Earth in one‘s own and in other cultures that may facilitate or interfere with the maintenance of life. According to Mack, it must consist of the application of methods of exploring and changing our relationship to the Earth‘s environment that can reanimate our connection with it. Further it ought to consist of an examination of politics and economics from an ecopsychological perspective. He further states psychologists will need to become professionally and personally committed and involved outside their offices and laboratories (Mack 287).

Eco Feminism Deep ecology identifies the dualism that nature is the ultimate source of anti-ecological beliefs and practices, and distinguishes humans from nature on the grounds that nature possess an immortal soul; Ecofeminism blames the andocentric dualism between man and woman and assumes woman as superior on the grounds that woman possess a larger brain. This acts as a common cause between feminists and ecologists. Ecofeminism sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women. Ecofeminism brings together elements of the feminist and green movements, while at the same time offering a challenge to both. It takes from the green movement a concern about the impact of human activities on the non-human world and from feminism the view of humanity as gendered in ways that subordinate, exploit and oppress women. Ecofeminists believe that it forms historically a strong connection between the fact of the process that women are being dominated by men in the same manner as nature is under their domination. The labour of women was used as a free resource like that of nature and they were given a notion of being colonised. The theorists of ecofeminism assert that the ecological crises we face today is the end of the process of that historical colonisation and hence portrays women as important stake holders where they contribute in reconstructing and producing the

33 system and society in such a way that it maintains and protects the dignity and integrity of both women and nature.

Anthropocentrism It is the world view that places human beings as the center of the cosmos. It possesses a theme that natural order has a great chain of being. It also advocates the view that there is the ontological divide between human and non-human nature, which means it is a natural existence that humans are superior to the non- humans. Anthropocentrism also believes nature as a machine which produces and procreates and humans act as consumers. This lead to the fact that only humans have the intrinsic value and nature has only instrumental value. Anthropocentrism holds the view that only human beings possess the moral values and not the non- humans. Anthropocentrism considers humans to be the most important life form, and other forms of life to be important only to the extent that they affect humans or can be useful to humans. In an anthropocentric ethic, nature has moral consideration because degrading or preserving nature can in turn harm or benefit humans. For example, using this ethic it would be considered wrong to cut down the rainforests because they contain potential cures for human diseases. Eco-critics reread major literary works from an eco-centric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world. They extend the applicability of a range of eco-centric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world – concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century. They extend the range of literary critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant ‗factual‘ writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs and regional literature. They turn away from the ‗social constructivism‘ and ‗linguistic determinism‘ of dominant literary theories and instead emphasise eco-centric values of meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility and the claims of the world beyond ourselves (Barry 254-55).

With its interdisciplinary nature, eco-criticism forms a strange interface between the sciences and the humanities. Eco-criticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works written in the 1990‗s, The Eco-criticism Reader by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm and The Environmental Imagination by Lawrence Buell. Cheryll Glotfelty is the acknowledged founder of Eco-critics in the United States of America. As a pioneer in this field, she says:

The study of relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, eco-criticism takes an earth centered approach to literary study (Glotfelty 18). Glotfelty asks various questions like show is nature represented in literature; how has the concept of wilderness changed over time and how is science itself open to literary analysis. Eco- criticism is seems a more political mode of analysis, if compared to Feminism and Marxism. Eco-critics are generally seen as mixing their cultural analyses explicitly to a green, moral and political agenda. In this respect, eco-criticism is closely related to environmentally oriented developments in philosophy and political theory. It is a fact that today eco-criticism or eco-literature has become a movement like feminist literature and feminist criticism because of the increasing threat perceptions of the environment polluting and destroying forces and holds an important position among the literary and cultural theories of today and it is deeply connected with the problems of ecological world. However, the acceptable truth is that the eco-consciousness or the deep concerns for nature can be seen in detail and in depth in the origin and growth of our culture and civilisation and all the religious texts, be it The Quran, and The Hindu religious scriptures: The Geeta, The Bhagvad Mahapuranas, The Ramayan and The Upnishads or The Guru Granth Sahib (5). Eco-criticism is unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories because of its close relationship with the science of ecology. Eco-critics can transgress the disciplinary boundaries and make necessary development in their own ecological literacy. I therefore provide brief discussions of some important

35 environmental threats faced by the world today. It is essential for eco-critics to recognise that there are serious arguments about the existence of the problems, their extent, the nature of the threat and the possible solutions to them. From a historical point of view, authors have always assigned values to nature that directly followed their popular representation in the contemporary society. Without showing a sense of inclination to the mythical or allegorical conceptions, the contemporary authors have developed their own way of using nature as a vehicle of expressing complex ideas. A fundamental belief that is shared by the ecocritics is that the human culture is connected to the physical world thereby affecting it and being affected by it. There are many interconnections seen between nature and culture, specifically when its subjects are the artifacts of culture, language, and literature. As a critical approach, it has one foot in literature and the other on the nature; and as a discourse, it makes negotiation between the human and the non-human. Eco- criticism includes the entire ecosphere in itself thus expanding the meaning of the world. The ecological function of art is to connect humans with the biosphere. From another direction, much of what we have and share in poetry, story, music, dance, painting, and the rest, is the biosphere celebrating or contemplating itself. Creating art is a process of integration of the human part of life with the wholesomeness of life. The first principle of ecology is that everything is connected. Life on the Earth is above all correlative. All is connected systematically by relationships of energy transfer and matter exchange and by solar processes that govern wind and water. All lives are interwoven and dependent on other life. All living beings are intimately coupled with many other living beings, their health is our health. No life exists in isolation; every life exists embedded in a context of relationships. This context is often metaphoric as a network or a web. Each and every living organism is interconnected to one another in a network, be it an organism or physical event, and the lines between them is their relationship. This enormous combination of ecosystem we call the biosphere is so thoroughly integrated that the density of relationship blacks out the visual metaphor. Indeed there is a peculiar set of relationships between place, art and bioregion. For example school children in Australia found Wordsworth fanciful and could not follow the poem as they do not

36 know the local topography and landscape of the Lake District. Similarly, students at Malaysia may not understand Keats Ode to Autumn as they do not experience autumn season. An Eco-literary text always makes an attempt to express the relationship among the sacred, the human and the nature in a given ecology. It provides wisdom of understanding the human and the sacred through the nature. Eco- criticism provides a better and deeper understanding on the part of human beings about nature. It is not just a mere study of literature to find the presence of natural descriptions rather it focuses on a broader and critical view of the readers despite their apparently incorrigible anthropocentrism due to their selfish nature. Yet eco- criticism, despite its shady borders, and multitudinous definitions, continues to be vibrant and relevant to literature, an approach that promises to stay. Literature, in its mission of artistically representing the author‘s truth, thus is called to portray ecological realities, which can include taking note of the diminishment and degradation of nature. According to Glen A. Love the field of eco-criticism examines how we think about, and express artistically, the complexities of the natural world. It looks at the implicit assumptions about nature that are embedded in the invented world of literature through which the author aspires to speak. Serpil Opperman comments with a wide range of authors and academic voices from around the world, eco-criticism today has taken a multicultural transnational stance. The entry of new transnational perspectives and interpretive methods into the eco-critical field has initiated a multi-directional trajectory and initiated a debate about where eco-criticism is heading. Many of the environment issues are studied in relation to the growing impact of climate change, the disruption of local ecosystems, and other environmental in securities. Involvement with cultural processes has produced various different ecocriticism, including postcolonial eco-criticism, environmental justice eco-criticism, and urban eco- criticism. Ecocriticism has not developed a methodology, although its emphasis on interdisciplinarity assumes that the humanities and sciences should be engaged in dialogue and that it should be equally equipped with critical and creative activities. While eco-critics study literature written throughout history and analyse its

37 relationship to the environment, most scholarship has focused on American and British literature from the nineteenth and twentieth century. One of the reasons why eco-criticism continues to grow as a discipline is the continued global environmental crises. Eco-criticism shows how the environmental conscious works can play their part in the solution of real and pressing ecological problems in today‘s world. More and more eco-critics are applying eco-critical theories to works of writers who showed their propensity to relate human and nature and to read human character through their response to the ‗oikios‘. Ernest Hemingway is one of the major American writers in whose work one comes across this ecological interplay between man and landscape, human and animal and living and nonliving. At present eco-criticism is in full swing and is a readily accepted theory worldwide. It is said to be the study of literature and the environment together to find a relationship between them. Its practitioners explore human attitudes toward the environment as expressed in nature writing. It is a broad genre. Green cultural studies, eco-poetics and environmental literary criticism, are stand for it and these are rather popular names for this relatively new branch of literary criticism. Literary criticism in general examines the relations between writers, texts and the ‗the world‘. In most of the literary theories the meaning of ‗the world‘ is synonymous with society. The meaning is further extended in Ecocriticism by including the entire ecosphere in it. Eco-criticism takes an earth centered approach to literary criticism. Eco-critics and theorists are concerned with the questions if the nature is being represented in a piece of literature or if the physical setting has a role in the plot or if the values expressed in the work is consistent with the ecological wisdom or if in addition to race, class and gender place should become a new critical category and in what ways and to what effect the environment crisis is seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture. Literary scholars specialise in questions of value, meaning, tradition, point of view, tradition and language and it is in these areas that we are making a substantial contribution to environmental thinking. Eco-criticism has come to mean not only the application, into the study of literature, of the ecological principles but also the application of such theoretical approach in the inter-relational web of natural, cultural and supernatural phenomena. It began to explore constructions of environment in literary texts and

38 theoretical discourse. Since literature has always conditioned our philosophical understanding of nature and environment. Even the aesthetic categories by which our feelings for nature are understood the beautiful, the picturesque, the scenic, the sublime, the wild etc. have been defined largely their use in literary and critical contexts. Most ecological work shares a common motivation, that is, the awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet‘s basic life support system. This awareness brings in us a desire to contribute to environmental restoration, not only as a hobby but as a representative of literature. Eco-critics encourage others to think seriously about the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas posed by the environmental crisis and about how language and literature transmit values with profound ecological implications. Arthur Lovejoy‘s contribution in this field is also very eminent. He observes that one of the strangest, most potent and most persistent factors in the western thought is the use of the term ‗nature‘ to express the standard of human values, the identification of the good with that which is ‗natural‘ or ‗according to nature‘. To sum up, it can be seen that how the growth and development of the term ‗ecocrticism‘ gained its strong foothold around the globe as a literary theory. It further shows how man can be associated with landscape and literature since ages and how during the course of time man realised that the world is dangerously heading towards apocalypse due to the abundant plundering of natural world and to save the world, man has to play a constructive role to make arrangements to safeguard it and secure his own future. In literature the importance of natural world and its resources have been given right from the rise of the civilisations upon earth and the religious texts bear the witness to this fact. During the development of Ecocriticism as a literary theory, many concepts came to fore including ‗Ecopoetics‘ and ‗Ecopsychology‘. Ecopoetics tend to examine literary works that concern nature directly where their focus remains more on the material used as the subject matter and less on the expression. It can be taken as a step forward in the theory of Ecocriticism where the scholars could reach a level to consider the figurative and aural aptitude of language which evokes the natural world in more effective ways. Ecopschology shows a connection where nature is considered to be very essential to the man‘s self and his mental health. It talks about the direct involvement of the natural world in psychotherapy and the development of the

39 personality of man. Ecopsychology believes in the life style where there is a possibility of both ecological and psychological well-being.

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Chapter 2 Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath: A Comprehensive Comparison

2.1 Introduction

This chapter deals primarily with the comparative study of the biographical and thematic elements of the selected poets, Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath. As a comparative study, the emphasis here is on the interdisciplinary approach of comparative literature and various other aspects related to the theory of comparative literature such as, Influence and Intertextuality. Moving a step forward this chapter also discusses the place of the selected poets in the tradition of modern poetry and also the influence of their respective nativities upon their poetry. Especially, the adaptation of the poetic content, poetic technique and style are observed by the parameter of influence both from their link to the respective native literature as well as from the other modern poets. Both these poets have dealt with various themes discussed in this chapter but nature and more often the imagery from nature can sometimes be seen as recurrent element in their poetry which is discussed in detail in the preceding chapters of this research work. Generally it is understood that the comparative literature compares the literature from different languages and cultures in order to observe the literary parameters that lies in the backbone of literary productions of a particular period all over the world. Moreover, It is the study of literary texts and their relationship with other literary texts as well as with other disciplines such as, sociology, history, economics, mathematics, science, and many others. The term ‗Comparative Literature‘ is not an easy term to be defined, because it can involve two or more than two literatures and disciplines at the same time. It becomes a herculean task when many dimensions and aspects of comparative literature like linguistic, cultural, religious, economic, social and historic are taken into consideration. However, in order to understand the term ‗Comparative Literature‘ the study of its nomenclature is a necessary step. Etymologically, the term ‗Comparative Literature‘ denotes as any literary work to be compared with any other literary work or works. Hence, comparative literature is the study of inter-relationship between

44 any two or more than two significant literary works or between any literary works with the works of other disciplines. In literature, It is essential that while making comparative study we must take the sources, themes, myths, forms, artistic strategies, social and religious movements and trends into consideration. The comparatist with his critical approach and investigations intends to find out the similarities and dissimilarities among various works that he has undertaken for the purpose of comparison. And the challenge for a comparative scholar here lies in the fact that the approach taken for the study must be wavered of biasness and any sort of prejudice as its goal is to reach at the justification and truth. It is only the earnest and sincere approach which will bring forth the naked truth or natural results from the study and this has been the ultimate purpose of a comparative study. Modernism as a literary concept is accepted all over the world. The term became popular with the popularity of writers like T S Eliot, Ezra pound, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce etcetera in the literary scene during the first part of the twentieth century. Various movements like Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Post-impressionism. Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism, which became popular during the age, came to be widely used in literature, arts, paintings etc. As a result they enhanced the growth of modernism. Modernism thus refers to the experimental literature produced during the early part of twentieth century. It had its impact on all forms of art: literature, painting, music and criticism. Modernism was influenced by aestheticism, an art movement which gave the slogan "art for art's sake" (Aestheticism 3) which emphasized that art had no didactic or utilitarian role, but was an end in itself English aesthetes like Walter Pater, Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde believed that art was an end in itself and has no social responsibility at all. (Aestheticism 3-4) Their movement influenced the most important writers of modem poetry like Eliot, Hulme and Pound. Modernism like any other movement didn't begin on particular date but it is usually accepted by critics unanimously that modernism in poetry began with the publication of T S Eliot's The Waste Land in 1921. Ezra Pound puts it: "Eliot's Waste Land is I think the justification of the "movement", of our modem experiment, since 1900," (qtd. in Whitworth). If the most important poem of modernism is The Waste Land; in terms of criticism the most important piece of

45 writing is "The Tradition and the Individual Talent", an essay in which Eliot challenged the traditional Wordsworthian notion, according to which poetry "is the emotions recollected in tranquility" (Eliot). But now for Eliot, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality'" (Eliot). This anti-romantic perception of poetry laid the foundation of the poetry that would be written after that, and modem poetry in India was no exception. Just as T S Eliot's poetry changed the poetic scenario of the English tradition, Ezekiel brought about changes on the Indian poetic scene. He changed the devotional and romantic tone of the pre- independence era poetry and brought it to a realistic mode. The poetry began to focus on subjects of day to day life like love, desire, poverty, sexuality, social relations etc. Ezekiel did not merely change the subject of poetry but the form also. His poetry turned more towards free verse; he used poetic devices like irony and humour very normally; and it focused mainly on the Indian urban culture. All this makes him a typical Indian poet. In his poetry "Rhetoric is eschewed. Emotional indulgence is avoided... [and poetry is] personal, modest, self-deprecatory, ironic, urban, sceptical— for subsequent poets to emulate or heed (Patke 247)." He is the one who taught Indians how to write about the city, and to do away with the emotions; whose measure erstwhile was the standard of measuring the worth of a poet. He sketched the urban life of his city, Bombay, and this city for him became more than home, a metaphor, a commitment. "I have made my commitments now. / This is one: to stay where I am.../ My backward place is where I am (Patke 248)". What London was for Eliot, Bombay became for Ezekiel; thus he made talking about the dirty, busy, cramped and noisy place the subject of his poetry, which was not found in the Indian English poetic scene, before. "Ezekiel is thus a small flame, unlikely to startle into incandescence, but not easily snuffed out."(Patke 247). In the beginning Indian English poetry was not very well received by the native readers. However, not to let the movement down, poets like Dom Moraes (1938-2004) began to write in the late 50s. Similarly, poets like P Lai and Adil Jussawala also began to write in the early 60s. Most important step in the development of Indian English poetry in English took place in the mid-50s, as many poets, editors and litterateurs committed themselves to the upliftment of Indian English Poetry. Nissim Ezekiel joined PEN in 1955 and The Quest in the same year. The Quest was quite a success as top most poets of the time like

Kamala Das, A K Ramanujan, Dom Mores, and Kotalkar, contributed to the journal. Another significant step towards the development of the Indian English poetry was P Lai's founding of the Writers Workshop in 1958. Writers Workshop has become very important in promoting English Literature in India, publishing for more than 50 years now, it has published more than 3000 books. Ezekiel who had gained popularity came in the 60s also published his book The Exact Name with the Writers Workshop. Agha Shahid Ali published two of his early books Bone Scluptors and In Memory of Begum Akhtar with the writers Workshop. Like Agha Shahid Ali, many poets who later became famous first began with the Writers Workshop, some important names are Kamala Das, K N Daruwalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, Meena Alexander, Shiv K Kumar etc.

2.2 Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali was born in India on February 4, 1949. He spent his early childhood in his home at Kashmir. Being the son of a distinguished and highly educated family his childhood is spent with affluence. He had been to a number of universities in India as well as in the world which include the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi in India and among the foreign universities Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona are notable. Agha Shahid Ali studied in Burris School in Muncie, Indiana. The Burris School is affiliated to Ball State University where Ali's father was earning the first Doctorate ever granted by Ball State University as well as the first Doctorate in Education by a Kashmiri. Ali studied for a B. A. in the Humanities (1968) at the University of Kashmir; he then went to the University of Delhi for a Master's Degree (1970) in English literature and taught there until 1975. Ali earned a Master's Degree in English and wrote a doctoral thesis, which was later published as ‗T. S. Eliot as Editor‘ (1986). Having decided that his interest was primarily in poetry he studied for the Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as one among the modern American poets. His literary output in the form of poetry earned him numerous fellowships and awards throughout his life. After his education he chose the career of a teacher in the United States where he

47 taught literature in several colleges and universities which include the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College, and the Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001, in Amherst, Massachusetts. As a notable poet Ali has that unique ability with which he blend multiple cultural and ethnic elements in their traditional forms with the elegant free-verse of his poems. His poetry variedly reflects his own experiences in the different religious and cultural circumstances. However, his poetry swirls around the themes related to his own life experiences such as; insecurity, obsession, memory, death, ancestors, nostalgia and so many others. In addition to this, craving for the past history of his homeland which he never knew by himself, his experiences of the religious ceremonies of both, the Hindus as well as the Muslims, friendships and family acquaintances, and etcetera are the constant halt of his poetic consciousness. As a technical poet also, his use of the stunning metaphors, the miraculous juxtapositions of the contradictory elements, and the blend of the real with the surreal make his poems attractive and helps his poem from being degenerated into sloganeering. He is the Master-Poet of Kashmir, a votary who immortalises his beloved land with the rare gems of his imagination. Locating Agha Shahid Ali in the arena of Indian writing in English is an important task for every literary scholar to trace the direction he is moving. It is necessary to state that it was Nasim Ezekiel who was the forerunner of the modern Indian English poetry. He brought modern elements to his poetry by deviating from the preceding romanticism which prevailed its influence upon the Indian English poets before him. Consequently, poets after Ezekiel no longer went back to Romantics for inspiration. New Inspiration was sought in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and other poets of the modernist movement from the West. Agha Shahid Ali, as an emerging poet at that particular period, also has influenced by such a movement and practiced poetry upon the modern themes and style. One of the landmarks in the development of the Indian English poetry was the recognition of English language by Sahitya Akadmy which began recognizing the better scope for the Indian writings in English and encouraged the editors to compile the works of the poets in anthologies. As a result, many unnoticed personalities find their place and recognition through the inclusion of their poetry collections in those anthologies in India and also abroad. Hence, in the year 1963 Indian poets like Kamla Das, P Lal, Nissim Ezekiel were included in Margaret

O'Donnell's An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse, published in London; which was a great achievement. P Lal later on published Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo an anthology which included hundreds of poets and most of them minor poets. It made the anthology much unpolished and one failed to distinguish between the better and the ordinary poets. The most important anthology which is still widely read and prescribed as syllabi in various Indian Universities is Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets published by the Oxford University Press, 1976. The Anthology established a canon and the book put the best ten Indian English poets together. The poets included Nissim Ezekiel, K N Daruwalla, Shiv K Kumar, R Parathasarathy, A K Ramunajan,, Kamala Das, A K Mehrotra, Gieve Patel. Arun Kolatkar, Patel, and Jayanta Mahapatra. Agha Shahid Ali at that time was only a growing poet and could not find the place in the anthology. It was only with the publication of A K Mehrotra's Twelve Modern Indian English Poets that Agha Shahid Ali entered the canon of Indian English poetry in the 1992. Ali began writing poetry in the 1970s when modern poetry was very much in vogue and had found its roots in India and there was quite a sum of Indian poets around including Nassim Ezekiel, A K Ramunajan, R Parathasarathy, Kamala Das, A K Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and Jayanta Mahapatra. His poetic collections include The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), it is the first book he wrote while living in America; it deals with his strong longing for home, Kashmir, besides his family is also the focus of the book. A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987) presents the surreal and gothic vision of Ali, and the poems deal with violence and power. A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991) deals with exile, longing and desire. Ali, like a travel poet, sets out to map America and envisions the brutality of history, particularly with reference to the Native Americans. The Country Without a Post Office (1997) is one of his celebrated books which deals with violence and human rights violations in Kashmir. The book is a kind of the resistance literature about the Kashmir conflict; it is considered as one of the best literary pieces written on the Kashmir issue. Rooms Are Never Finished (2002) deals with death of Ali's mother and violence in Kashmir; and he juxtaposes the two with the tragedy of Karbala. Ali has romanticized his home land in some of his early poems by hanging around his own memories of the times he spent there in the past. However, the romantic diction in his poetry is changed with the course of time as Kashmir sees

49 the rise of violence in the land. This resulted in the shifting of the tone in his poetry; from a tone of his romantic longing of the beautiful homeland to a tone of sorrow and lamentation over the dilapidated condition of the land. At times, it becomes sarcastic and furious whenever he witnesses the human rights violations in Kashmir. Agha Shahid Ali has written about the prevalent political conditions that affect the people of Kashmir. Pakistan and India are tearing Kashmir apart, each claiming a right to the territory. Human beings have become objects. He writes:

The boys of Kashmir Break so quickly We make their bodies sing On the rack, Till no song is left to sing. (Ali, The Country Without a Post Office 55) A number of themes related to Kashmir can be found in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. Dealing with its social and political scenario he is concerned about the human atrocities of the land. Ali appears more distressed to see such a sorrowful condition of his own home land. And this resulted in a sense of isolation and solitude of the poet. The loneliness is the outcome of his desire to make Kashmir beautiful again. Being far away from his home land, he feels himself alone even in the crowd by thinking about such precarious condition of his native place. And reflecting on his solitude he identifies himself as the ‗last snowman‘.

No, they won‘t let me out of winter, and I‘ve promised myself, even if I‘m the last snowman, that I‘ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders. (Ali, The Veiled Suite 34) Agha Shahid Ali has also given a vivid picture of the nature surrounding him. The importance of streams and rivers has been highlighted in his poems. He believes that the natural entities are the main source of energy and if there is any sort of disturbance occurs in their function the whole world will be changed into a

50 desert. In his book A Nostalgist‘s Map of America, he relates his current American home with his boyhood in Kashmir through a series of landscapes which often seem blurred. In In The Mountains, Ali describes nature as one of the names of God. In his book The Half Inch Himalayas, there are recurrent images recollected through his memory of the childhood in Kashmir. However, the descriptions of the landscapes, the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, the springs, the snow, the huts and the crop fields are recurrent in all his poetic collections. In one of his poems ‗Snow on the Desert‘, Ali recollects:

…a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing. (Ali, The Veiled Suite 167) The themes of identity and the sense of belongingness are very much predominant in Ali‘s poetry. Agha Shahid Ali wrote eight volumes of poetry identifying himself as a Kashmiri-American poet. His collections of poetry revolve around the theme of loss and grief. The inspiration of his poetry comes from his own feeling as being a Kashmiri. His early childhood appeared in the post partition era, after Pakistan was carved out from India. Kashmir remained a dispute, an issue about which he is very much concerned. The desire of the people to merge the two parts of Kashmir to an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir which resulted in many conflicts followed by bloodshed and terrorism are also reflected in his writings. This scenario works like traditional location for arts and creativity. Agha Shahid Ali is one of those poets who feel more close to their past homeland than the current home where he lives. He also admits it as he says; ―my poems have that darker edge of them always. Life has that same balance of different dark and light elements. I like to see that reflect in my work‖ (Ali 77). Ali, like other Diaspora writers search the food for their poetry in the land of nostalgia about their past life in the native homeland. Despite being living in a new land and becoming established there, the longing for the native place is very much in the

51 subconscious mind of the poet. Where ever he goes, goes with him the snowy culture of Kashmir reminding his link again with his past. So, the seasons of spring and winter always creates a craving for the poet. He often expressed his compulsion to re-achieve the existence that he has lost. He travelled throughout America and saw many consequences about his loss but he always remembered his source culture. At one place he says about unreal locations:

Pennsylvania became, if not home, certainly a home and sometimes in bar at 2:00 am, like so many Americans, I often felt, almost an exile. Night after night, all routes to death opened up, again and again, as the bar closed all over the Pennsylvania the taxi hour of loss. Then some years later, I left for Arizona where it always is yesterday, no day light saving time there and the Sonora desert seems strongly out of time, these locations meant loss. Each of them also means creating rhetoric of loss, the illusion of belonging-to something, to anything that dismal world –roots (Mishra). In his poetry sorrow and loss come together in a unique way. Observing a similar thing about his poetry Muhammad Safi Khan says that ―emotion excited by the deep sense of loss is fundamentally more poetic. Loss and sorrow are versified for having lost something precious to be drowned in sorrow‖ (Khan 5). One can see in his poetry that both loss and sorrow become synonyms to each other. In this way Ali‘s poetry is the sorrow of loss. Though he is living in the other location but his heart lies in a particular setting that is Kashmir. The loss is the metaphorical reality of his poetry. Whatever we read into his poetry are not words only but the synonym of the loss. ―It is in the blood. Loss is his beloved, the interior paramour he has willingly embraced and kept faith through the four volumes of the poetry‖ (Needham 63). He was always in the verge of pain and he kept it close to his heart. Shahid also has the ability to hide his pain before the world. But, it reveals itself in the forms of words into his poetry quite in an unconscious way. At times he as a poet seems like Keats. Keats was distressed to keep the beauty of the world alive in the Grecian Urn so is Ali always in pain to make his beautiful Kashmir alive in his textual world. His poetic world is like Grecian urn where every spot, whether given by its people or others, echoes to the heart and the mind of

52 the people. ―To fill poems with life‖ (Ali 16) is general tendencies of Agha Shahid Ali. In the poem, ‗The Correspondent,‘ Ali reveals a similarity of the terrified condition of two countries – Kashmir and Bosnia. In the poem, the poet says that the conditions of Bosnia and Kashmir are equal, because both countries are facing the same situation of bloodshed of innocent people. Comparing his self- administered exile with the exile of Mandelstam or his cross-border relations with political sieges of ancient cities, Shahid Ali blends personal losses with the losses of the world. The war journalist, who is either a lover or partner of the poet, equates the Kashmir conflict and the Sarajevo/Bosnian war, making reference to a third connotation: ‗correspondence‘ as ‗analogy‘ or ‗similarity‘. Shahid shows his interest in all three nuances. He says there must be communication between people, the media must film and picturise the reality of the violence that is widely spread in Kashmir, and should also approach the Kashmiris with a very positive approach so that the age-old glory of this beautiful state could be regained.

And he walks – there‘s no electricity – back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights (to a soundtrack of exploding grenades) a dim kerosene lamp. ―we must give back the hour its sheen, or this spell will never end …. Quick,‖ he says, ―I‘ve just come – with videos – from Sarajevo.‖ (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 209) In this poem the poet, a speaker himself in the poem, gives an account of Bosnian journalist, who has come to Kashmir on an assignment to film the warlike situation in the speaker‘s country. While filming the documentary, the war correspondent comes to know that there is not much difference between his country and Kashmir. Both the countries are undergoing the same trauma of atrocities and violence. In his poem ‗Farewell‘, Agha Shahid Ali presents a devastating picture of conflict and its aftermath, he paints a picture that is not only true for Kashmir but even extends to faraway lands such as Palestine. Shahid Ali‘s poetry derives its intense imagery from his response to Kashmir‘s agony, it is so compelling because his poetry‘s appeal is universal, and its voice faithfully expressive.

At certain point I lost track of you. They make desolation and call it peace. When you left even the stones were buried: The defenceless would have no weapons. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 175) ‗The Last Saffron‘ is a poem in which Ali mixes song and suffering. Here Ali recollects both sweet memories and the ongoing harsh conditions in Kashmir; moreover, he is obsessed with a desire to die in Kashmir. His desire to die in his homeland explains his love and affection towards it. The poem is divided in three parts; part first deals with his desire to go back to his homeland and ecstasy of his return. Describing places like zero Taxi stand, Gridlays bank etc. show his love for the city of his birth, Srinagar.

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir, and the shadowed routine of each vein will almost be news, the blood censored, for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 181) Agha Shahid Ali loves his beloved homeland Kashmir with the same passion as he loves his mother. The meaning of these three words – beloved, Kashmir, and mother have no difference for him. He loves his mother because of the fact that the heritage he bears on his shoulder has comes to him from his mother. He always sees in his mother his homeland and vice versa. As Irfan Hasan , one of Shahid‘s friend says:

Everyone loves his mother. So did Shahid. But love for his mother was so deep that it won‘t be possible for him to describe. He nursed her and was always there by her side as if she was ‗his own daughter‘. Sofia aunt‘s death was something Shahid could not expect and it greatly disturbed him. He could not come to Kashmir because of it. But he came again to his beloved land alone with Sofia aunty, this time to bury him (Hassan 10).

Shahid is found using a style in his writing which is post-modernist: spare, controlled, working with sudden puns and twist and relying on imagery for expression of an emotion. The single and even smaller words are infused with potentials of meaning and are adroitly emplaced in his poems. Agha Shahid Ali wrote poetry both in the form of free verse and other traditional forms. He often seem experimenting his poetry with different verse forms such as; the sestina and canzone. He is credited with introducing and popularising the ‗Ghazal‘ form in American poetry. Known particularly for his dexterous allusions to European, Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, Ali‘s poetry revolves around the thematic and cultural poles. The scholar Amardeep Singh has described Ali‘s style as ‗ghazalesque‘, referring to Ali‘s frequent use of the form as well as his blending of the ―rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of love and longing,‖ (49) Singh noted, ―but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance (and sometimes political importance)‖ (49). Though Ali began publishing in the early 1970s, it was not until A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987) that he received widespread recognition. Bruce King characterised that book as:

a surreal world of nightmare, fantasy, incongruity, wild humor, and the grotesque. Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up, leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the idiom is American and contemporary (49). Agha Shahid Ali's ghazals In English is a remarkable achievement in bringing "real" ghazal to America. Ghazal in the West was not known in its true form and subject. Agha Shahid All gave true form and shape to the English ghazal. Although he wrote the ghazal in English, its form, content and context was truly oriental called Sabk-e-Hindi. Even though, language structure of English is not feasible to write ghazals, as it demands strict rhyme, rhythm and meter which hold a poem together, still Ali wrought it well. Ali's great accomplishment is not only that he wrote ghazals himself, but he encouraged many young American poets to write ghazals which he compiled in form of an edited book, Cal Me Ishmael Tonight. This book of ghazals is in itself a remarkable achievement: it shows how this new form was internalized by the western writers and they formed ghazals on various

55 themes, of various metrical lengths, and also fiddled, to a small extent, with the original form so as to make it a bit different and acceptable. Besides writing ghazals, Ali also translated Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Ali‘s translation of Faiz is a great attempt of translating a poet by a poet. Ali's translations as compared to other translators of Faiz are different and attractive because he transcreated the essence, rather than translating the text too closely for its meaning. Ali belonged to the generation of postcolonial poets. As the subject matter of his poetry is concerned, it is mostly about his experience in India and his memory about India. Ali started writing under the influence of T S Eliot and English Romantics, particularly P B Shelley. This influence, however, was short lived and he developed his own style of writing which is a blend of Urdu tradition and the Western tradition. Ali was influenced by his own Indo-Islamic culture and he began to write on subjects like Indo-Islamic music, Urdu language, Muharram etc. Ali, bears quite resemblance with the poetry of A K Ramanujan whose localism, preoccupation with family and cultural plurality, are very much similar to Ali's poetic concerns. However, Ali has not much been acknowledged in India as he deserves: a very few Indian critical editions have written on his poetry. He is not even included in Jeet Thayil's anthology, ‗60 Indian Poets‘. However, Ali‘s marginalization in India has been compensated by his acceptance at the international level. He is found in more than fifteen International poetry anthologies including the famous Norton Anthology of Poetry where only three other Indian poets have been able to find a place. In Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry we can find an aspect of motivation by the environmental influences. In an interview Ali says:

I do believe environment influences you. I could have been as good a poet or as bad a poet or whatever. But I think it would have been different, because I am motivated by forces in this country: the literary work, what I read, the school I go to, my friends, lovers, all of that (Gamalinda 48). Agha Shahid Ali acknowledges his gratitude to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose poems he translated and published and to Begum Akhtar, a famous singer of ghazals, whom he has known since he was a teenager. In the poem ‗In Memory of Begum Akhtar‘, he points out their influence:

You've finally polished catastrophe, the note you seasoned with decades of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz: I innovate on a noteless raga (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 54) Agha Shahid Ali came from a culturally rich family where, besides English, Urdu and Persian poetry and literature were talked about in abundance. He was brought up reading and listening to the poetry of greats like Hafiz, Ghalib, Mir, Faiz etc. His upbringing in a culturally rich Islamic milieu had a lasting influence on his poetry. His poetry concerned with the Indo- Islamic culture is both a lament and nostalgia. Although, Agha Shahid Ali was greatly influenced by T S Eliot, still to some extent, he could not do away with the influence of the English Romantics, particularly that of Shelly. It is quite evident in his second book of poetry, ‗In Memory of Begum Akhtar‘ (Ali, 53). The book, moreover, is marked by strong distrust with religion, mainly because of his early education where he was influenced more by Marx and Freud and less by the religious scriptures.

2.3 Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was a gifted poet as much as her poetic career is concerned. And her poetry is marked by the confessional style through which she evokes her troubled life. Her interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by writing for a journal. Such an endeavor in an early age gained her a scholarship from the Smith College in 1950. While she was a student there, Sylvia Plath left for New York City during the summer of 1953 to work as a guest editor in the Mademoiselle Magazine. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. After being recovered a bit Plath returned to Smith‘s college and finished her degree in 1955. A Fulbright Fellowship brought Sylvia Plath to Cambridge University in England where she met the poet Ted Hughes and fell in love with him. The two got married in 1956. However, the marriage did not last long and they had a stormy relationship in their conjugal life. After such unsuccessful

57 marriage with Hughes In 1957 Plath left for Massachusetts to carry on her further study. There she accompanied poet Robert Lowell and the fellow poet and student Anna Sexton. She also taught English at Smith College around that same time. Plath returned to England in 1959. A poet on the rise, Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel. The novel is an autobiographical expression of the poet which deals with the topic of one young woman's mental breakdown. The novel was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. During this period she also wrote a number of poems which were published posthumously under the collection Ariel (1965). However, such an appealing poetic career ended immaturely with the poet herself when on February 11, 1963 she took her life herself successfully at last after few unsuccessful attempts. The modern American poetry is characterized by the personal expressive tone of the author. Along with the general literary themes such as love and death, madness is also one of the major characteristics of the mid-twentieth century American poetry. It has a strong satirical tone that expresses social consciousness together with urban technological progress. It is more mature and serious in its expression. There is an expression of despair, disintegration and frustration variedly present in the poetry of this period. There is a constant struggle to assert the encompassing validity of the feeling of personality in the poetry. Their personal memories are also viewed against a larger backdrop of a world where secularism, violence, political paralysis and uncontrolled sexuality have reached into an alarming stage. It has the quality of suggesting the universality of their anguish, even in their most personal and painful revelations. There is a painful and moving chronic disintegration of the marriages ending in divorce and agony of loneliness. In the American poetry there is also horrifying revelation of their personal experiences without any compromise or attempts at self-deception A lot of such characteristics of the mid-twentieth century American poetry mark themselves in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. A whole lot of themes such as; love, hate, madness, painful experiences, depression, sadness, obsession with death, futility of life, nihilistic approach, alienation, anxiety, psychological complexities, universality of anguish and broken relationships find their expression in Sylvia

Plath‘s poetry. However, all these themes bear a personal element in them and the poems become confessions about these themes. As a matter of fact, the confessional poets like Sylvia Plath reacted as if they started a revolution against the tradition of impersonality. Being confessional is the hall mark of such poets like Sylvia Plath and such other confessional poets. Plath found herself in a culture where women writers were not given much opportunity in the matter of the publication and circulation of literary outputs. Sylvia Plath‘s importance in American history is derived from the literary excellence of her writing, and her works show the plight of mid-twentieth century women. Plath's significance comes from her role as a poet and the ways in which her writing opened the door for a feminist and a prey to the patriarchal society to explore the world the reality of which she finds in the form of psychiatric patients. By aligning the works of Sylvia Plath alongside the events in her life, one is better able to understand the importance of the poet to the readers of American history. Talking about the writing style of Sylvia Plath, most of her poems comprise of 3 to 5 line stanzas which are fairly short in lines. The theme of her poetry runs through the figurative use of words in the forms of metaphors, similes, and other such poetic tools. Vocabulary is chosen according to the expressive mood of the poet and hence they lack both rhyme and alliteration. But, the vocabularies are rather descriptive in themselves containing a depth of meaning which she wants to express. Punctuation marks are used abundantly in all occasions and sometimes even without any formal need. All these elements blended together to create a pictorial mode of writing which her poetry often projects. Plath deals with various themes during the course of her writing. Death is a consistent theme in Plath's poetry. It manifests itself in several ways in her poetry. The theme of death comes from her personal experiences from the death of her father and some other close acquaintances. In ‗Full Fathom Five‘, she evokes the theme by depicting the incidents of her father‘s death and burial which thrust her a lifelong exile. As she writes;

The muddy rumors Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearance Proves rumors shallow

(Plath, The Collected Poems, 93) The theme of death is also attached with an effect that marks its presence strongly in the life of Sylvia. His death left her with the feelings of defeat, resentment, grief and remorse. The absence of her father from her life had a negative influence on her emotional life to such an extreme that she never been able to accept the fact that her father is no more. Besides, she always want him alive which is reflected radically in her poems. So, in the poem ‗The Colossus‘ she tries in vain to put him back together again and make him speak.

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 129) In ‗Daddy‘, she goes further in claiming that she wants to kill him herself, finally exorcising his vicious hold over her mind and work. Death is also dealt with in terms of suicide, which eerily corresponds to her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide. In ‗Lady Lazarus‘, she claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying to kill herself multiple times.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do It so it feels real. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 245) In short, Death is an immensely vivid aspect of Plath's work, both in metaphorical and literal representations as is very evident in her poetry. Plath felt herself as a victim of the patriarchal world throughout her life. This patriarchal domination comes from her own circles including her father, her husband, and also from the literary world where the patriarchal domination was very much sensible at that time. Her poetry can often be understood as a response to such patriarchal world in which she outcries her feelings of victimization. Many of her poems with a male figure can be interpreted as a

60 reference to all the male society as a whole. Regarding her father, she realized she could never escape his terrible hold over her; she expressed her sense of victim-hood in ‗The Colossus‘ and ‗Daddy‘ and hence she writes;

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 129) Images and allusions to nature are permeated in Plath's poetry. She often depicts the images of sea and the green fields to great effect. The sea is usually used as a metaphor to her father; it is powerful, unpredictable, mesmerizing, and dangerous. And in the poem ‗Full Fathom Five‘, her father is depicted as a sea god himself. As she writes;

Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide‘s coming When seas wash cold, (Plath, The Collected Poems, 92) She also pulled from her personal life, writing of horse-riding on the English fields, in ‗Sheep in Fog‘ and ‗Ariel‘. Nature is also manifested in the bright red tulips which jolt the listless Plath from her post-operation stupor, insisting that she return to the world of the living. Here, nature is a provoker, an instigator - it does not want her to give up Nature is a ubiquitous theme in Plath's work; it is a potent force that is sometimes unpredictable, but usually works to encourage her creative output. The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. The train leaves a line of breath. O slow Horse the color of rust, Hooves, dolorous bells… (Plath, The Collected Poems, 262)

Plath has often been grouped into the confessional movement of poetry. One of the reasons for this classification into the category is that she wrote extensively on her own life, her own thoughts, and her own worries. Any great artist both creates his or her art and is created by it and Plath was always seen endeavouring to know herself better through her writing. She tried to come into terms with her personal demons, and tried to work through her problematic relationships. For instance, she tried to understand her ambivalence about motherhood, and tried to vent her rage at her failed marriage. However, her exploration of herself can also be understood as an exploration of the idea of the self, as it stands opposed to society as a whole and to other people whom she did not particularly like. This conflict - between the self and the world outside - can be used to understand almost all of Plath's poems.

The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself. I bend over this drained basin where the small fish Flex as the mud freezes (Plath, The collected Poems, 131) Motherhood is a major theme of concern in Plath's poetry. She was profoundly ambivalent about the prescribed role for women as a mother. Writing about how she felt insignificant as a pregnant woman and about being a mere means to an end in the poem ‗Metaphors‘ she lamented how weird she looked, and expressed her resignation over a perceived lack of options. However, in the poem ‗Child‘ she delights in her child's perception and engagement with the world. Of course, this poem ends with the suggestions that she knows her child will someday see the harsh reality of life. Plath did not want her children to be contaminated by her own despair. Your clear eye is the absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose names you meditate- April snowdrop… (Plath, The Collected Poems, 265) Sylvia Plath‘s early years of poetry writing consisted of meticulous style which she adapted from other contemporary poets. Some of her main influences

62 were Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Earnest Hemingway. Like T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath incorporated her personal life into her poetry. T.S Eliot wrote about his marital troubles along with the difficulty of religion and hope. T.S. Eliot was not afraid to talk about death, many of his poems addressed death, which is very similar to Plath‘s style. In the very first part of his poem The Waste Land entitled as ‗The Burial of the Dead‘, Eliot deals with the theme of death. The title is enough to strike the reader with his intention. As he further writes in the poem about the death that it is something;

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear Death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. (Eliot, Waste Land, New York: Norton and Co, 2001) Eliot‘s poem, ‗The Hollow Men,‘ includes an amended version of a happy children‘s song, the new verses aren‘t quite as happy. He also ends the poem in a depressing manner with the famous lines:

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. An example of death and depression comes in Plath‘s poem, ‗Death and Co.‘ Plath seems perfectly comfortable with addressing death, she doesn‘t fear it and she seems to embrace it as a part of life.

Frill at the neck Then the flutings of their Ionian Death-gowns. Then two little feet. He does not smile or smoke. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 254) Plath‘s style is also similar to Hemingway‘s in the fact that they both tend to write about events that occur during certain time periods. ―Her expression of distrust of society, her anger at the positions, talented women were asked to take in that

63 society, were healthful (and rare) during the early 1960s, so she became a kind of voice of the times in the same way. Earnest Hemingway expressed the mood of the 1920s‖ (Lauter). Two poems where Plath used the time period as well as her views on feminism and women‘s roles in society are ‗Sow‘ and ‗Cinderella‘. In ‗Cinderella‘, Plath portrays the woman in the way viewed women of the time. In the beginning of the poem, it explains how the woman is wearing scarlet heels and her hair is flaring, which is very typical. But as the poem goes on, it shows how the woman becomes dependent on the man and how they interact.

And glided couples all in whirling trance Follow holiday revel begun long since, Until near twelve the strange girl all at once Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk She hears the caustic ticking of the clock. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 304) Another poem that draws a parallel with society during the time period is ‗Sow‘, Plath is addressing the War and the struggles occurring:

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat By a grisly-bristled Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow‘s heat. But our farmer whistled, Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape, And the green-copse-castled (Plath, The Collected Poems, 61) Wallace Stevens wrote his poems mainly about nature and the changing of seasons, the sun and planets, and the American landscape. Stevens found a connection with nature and felt strongly about preserving and finding the beauty in nature. Similar to Stevens, Plath felt connected with nature and shows it in some of her poetry. There was a time when Plath went to Yaddo, a writer‘s sanctuary in New York, and was greatly influenced by nature. Steven‘s poem, ‗Anectdote of the Jar‘ highlights how important nature truly was to him. He is so clear in his

64 description and so passionate about nature in his writing that it seems to transfer to the readers:

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surrounded that hill. In Plath‘s poem, ‗Dark Wood, Dark Water,‘ she gives the reader great imagery when it comes to the nature she is experiencing. It is almost possible for the reader to place them in the time and place where the poem is taking place. She sounds a lot like Stevens, the excitement of nature is hard to miss.

This wood burns a dark Incense. Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees. Blue mists move over A lake thick with fish. Snails scroll the border Of the glazed water (Plath, The Collected Poems, 127) When looking at Plath‘s poetry, it is easy to find ideas and formats taken from poets, such as Williams, Eliot, and Hemingway and spun into her own. In the beginning of Plath‘s career, she had trouble finding her voice, so she looked to other poets for inspiration. As the years went on, she began to develop her voice and create her own style. Yet without other frontrunners in this field, Plath would not have become the successful and well-known poet she is today (even though she is dead). Plath‘s poetry is timeless and will continue to be a staple of American Literature for many years to come.

2.4 Conclusion Ali‘s poetic concerns include localism, preoccupation with family, and cultural plurality. Ali through his poetry tries to view his past, present and the future relationship with his home. Agha Shahid Ali‘s engagement with his home can be seen as twofold, he longs for return like other poets in exile and at the same time he is mournful towards the violence and terror of his homeland, Kashmir. Ali also deals with the obsession of death, as he seems to juxtapose his death with the killing of boys whom he laments in his poems. Ali has dealt with the surreal and gothic vision, exile, longing and desire. He also acts as a travel poet who sets out to map America and envisions the brutality of history with reference to the Native Americans. Sylvia Plath became a legendary figure by generating numerous responses about her work particularly in connection with her personal concerns. Plath became a poet who learned her craft through the hard way, as she can be considered her own muse. During the course of her poetry one can come across the themes like the fragmentation of the self, the loss of innocence, the roles of daughter, wife, and mother, and the victimization under patriarchal descent. Both Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath possess the thematic concerns in their poetry that qualifies them to be categorised in the zone of modern poets who are influenced by T.S. Eliot and the English romantics at a decent scale.

Works cited

Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009. Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A critical Introduction. New York; Cambridge UP. 1993. "Aestheticism" A Glossary of Literary Terms. Ed. M H Abrams. Australia: Thomson Heinle, 2005. 3-4. Print. Dass, Bijay Kumar. Comparative Literature, New Delhi; Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2000. Dhawan, R.K. Comparative Literature. New Delhi; Behari Publication. 1987. Eliot, T S "Tradition and the Individual Talent. T.S. Eliot. ―Bartleby.com: N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2011. Gamalinda, Eric. ―Poems are Never Finished, a Final Interview with Agha Shahid Ali.‖ Poets and Writers. 2002. Gifford, Henry. Comparative Literature, New York: Humanities Press New York. 1969. King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: OUP. 2001. Kirby, John T. The Comparative Reader: A Hand list of Basic Reading in Comparative Literature. New Haven: Chancery P, 1998. Lauter, Paul. "The Heath Anthology of American Literature." American Literature 26 (2003). Patke Rajeev S. "Poetry since Independence." An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 243-275. Print. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. Remark, Henry. ―Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function.‖ Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective. Edited by Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz. Edwardville: Southern Illinios UP. 1961. Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Whitworth, Michael H. Modernism. Maiden, USA: Blackwell, 2007. Google Book Search. Web. 2 July 2018.

Chapter 3 An Ecological Assertion: Nature and Narrative

This chapter is a detailed comparative analysis of the poems of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath with the focus on the assertion of all types of ecological concerns and the use of natural imagery and its projection. It deals with the issues of ecological crises and destruction of nature by mankind and their projection with references from the poems and fulfils one of the objectives of the study. It seems quite relevant to give some background sketch of the history of English poetry and its evolution in specific for the interest of those inclined to put steps in the world of literature. Just as English Literature has been divided into various parts on the basis of various ages, so is our poetry, into various forms. The various forms of poetry include: Lyric, Sonnet, Elegy, Ode, Ballad, Epic, Satire, Dramatic Monologue, and the Metaphysical poetry. A brief sketch of each form will be given to maintain the coherence and the interest of the new literature readers. The first form of poetry, Lyric gives expression to a single emotion or feeling. It is appealing more to the heart than it is to the intellect. If we put this term simply, a lyric is any fairly short poem, uttered by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling. In dramatic lyrics, however, the lyric speaker is represented as addressing another person in a specific situation. John Donne‘s Canonization and William Wordsworth‘s Tintern Abbey can be treated as the best examples of the dramatic lyric. This lyric is uttered in the first person, the speaker or ‗I‘ in the poem need not necessarily be the poet who wrote it. The second form of poetry, Sonnet is a lyrical poem which consists of a single stanza of 14 iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English Language: The Italian Sonnet or Petrarchan Sonnet (named after the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. The Petrarchan form of Sonnet was used for a variety of subjects by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, and other sonneteers. The second form of the Sonnet is the English or

68 the Shakespearean Sonnet. This Sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. The Spensarian Sonnet was similar to that of the Shakespearean, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The third form of poetry, Elegy has been derived from the Latin word Elegia, or the Greek word Elegeia, which means ‗a lament‘. So, the Elegy is a poem or a song of sorrow, especially for the dead. It is a funeral song or a song of mourning. Its mood is serious, pensive or reflective. According to M.H Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham:

In Greek and Roman times, elegy denoted any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). The term was also used, however, to refer to the subject matter of change and loss frequently expressed in the elegiac verse form, especially in complaints about love (85). An important subtype of the Elegy is the Pastoral Elegy, which represents both the poet and the one he mourns, who could be another poet, or a shepherd. Some notable pastoral elegies are Spenser‘s Astrophel, written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1595); Milton‘s Lycidas (1638); Shelley‘s Adonais (1821), and many more. The fourth form of poetry, Ode has been derived from Greek word ‗Ode‘ which means ‗to sing‘. The Ode is an elaborate lyrical poem, often lengthy, generally addressed to somebody or something and intended to be sung in chorus, and is a more serious and dignified composition. There are two types of Ode: Regular or Pindaric Ode, which was choric and is sung to the accompaniment of a dance. It consists of three parts- moving in a dance rhythm to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the antistrophe; then standing still, the epode. The second form of Ode is Horatian Ode, which is mostly calm, meditative, and colloquial; these types of Odes are usually homostrophic, which means they are written in a single repeated stanza form, and are shorter than the Pindaric Ode. The fifth poetic form, Ballad is a short story in verse, transmitted orally. It is a narrative species of folk songs, which originate and are communicated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people. It is written in Ballad stanza form, which is a quatrain in alternate four- and three stress lines; usually only the second

69 and fourth lines rhyme. Ballad has two forms- Broadside Ballad, which is printed on one side of a single sheet (called a broadside), dealt with a current event or person or issue, and was sung to a well-known tune. Literary Ballad- is a narrative poem written in deliberate imitation of the form, language, and spirit of the traditional ballad. Epic is the seventh poetic form. The term Epic comes from the Greek root ‗epos‘ which means ‗a word‘. This term is applied to a long narrative poem and the related heroic events in an elevated style. According to M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham,

In its strict sense the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centred on a heroic or quasidivine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the instance of John Milton‘s Paradise Lost) the human race (90). The eighth poetic form of English Literature is Satire. Satire could be described as a light form of literary composition, originally in verse. It is used to criticize a subject by making it ridiculous and showing the attitude of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation towards it. Its various forms are- Formal Satire, in which the satiric persona speaks out in the first person. For example: Pope‘s Moral Essays. Another form of Satire is Horatian Satire, in which the speaker manifests the character of an urbane, witty and tolerant man of the world, who is moved more often to wry amusement than to indignation at the spectacle of the human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy. Juvenalian Satire, Indirect Satire, Menippean Satire, Varronian Satire are the other forms of Satire. Some examples of Satire are- Cervante‘s Don Quixote, Swift‘s Gulliver‘s Travels, Pope‘s Dunciad, etc. The ninth and the last formal form of poetry is Dramatic Monologue. The term ‗Monologue‘, is derived from the Greek words ‗monos‘ and ‗logos‘. The meaning of ‗monos‘ is ‗one‘, and the meaning of ‗logos‘ is ‗speech‘. Hence, a Dramatic Monologue is a composition meant to be spoken by one person. It‘s a lengthy speech by a single person. It‘s a type of lyric poem which was perfected by Robert Browning. The best example of it is My Last Duchess, Andrea Del Sarto, Tennyson‘s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot‘s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Literature and environment stand to benefit from closer consideration of each other, and that comparative literary criticism and ecocriticism are mutually illuminating. The comparativists combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of literary texts across land and sea and posit new connections between global, national, and local forms of ecological awareness, poetics and aesthetics. The serious ecological crises like air pollution, acid precipitation, global warming, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity have engulfed our planet earth. Ecocriticism became very much acclaimed critical approach in the 1980‘s after Feminism and Post-colonialism, and developed, with attention from scholars of various fields, in different countries into a separate subject. In the application of Ecocriticism to the study of all forms of literary works it shows the ideas and thoughts that prove helpful in dealing with the relationship between man and nature, and also contribute to the cause of environmental preservation. Ecopoetics and contemporary poetry possess the primary responsibility of the cultivation of an environmental imagination in order to make it relevant and variable. In other words, it gives rise to some questions like, how shall we ‗live‘ in a poem? To what use, in both practical and transcendent terms, do we put it? How do our uses of and beliefs in language evident in the poem parallel our uses and beliefs for the environment? What is the nature of poetic form, and how does it help us think and be, and relate ethically to where we live? Further, how is that poetic form an enactment of the things and processes of nature itself? A poem must provide a relevant landscape to our experience if it is a horizon. As a matter of perception, it should provide convincing proof that the language plays a fundamental role with the world upon examination, and its capacity to construct a space that can be made a habitat. Like other arts, poetry is also an art of creation. The poet actually lives in an imaginary world and presents things as he/she imagines them and at times makes them more comprehensible, beautiful and creative than they can be seen by an ordinary person. A poet creates all together a new world, it is a matter of fact that the topic of poetry generally revolves round animated sentiments. The poets preserve the past incidents and events through the power of poetry. Every poem has its value in human experience regardless of school. It is a piece of art to be looked at very closely, it is something of use very flexibly and pragmatically. All the poetic theories are of the consensus that the poem always

71 remains the central evidence of understanding. The understanding establishes in that species of animal man which lives in contact with the world: "because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ" (Dewey 19). Primarily or secondarily all poems refer to a visible world and hence are landscape poems. The poem begins at some point and is either of nature or of mind. Poems are being formed for particular reasons that are to escape from the ugliness and boredom of daily life, or an assertion of the unexciting dignity. The poem is a pious kind of persuasion as is our most intimate belief of articulation. The poems sometimes meet our expectations to convince the world‘s chaos and divinity and at other times they fail to do so. No matter what our beliefs are, a poem‘s meaning seems to be driven by the possibility of language to create true relations between things and names. Language expresses an intrinsic purpose, that the shift of words and usage does not affect the accuracy. The deep structure plays an important role to retain a true and meaningful presence of the form. The philosopher George Steiner puts it plainly:

. . . any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, under- written by the assumption of God's presence ... the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this "real presence." (Steiner, 3) Leonard Scigaj argues in ‗Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets‘ (1999), ―environmental poetry must contain an activist dimension to foreground particular acts of environmental degradation and degraded planetary ecosystems‖ (21). Scigaj‘s seeks to reorient readers to the referential function of literature and the standpoint of environmentalism. His project, as he succinctly puts it, seeks to ―critique poststructuralist language theory and provide an alternative‖ (xiii). He turns to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to elucidate the cultural value of writers such as A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Adrienne Rich. These poets approach language as ―a positive instrument that can promote authentic social and environmental relations

72 between humans and their environment—relations that can lead to emancipatory change‖ (33). As Scigaj admonishes:

We need a sustainable poetry, a poetry that does not allow the degradation of ecosystems through inattention to the referential base of all language. We need a poetry that treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating cyclic feedback systems (5). Scigaj concludes that in the face of environmental crisis we are no longer able to naturalize these ecosystems ―into benign backdrops for human preoccupations‖ or to ―reduce them to nonexistence by an obsessive focus on language‖ in our literary work. Jonathan Bate argues, to the contrary, that ecopoetics properly begins ―not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell upon the earth‖ (266). Killingsworth makes a similar distinction in ‗Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics‘ (2004), he writes: ―I use the term ecopoetics when my readings aim for a primarily phenomenological significance and ecocriticism when they take a sharply political turn, invoking issues on the current environmentalist agenda‖ (6). As the literary critic Jed Rasula points out in his ‗This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry‘ (2002), after all, the poet seeks not to ―‗change the world‘—a futile repetition of the Prometheus complex—but [to] change the mind that conceives, and accedes to, that composition of the real we acknowledge as the world‖ (62). Rasula elaborates the ecological dynamics at play in the modern poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Rasula has no interest in defining and arguing for the distinctiveness of a select group of poets with common ecological concerns. Rather his subject is poets who call on the imagination ―as a resource of ecological understanding‖ and poetry ―in a truly recreational capacity, one that redefines ‗recreation‘ as original participation‖ (3). For Rasula, ecopoetry begins with the inadequacy of the self and its anthropocentric preoccupations, and it goes on to envision language and poetry. Agha Shahid Ali is known particularly for his skillful allusions to European, Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, Ali‘s poetry collections revolve around both thematic and cultural poles. Amardeep Singh has described Ali‘s style as

‗ghazalesque,‘ (Singh) referring to Ali‘s frequent use of the form as well as his blending of the rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of love and longing. Though Ali began publishing in the early 1970s, it was not until A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987) that he received widespread recognition. This book has been considered as a surreal world of frightening, fantasy, inaptness, wild humor, and the bizarre. Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up, leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the saying is American and contemporary. Ali‘s next book, A Nostalgist‘s Map of America (1991), relates a series of travels through landscapes often blurred between his current American home and memories of his boyhood in Kashmir. King Bruce contended that such mind links past and present, America and India, Islamic and American deserts, American cities and former American Indian tribes, modern deserts and primitive oceans. There is a highly profiled language of color, paradoxes, oxymora, and other means to lift the poems into the lyrical and fanciful. Nature has been a predominant theme of poetry especially written by American migration poets for quite some time now. It is being used as a symbol showing people‘s attachment to their place of home or for the migrant‘s sense of being uprooted. However, in recent poems of movement, nature matters in a more immediate environmental sense in terms of exploring people‘s geographical movement in relation to their perspectives on the natural world and to particular kinds of human-nature interaction. Such poems frequently engage the environmental issues of the migration of humans by way of comparing the present conditions of high standards of global world to the past ways of being close to land. Agha Shahid Ali has given a vivid picture of the importance of streams and rivers in his poem ‗Desert Landscape‘, and also says that these natural entities are the main sources of energy and if there is any sort of halt in their function the whole world will change into a desert. In this poem he talks about rain in a desert that is hope. He says:

… a Jesuit priest began to build a boat, bringing rumours

of water to an earth still forgetting the sea it had lost over two hundred million years ago. (Ali, A Nostalgist‘s Map of America 160) In this poem Ali considers earth as barren both moral and in humanistic perspective, where people have lost hope like in a desert there is no hope of rain and he is very optimistic while saying that the time will come when there will be rain in the desert and all dreams will be fulfilled. The streets will be changed into streams and rivers, but it will come in abundance and will wash away everything that comes its way. The mountains will catch fire and everything will get vanished. This can be viewed as revenge from nature to mankind for destroying it in many ways. In this poem Ali projects that our chief objective should be to fight against the causes that are responsible for natural disasters like pollution and resource depletion, for the sake of the betterment of humans on earth. This is a thought put forward by ecocritics which they named as Shallow Ecological Movement. This proportion is clearly embedded in the above mentioned poem. These lines also comment on the usefulness of earth and Natural resources for human beings, which again is an attribute of Deep Ecology Movement. Ali in the poem ‗I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror‘ drives through Utah and views South America in his rear view mirror. While mapping the continent he starts from the lower countries seeing Argentina then Paraguay followed by Uruguay. Thus while moving north ward the mirror reflects Columbia, Brazil and Peru. Ali does not describe the countries merely by names but the way he sees them through the glass of the mirror or the way the mirror reflects them.

This dream of water – what does it harbor? I see Argentina and Paraguay under a curfew of glass, their colors breaking, like oil. The night in Uruguay is black salt. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 161) This poem clearly indicates that reverence of life is our guiding value which is one of the key tenets of the concept of Ecophilosophy. It also shows our violent and

75 selfish attitudes towards fellow humans, and our widespread abuse of the environment. We kill our fellow beings to meet our own filthy and short lived ends and we cut forests and destroy nature again to fulfill our worldly desires. This action is totally condemned by ecocritics who explained its merits and demerits by using a term called ‗Ecophilosophy‘. In one of Ali‘s poems ‗Snow on the Desert‘, published in his poetry collection, ‗The Nostalgist‘s Map of America‘, he projects a beautiful natural imagery when he talks about the falling of snow the whole night and in the morning the bright sun throws its rays on it and has an effect on the human eyes where they become unable to see because of the reflexion. Ali writes:

… and the snow which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert‘s plants, its mineral hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 164) In this poem, Ali talks about the harsh winter conditions, the silent snow fall at night mesmerizes everyone in the morning, but at the same time it freezes everything as if it puts life on pause. He talks about the effect of the global warming and the climate change by which the snow that otherwise is the attribute of the mountains starts falling in the desert. The popular plant of the desert, cactus, also gets affected as it stops to grow and goes to dormancy. Further in the poem Ali expresses many experiences during the travel, he talks about the big cactus plants called Saguaros and says that they bloom only at night, ―and you know the flowers/of the saguaros bloom only at night‖ (Ali, 165) and also recalls the place as once being a sea there. He states the condition of the Saguaros plants in detail and juxtaposes their being a tribe ―But because they too are a tribe/vulnerable to massacre‖ (Ali, 165) with the aspect of humans living in communities where they seem vulnerable to death and destruction. He also throws a fair amount of light on the theme of lost history in the poem and portrays a concept of the end of the world can be the beginning of the world. At the end of the poem which is also the culminating poem of this collection he seems to be

76 concerned about the loss in the environment and finds its similarity with the loss in his own life ―a time to think of everything the earth/and I had lost‖ (Ali, 168). Agha Shahid Ali is considered as a politically active and religiously familiar poet, his sense of identity is deeply rooted in the history which appears to be fading quickly. In one of his poems ‗Prayer Rug‘, published in his collection ‗The Half Inch Himalyas‘, dedicated to his grandmother, Ali portrays the tones of sadness and mixes them with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca called Hajj. By using religious allusions and imagery he creates a sense of strength and importance within the prayer ceremony, but he is worried of the fact that these Islamic ceremonies are unfortunately becoming outdated and unwanted by the younger generations in the poem. This poem is rich with the use of natural imagery, Ali writes:

Those intervals between the day‘s five calls to prayer the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 40) In these lines Ali portrays a very popular practice in his native homeland, Kashmir, where in his time (and still in the rural areas) people used to make rosaries of the ginger and pepper by pulling a strong thread through them by the use of a needle. With the help of sun light during the autumn season the women of the house would dry the vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants in order to preserve them and eat them during the next unproductive, in terms of getting fresh vegetables, winter season. In the same very manner Ali piles up memories that help him to survive in exile and away from his homeland. Likewise the Kashmiri people bank on the dry vegetable stock during harsh winters, Ali banks on the stock of his memories in which he finds solace from homelessness and this stock of memories help him to create his poems and their relevance.

Agha Shahid Ali very frequently uses the nature and the natural imagery to express his inner world and his personal experiences with a universal appeal and powerful effect. In one of his poems ‗The Season of the Plains‘, published in his collection ‗The Half Inch Himalyas‘,Ali gives a description of monsoon rains and projects a long lasting effect of the natural phenomena on the human memory, he talks about the monsoons which are not a very much part of the seasons of Kashmir as he says ―The monsoons never cross/ the mountains into Kashmir‖ (Ali, 45), but he recollects through them the reminiscences his mother spoke of during her childhood when she lived in Lucknow. This poem also deals with very rich natural imagery when Ali talks about the famous river in Banaras, Jamuna, and also talks about the sweet and soothing sound of flute which connects him with his past and makes him feel nostalgic. Ali writes:

… in the plains of Lucknow, and of that season in itself, the monsoon, when Krishna‘s flute is heard on the shores of the Jamuna. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 44) Further in the poem Ali makes use of many other natural entities and phenomena to reach out to the audiences with a strong appeal of the treatment of nature in his works. He talks about his perception that the natural phenomenon should not become a hurdle between the way to perform the daily course of life ―Separation/can‘t be borne when the rains/come:‖ (Ali, 44). ‗Flight from Houston in January‘ is a poem by Agha Shahid Ali which was first published in his collection ‗The Half Inch Himalyas‘, this poem actually is a vision of the poet while he is in a flight and it begins with the description of sky and clouds. Ali makes comparisons of the two states of the climate of Mexico and Pittsburgh ―the sun touched with Mexico/the white hills of Pittsburgh‖ (Ali, 69). By portraying this Ali probably tries to talk about the two major seasons that are Summer and Winter, through the representation of which he finds a connection with his homeland. Ali writes:

Both sides of the sky

are visible here, the clouds below us and a clear blue above. … for days I saw the warm side of the sky, the sun touched with Mexico… (Ali, The Veiled Suite) These lines show the natural attributes in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali that he uses to evoke his touch with the past and what he foresees. Ali‘s poem ‗From Another Desert‘ is a classic example, it shows that Ali has internalized various cultural traditions that result in the development of his pluralistic identity. The poem tells the famous story of Laila and Majnoon, it is an old Arab tale of love based on the true story of Qaysibn al-Mullawah. Laila was a beautiful girl from an upper class family and Majnoon was from a lower class family. Both fell in love, and Majnoon asked for Laila's hand in marriage which was rejected by Laila's father on the grounds of Majnoon's economic status as the problem. Finally, Laila was married to another man and, as a result, Majnoon left home and began wandering in the forests. Agha Shahid Ali creates this poem from the cultural context of this story. The poem opens with the cry of the mad Majnoon:

It is a strange spring rivers lined with skeletons wings beat in the cages letting the wind hear its own restlessness the cry of gods and prisoners letting me hear my agony (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 139) In these lines the speaker (Majnoon) cries and it has many cannotations, it can be taken as the pain of love, a spring without blossom ‗strange spring‘ (Ali, 139). This poem can be treated as a wasteland that talks about independence without

79 freedom where wings are beating in the cages and has a pessimistic tone, but also there is desire and hope ‗letting me hear my agony‘ (Ali, 139) . These expressions by Ali are clear by the use of his natural imagery like spring, desert, rivers etc. Further in the poem Ali personifies breezes as the lost travelers who are asking for a place to stay ‗the breezes are lost travelers today‘ (Ali, 142). These breezes knock the door of the speaker the whole night and were asking ‗if the beloved had ever passed this way‘ (Ali, 143). There is a poem by Agha Shahid Ali called ‗No‘ published in his collection ‗The Nostalgist‘s Map of America‘, this poem is full of natural imagery where he speaks about going for fishing not in a stream but in the desert sky, he probably wants to convey the unproductivity of the place where he is living in terms of the creation of art. He very beautifully portrays the rain as hooks, sun as rod and the rainbow as fish. Ali writes:

not in the clear stream, I went fishing in the desert sky. With rain hooks at the sun‘s end, I caught a rainbow, its colors slippery in my hands. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 151) Agha Shahid Ali‘s poem ‗I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight‘, published in his collection ‗The Country Without a Post Office‘, the poem seems to be set in winter as many references to snow, ice, and cold can be seen in the poem. This poem can be treated as a resistance poem, where Ali tries to delineate the violence in Kashmir while living abroad. This poem talks about a curfewed night in which a shadow of a boy is wandering in search of its body ‗is running away to find its body‘ (Ali, 178). Ali gives a vision of the horror created due to the interrogations Kashmiri boys faced day in and day out like electric shocks etc. Further this poem presents the snow falling, like ash, very destructive, it can hold the meaning of falling of snow literally during the winters or it can be the ashes produced from the burning of houses by soldiers. The juxtaposition of the conditions of Kashmir with the natural phenomena is very much evident in this poem. Ali writes:

One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains to will the distant mountains to glass. … and snow begins to fall on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods, the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 179) Other natural entities Ali has used in the poem include cold, Himalayan mountains, sheer ice, chinar leaves etc. Agha Shahid Ali's poem ‗A History of Paisley‘, can be approached through both historic and political aspect. This poem seems to talk about a myth regarding Hindu god Shiva and his spouse Parvati, there seems to be a quarrel between them and after reconciliation Shiva carves river Jehlum in the shape of Paisley to memorise it. Ali in the backdrop of this myth foregrounds the topic of political violence in Kashmir by the use of natural entities and natural processes. Ali says that the blood spilled in the streets of Kashmir due to political unrest leaves the Paisley shaped foot marks when somebody walks over it in the dim light. The sound of anklets of Parvati is compared with the sound of bullets ‗hear bullets drowning out the bells of her anklets‘ (Ali, 219), and the sign of devotion and faith gets replaced by sign of horror and terror. Ali writes:

… Look! Their feet bleed; they leave foot prints on the street which will give up its fabric, at dusk, a carpet – … up there in pure sunlight, your gauze of cloud thrown off your shoulders over the Vale, do not hear bullets drowning out the bells of her anklets. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 219) There are many natural entities in the poem that Ali made use of to express and make his case strong with a universal appeal like ‗peaks of Zabarvan‘, ‗ocean‘, ‗glaciers‘, ‗Himalayas‘ etc. During the early 1990s the militancy was on the rise in the Kashmir Valley, Muslims and Hindus residing there suffered a great deal, but Hindus, also called as Kashmiri Pundiths, were forced to leave Kashmir. Agha Shahid Ali personally, like every Kashmiri, felt very sad about the exodus of Pundiths, he after that

81 always wanted the Pundiths to return home, he would miss many things including the food that was particular to this community, as it vanished from the Valley with the departure of this Hindu community. Ali‘s poem ‗Farewell‘, published in ‗The Country Without a Post Office‘, laments the departure of Kashmiri Pandiths and reminds them of the sad state which the poet is feeling for the people who ‗became refugees‘ (Ali, 202). Ali wants to give Pandiths a notion that they have not been forgotten, and Muslims back in Kashmir are their fellow sufferers and the pain of separation due to the bad phase of history is being felt by both the communities. Ali laments the sense of guilt that he couldn‘t stop them from leaving and this guilt haunts him and says that the history cannot be forgotten hence he cannot be forgiven. In this poem Ali presents the situation where Kashmir, generally regarded as the Paradise on earth, has turned into hell, he calls it as ‗Paradise on a river of hell‘ (Ali 177) and has to row through it by using his heart as paddle. Then lotus becomes the paddle, which produces a beautiful image of Dal Lake on which it blooms and projects the overall beauty of the Paradise on earth. After that he talks about the withering away of lotus ‗as it withers‘ (Ali,177) which symbolizes the gloom in the Valley. As lotus is considered a Hindu symbol so, its withering can be taken as the exodus of Hindu community from the Valley. Ali writes:

I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell: Exquisite ghost, it is night. The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves: It is still night. The paddle is a lotus: I am rowed – as it withers –toward the breeze which is soft as If it had pity on me. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 177) Agha Shahid Ali‘s take is that of a poet‘s, he is not a political analyst, his concern is based on humanism. With the lament for the exodus of Pundiths, hope of their return can also be sensed. The natural imagery by Agha Shahid Ali has been used time and again to represent the grim realities and their portrayal as a primary entity encompasses many of his poetic works including this one. Plath‘s poetry could not be treated as only autobiographical, subjective .and self-centered. They show an awareness of the social and political climate of the

82 time. She played a well role of mother, wife and daughter while being very much conscious that she was a brilliant, intelligent woman. She was profoundly affected by the conflicting ideologies of domesticity and achievement. The double standard of American society resulted in Sylvia Plath‘s envy and hatred of men. The fearful and contradictory nature of American culture of the 1950‘s influenced her poetry and at the same time aroused anxiety in Plath‘s own life. Sylvia Plath has used nature as a recurrent theme in her poetic work, it is that lucrative force in her poetry which is not always predictable, but encourages her creative ability. Plath‘s poetry is filled with allusions and images of nature. She often evokes natural entities like sea and the fields to great effect. The sea is usually associated with her father, it is powerful, unpredictable, mesmerising and dangerous. An image of the sea is also used at many other places where it suggests a terrible sense of loss and loneliness. Plath‘s formal craft, her use of sensuous poesis as a response to her environmental concerns and sympathies make her an ecological poet of great importance.

Above all, Sylvia Plath's writing is sane? and I mean sane in at least two senses, neither of which in the least concerns Plath's own mental state. First, Plath's writing is sane in its argument and subject matter. Insistently, the writing concerns itself with real political and material issues, with "definite situations". . . . Second, the writing is sane in so far as it is controlled, methodical, and carefully wrought? a circumstance to which Plath's manuscripts in the archives testify. Both of these senses of sanity are the very opposite of the myth of Sylvia Plath as mad, depressed and pouring out her distress in an ink of blood. (Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, 37) Tracy Brain declares Plath‘s treatment of nature something beyond mere romantic admiration to deal soberly with the vulnerability of the body to toxic pollution. Plath expresses the ecological idea that death is often linked to alienation from one‘s environment and fellow creatures, rather than being obsessed with death, whereas life requires interaction with one‘s environment and other beings. Plath can be categorized as an ecological poet for the reason of her

83 concern about industrialization and the destructive consequences of modern, technologized life, which she expressed periodically in her journals:

―I dislike apartments, suburbs. I want to walk directly out my front door into earth and into air free from exhaust‖ (Plath, Johny Panic and the bible of dreams, 39). She also concisely expresses this troubled attitude toward motorized modernity in the third stanza of ‗Private Ground‘:

Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well I need hardly go out at all. A superhighway seals me off. Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 130) The poet is clear here by saying not only does modern technology, in the form of cars and the superhighway ‗poison‘ the environment, but also it ‗seals‘ the speaker off from the woods and natural beauty of her friend‘s property. There are poems that address concerns associated with the broader field of the environmental humanities, such as environmental and social justice and others engage with the natural world with an emphasis on our sensory responses to it. Both these poets suggest an emphasis on individual experience, but at the same time shows the relationship between the individual experiences and the effect it has on readers‘ abilities to appreciate their immediate natural surroundings. Plath‘s poem ‗Winter Landscape, with Rooks‘ has a very gloomy background, written in 1956, the year when Plath married to Ted Hughes. The title of the poem shows the winter‘s cold and darkness. Rooks are a species of birds considered intelligent and by which it can be sensed that the speaker gives a notion of attaining freedom of mind. The speaker‘s feelings are depicted through the portrayal of the landscape that is the feelings of anger and doubt of hope. The ‗black pond‘ is compared with ‗a single white swan‘ (Plath, 21), it symbolises the hope of light that can be found in darkness. Further in the poem, the rising of the sun over the landscape depicts hope or clarity. Then there is a shift of tone in the

84 poem where the hope changes into depression ‗I stalk like a rook/brooding as the winter night comes on‘ (Plath 21). Plath writes:

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, … I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on. Last summer‘s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; (Plath, The Collected Poems, 21) The summer symbolises life and happiness and by the depiction of ‗ice‘, it means that any hope has frozen and is at the verge of death, the poet is going very deep in hopelessness and faithlessness on humanity and this can be treated as the central theme of the poem. This poem as can be seen is very rich in portraying natural imagery and talks about natural entities at length. The poem carries a struggle that the poet undertakes to overcome the troubled and depressed life and enter a happy and prosperous life. Finally Plath tries to overcome her self-doubt and enjoy a normal life style. In Plath‘s various poems, death can be seen as a central theme though the wish for it differs from one poem to another poem. This power of death in her poems can be seen through the recurrent imagery of non-human nature including animals, insects, birds and landscapes. The cause of desire for her death can be traced from her psychological, social and personal reasons. She can be seen as a personality who was divided between the two forces of life and death. The impact of her sufferings and troubles of her life is very much evident in her poems that give them a dark and gloomy outlook. The other obvious reason of Plath‘s dark tone of poetry may be her being a twentieth century poet, generally considered as the era of dehumanisation and violence. She also attained a tag of a confessional poet and expresses her personal troubles and sufferings through her poetry to the readers. She has adopted a fearful style of portraying the social issues and her own psychological agonies in her poetry. In Plath‘s poetry there can be seen a blend of the experience of a modern life and personal crises that result in

85 confusion and exemplary pain. A relationship between Plath‘s mind and her creativity can be found where her creativity seems to address her concerns with a universal appeal. Her poetic craft gains prominence due to the adaptation and the determination of her themes and the use of symbols and images from nature. Her large number of oeuvre is considered to be confessional, dramatic in nature and universal in appeal. Plath‘s art and craft enables her to develop a series of personae and motifs. According to John Rosenblatt Plath‘s ―poems dramatize the transformation of her personal situation into a metaphor of personal struggle‖ (107). The sea for Plath is her place of nostalgia which can be reflected through her memory of childhood and she evokes it to a great effect in her poetry. Plath had a great liking for the sea in her real life as well as in her art. During her youth she had spent her vacations on the North Atlantic coast. The poem ‗Full Fathom Five‘, by Sylvia Plath that was included in her collection of poetry ‗The Colossus‘, published in 1958, is usually considered to be about her father, Otto Plath. The poem reveals about an aged god-like man who rises from the sea, the speaker seems directly talking to him as he has been shown rising from the cold, foamy tide of ocean. The speaker observes the man as a white-haired and white-bearded who rises and falls with the up and down of the waves of the sea. The speaker compares the old man to the ‗ice mountains‘, which are unfathomable and one must keep a distance from them. The old man has many obscure features that can be taken as a proof of his dangerous qualities. Plath writes:

Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide‘s coming When seas wash cold, foam- Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. … you float near As keeled ice-mountains Of the north, to be steered clear Of, not fathomed. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 92)

Plath as speaker in the poem is unable to look at the old man much, but she seems to feel very sad on the sight as he fades away with the vapours of the sea. Plath recollects the memories of the burial of her father, but at the same time negates them as she sees her father in front of her at the sea. The use of this rich natural imagery by Sylvia Plath produces ample material where it can be said that she makes use of natural entities quite frequently in her poems and evokes their concerns as well with a remarkable effect. Plath‘s poem ‗Sheep in Fog‘, was written in December 1962 and revised in January 1963. It is a short poem which portrays the use of natural imagery that reflects loneliness. In the poem the hills are clad with whiteness and the people and stars regard the speaker sadly, the speaker admits the disappointment. The speaker talks about a train the smoke of which comes out like breath, the colour of the horse is shown as rust and its hooves like dolorous bells, and the morning grows gloomy and black. The speaker feels laziness in her bones and observes how the fields ‗melt my heart‘ (Plath, 262) and threatens her not to enter into a heaven which is without the stars and her father, she calls it as dark water. Plath writes:

The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. … They threaten To let me through to a heaven Starless and fatherless, a dark water. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 262) By the title of the poem, it is clear that Plath is terrified and feels like a lost sheep who is wandering in a world which does not mean anything. She continually feels like she is nothing but a disappointment for everything that surrounds her. The tone of the poem is very bleak and gloomy it even paradoxically calls heaven a place that threatens the speaker. By the use of nature and its settings, Plath tries to portray its effects both on her personality and her poetry. Sylvia Plath‘s poem ‗Frog Autumn‘, was published in 1958, this poem at the very outset refers to Mother Nature, Plath talks about the summer season which is growing old and there is a spill of cold all around which engulfs the nature as the

87 next season of winter begins to fall. Life comes to a halt, insects begin to die and the weather turns cold. This poem creates a dark, cold and marshy sort of image of the environment and the connotation seems not to be very optimistic. The poem gives an idea of the autumn that of a sleepy state, which creates an image of early sun rising in the cold mornings which falls on the grass full of dew and the air is filled with fog. The cold shift in the weather has put everyone in a lazy and sleepy state, the animate entities like plants and flies start to become inanimate. The spiders and the other insects try to save themselves from the cold and foggy autumn, but in vain. Plath writes:

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. The insects are scant, skinny. In these palustral homes we only Croak and wither. Mornings dissipate in somnolence. The sun brightens tardily Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. The fen sickens. Frost drops even the spider. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 99) This poem can be seen as portraying a negative light on the natural phenomena of changing season, where it describes cold and marshy conditions of the autumn season which causes the death to life all around, families seem to disintegrate and natural organisms seem to be in sloth. In this poem natural imagery has been put to use with greater effect by Sylvia Plath. Plath‘s poem ‗Tulips‘, first published in her collection ‗Ariel‘ in 1961, is set in a hospital room where everything is supposed to be at peace as the walls are also painted white, the poet makes resemblance of the environment of the room with winter ‗it is winter here‘ (Plath, 160). In the hospital room while lying on the bed, the poet‘s mind feels at peace and removed from the hustle and bustle of the outer world. She seems to say that she surrenders her identity in terms of submitting her belongings including her clothes to the hospital authorities as a pre-operative practice ‗clothes up to the nurses‘ (Plath, 160). Plath feels that the nurses in the hospital treat her very smoothly and gently. She feels herself as a ‗thirty-year-old

88 cargo boat‘ (Plath, 161) that has been left alone in the sea with her address only cut from all connections in life. Plath hardly wanted any company in this peaceful room, not even the tulips, she was happy lying in the bed and be free, empty and peaceful. Plath writes:

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. … I didn‘t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. … Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, … Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 160) Plath uses the imagery of tulips quite effectively to express the state of her mind where she enjoys her being lonely and cut off from the worldly affairs, gives a feeling of death. She says in the above line that the atmosphere of the room was calm and by the arrival of tulips she feels irritated and being watched, she can hear the noise of breathing of tulips even from the gift wrapper. She imagines as if these tulips are bringing her back to life and she feels warmth on the walls, the water she tastes is salty like the ocean which symbolises life. ‗The Moon and the Yew Tree‘, is a poem by Sylvia Plath which was published in 1961. In this poem Plath states the light as cold and projects the tone of the poem as desolation, she further describes the surroundings through her own mental interpretation where the light that surrounds her seems blue and the trees black to her. The black colour gives a notion of grief and fear while the blue light shows the lack of sympathy and warmth. During the course of the poem she feels one with nature and says that even the grass is filled with grief and despair and seems to her that these are sharing their sad and painful stories with her. The natural imagery is so strongly presented that she feels her ankles scratched by the grasses she walks over trying to create a connection of oneness, she not only feels their touch, but also could hear their sound, probably the grasses are feeling apologetic and expressing their humility for acting naughty and pricking her ankles. Plath writes:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring their humility. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 172) This poem actually describes the parents of Sylvia Plath with the use of a very rich natural imagery, where her mother is symbolised as ‗moon‘ and her father is symbolised as ‗the Yew tree‘. She calls her mother with unusual attributes of the moon ‗she is bald and wild‘ (Plath, 173), it could be because her mother was unable to give proper motherly care and love to Plath, and she failed to receive the much needed emotional support from her mother‘s part. After that she projects her father as the Yew tree which is ‗blackness – blackness and silence‘, she has even colder experience of her father in terms of getting paternal love from him, when he died, Plath was a child and hence has a faded memory of his being there for her when she needed her fatherhood. Plath‘s poem ‗Crossing the Water‘, was published in her collection of the same name in 1971. This poem opens with a note where everything seems to be black, the trees, the boat and even the people. The water flowers probably the lilies let a little light pass through them and act as an obstacle to prevent the easy movement of the boat, their advice also seems black, they are either protecting the boat to go further deep in the lake or trying to drag the boat into some sort of danger. The cold water of some another world below seems to project the blackness all over and when the boat passes through a large number of lilies it passes the message as a pale hand is trying to catch the boat like a hidden thing is catching the line of a fisherman. At the end there is some light which finds its passage among the dark and dense lilies ‗stars open among the lilies‘ (Plath, 190) and the clear water can be seen with the reflection of the sky in it. The effect of this reflection upon the speaker is so grim that it almost blinds her after all it was so dark initially and it silences everything around. Plath writes in the poem:

Black lake, black boat two black, cut-paper people. Where do the black trees go that drink here? … A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry: They are round and flat and full of dark advice. Cold worlds shake from the oar. The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 190) In this poem there is a comparison between blackness and a sudden luminous spark of heaven, it can be taken as a personality trait of Sylvia Plath. As the spirit of blackness and emptiness seems to be very much recurrent in the life of the poet, it can be reflected in the poem as well with the powerful use of natural imagery. In the poem the mass of lilies and their darkness symbolises the troubles in the life of Plath and the demons below the surface are her suicidal tendencies and the over sensitiveness which ultimately cut shot her life at a very early age. To sum up, there are poems by both the poets that address concerns associated with the broader field of the environmental humanities, such as environmental and social justice and others engage with the natural world with an emphasis on our sensory responses to it. Both these poets suggest an emphasis on individual experience, but at the same time shows the relationship between the individual experiences and the effect it has on readers‘ abilities to appreciate their immediate natural surroundings. The ecological concerns and the use of natural imagery are dealt with in detail and also the ecological crises and the destruction of nature by mankind can be seen as a predominant theme of this chapter which seems to give a notion where an objective of this study can be seen as under focus.

Works Cited

Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Harpham. A glossary of literary terms. Cengage Learning, 2011. Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 2010. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. New York: Routledge, 2014. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell , 2005. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Environment. New York: Cambridge University, 2011. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, 1934. Garrard, Greg. Eco-criticism. New York: Rutledge, 2012. Glotfelty, Cheryll. The Eco-criticism Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia, 2005. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004. King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Mishra, Santosh Kumar. ―Paradigm of Longing: The Poetic World of Agha Shahid Ali‖. Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, Vol. II, Issue VI, 2013, http://www.galaxyimrj.com/V2/n6/Mishra.pdf Accessed 05 February 2017. Plath, Sylvia. Crossing the Water. New York: Harper and Row publishers, Inc., 1971. --- . Johnny Panic and the bible of dreams. London. 1977. --- . The Colossus: and other poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. --- . The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.

Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. North Caroline: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Scigaj, Leonard. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1999 Singh, Amardeep. ―The Kashmir Standard‖. 2013, https://kashmirstandard.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/aga-shahid-ali-1949- 2001/ Accessed 06 March 2017. Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Sumathy, U. Eco-criticism in Practice. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers, 2009. Tosic, Jelica. ―Eco-criticism – Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Environment.‖ Working and Living Environmental Protection, Vol. 3, no.1, 2006, pp. 43-50, http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/walep/walep2006/walep2006-06.pdf2006. Accessed 05 May 2017.

Chapter 4 Eco-Psychology: Eco-Human Camaraderie

This chapter gives an idea with the help of the references from the poems of the relationship of man with nature and also throws light on how nature and the surroundings play a prominent role while it appeals the psychological senses of the poets under study. Further there is an analysis of the poems of the selected poets where they project nature not merely as content but also shows that it helps in the expression of emotions and personal experiences of the poets. Understanding the relationship of human and nature is a complex topic in literature in general and poetry in particular. There are many ways in which human beings respect and adore nature, but at the same time, they also disrespect and make plunder to it. Nature is the life force both for the humans and the non- humans. Without it the life on earth is impossible. As the human being thinks itself as superior among all the creatures on earth, solely it is his responsibility to protect the nature in every possible way. By doing this, he must accept what nature will give in reply. So, the relationship between nature and the human being is reciprocal. In other words, the way humans treat nature is the ultimate cause of the nature‘s behaviour to the human beings. In addition to this, nature has the capability to give many surprises in which the relationship can be looked through in a different perspective in which nature is on the dominant position to the man. Being dominant, nature puts various effects on the human being affecting its socio cultural life and its psychology as well. This chapter explores such relationship between man and nature and explains with the help of the references from the poems that how nature plays a significant role in appealing to the psychology of the poets. Moreover, it is an attempt to find how nature plays an important role to produce not only content but act as the linguistic material for the poets like Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath to express their emotions and personal experiences. The poetry and the life forces originate from one‘s own physique and the external functioning of natural world put a deep impact on the inner processes of the body, hence, a link between poetry and the environment evolves. In this way we can say that poetry can mostly be used to deal with the issues of environmental crises more effectively. During the present scenario, it is very

94 important to not to bind ourselves to the realm of nature and its aesthetics but to identify our role as a part of it. The poetry that adopts an environmentalist approach though not thoroughly has been called as ecopoetry. This poetry follows various styles like they share a common aim of inspiration and appreciation for the non-human world, the tone these poets use is often celebratory and their main focus remains on those forms of nature that are easy to visualise and to relate to. Ecopoetry is believed to make use of metaphors in comparison to describe a relationship between poetic craft and ecology. The difficulties of dealing emotionally and conceptually to the issues of environmental change today are increasingly acknowledged. The research shows that emotion is as much important as rationality in making decisions about the issue of nature both on personal and institutional levels. Because the emotion is the only tool which brings man more close towards nature while the preservation of nature is in question. This suggests that the obstacles related to emotion are as much affective as scientific and political obstacles in developing a sustainable society. What images and ideas will help us make emotional sense of issues such as climate change, and how and where will we be able to find and formulate them? How can our imaginations begin to engage with the implications of a profoundly changed relationship between human and non-human nature? An obvious answer to all these questions is the art, and indeed. However, art and literature has the answer to these questions. And climate change is a growing field today in all forms of art and literature. It has brought many a litterateur‘s attention as they take the burden to critically think about such an issue. Hence, one of such critic, Timothy Clark, has pointed out that thinking about climate change forces us to confront ―how current modes of thinking and acting are inadequate or anachronistic,‖ (Clark 131-49). The climate scientist Mike Hulme also has concluded that ―rather than placing ourselves in a ‗fight against climate change,‘ we need a more constructive and imaginative engagement with the idea of climate change‖ (Hulme 361). Another critic Hannes Bergthaller has suggested that ―the larger question that confronts both ecocriticism and environmental history is whether it will be possible to formulate some kind of modern equivalent to the Aristotelian concept of nature—i.e., a concept that would allow us to inscribe ‗social‘ and ‗natural‘ process in the same matrix and to know them in ways that can to some extent provide practical guidance‖ (Bergthaller). Commenting on the role

95 of the poets in dealing with the nature, English ecocritic Jonathan Bate writes in his seminal study The Song of the Earth:

What are poets for? They are not exactly philosophers, though they often try to explain the world and humankind‘s place within it. They are not exactly moralists, for at least since the nineteenth century their primary concern has rarely been to tell us in homiletic fashion how to live. But they are often exceptionally lucid or provocative in their articulation of the relationship between internal and external worlds, between being and dwelling (Bate, 251-252). As climate change and other environmental issues which have indirectly become visible or recognisable increasingly challenge the limits and abilities of our environmental imaginations, the qualities of poetry appear as relevant and intriguing. As Tom Griffiths has argued:

[the] narrative is not just a means, it is a method, and a rigorous and demanding one. The conventional scientific method separates causes from one another, it isolates each one and tests them individually in turn. Narrative, by contrast, carries multiple causes along together, it enacts connectivity (Griffiths). Perhaps this is true only for poetry. While all narrative genres are capable of complexity, some struggle to represent environmental problems that challenge human imaginations and include vast and complex temporal and geographical scales far beyond the immediate experience or lifetime of a single individual, for example the difficulties of representing climate change in the form of the novel (Trexler 185-200). Poems depend on unique formal qualities, and are perhaps even more than other literary genres animated by and able to contain open-ended, multiple and even contradictory levels of meaning. This makes them interesting to look for images that challenge established patterns of environmental thought and address complex twenty-first century human-environment relations between local and global, social and ecological, perception and imagination. Ecopoetry uses language to deepen a sense of nature‘s presence in our lives; and these invocations of nature‘s presence are celebratory of the biological fact that we are nature; it suggests an ecological understanding of nature and its

96 processes. As John Elder explains in the first book, the treatment of the intersections between poetry and ecology, ‗Imagining the Earth‘ (1985), the principles of ecology change one‘s vision of nature as well as the form in which that vision is expressed. As early as 1980, Robert Bly suggested that poets have long imagined something like an ecological world view. This poetic, cultural and spiritual orientation to the world is organised around a sense of interrelatedness between the human worlds. The erosion of this more holistic world view appears in the more self-conscious nature writing of late eighteenth-century Romantic poets in Europe as well as the early nineteenth-century writers in America. The work of these writers expresses a troubled separation from nature, as well as a concern with the irreversible industrial, technological, and political events that were shaping new conditions for human life. These critical discussions of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world, between the language of poetry and the world that surrounds a poem, are a part of the historical development of an ecological perspective. Ernst Haeckel‘s term ‗oecologie‘ suggested to his nineteenth-century contemporaries the potential to re-imagine human affairs as a part of the larger economy of nature. As late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ecologists studied biological entities as a part of an ecosystem, the discipline of ecology sought standing in the scientific community as a quantitative science. The science of ecology then diverged from the descriptive explanations of nature and the role of humans in the natural world and the spatial metaphors that defined the field. The science of ecology also moved from more general conceptions of ecological processes to more complex, unpredictable, and open natural systems; random events, disequilibrium and flux. Angus Fletcher‘s ‗A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination‘ (2004), affirms that John Clare, Walt Whitman, and John Ashberry elaborate ―both the powers and the constraints operating upon poetry when it seeks to represent the world around us‖ (3). Fletcher‘s argument addresses the question of what happens when the poet‘s way of being in the world ―is defined as an ecological surrounding‖ (5). To what degree is the environment poem, Fletcher asks, ―designed to increase our knowledge, as distinct from our experience, and if the latter, must our increased knowledge be of a factual nature?‖ (135); is it possible, in the environment poem, to distinguish the

97 widest possible definition of nature ―from any locally confined notion of any singular environment, any singular ecosystem?‖ (136-37). And as ecological discourse continues to permeate human thinking about the natural world, how might poetry contribute not to representing the environment, or ―saving the earth,‖ but rather to seeing the future world as an ecosystem? As Fletcher explains, ―Unlike most prose discourse, poetry expresses closes personal involvements, and hence pertains to the way we humans respond, on our own, to environmental matters.‖ Fletcher elaborates the development of a more democratic and descriptive mode of poetry, the environment poem, that ―introduces the experience of an outside that is developed for the reader inside the experience of the work. . .a surrounding that actually has more presence than any state of mind‖ (227). Rather than focus on the end of the poem as representing a place (the topographic) Fletcher privileges space (the chorographic). He recognizes the limits of defining space in terms of place, or limiting the experience of an environment to a fixed and static state. The chorographic poetry of Clare, Whitman, and Ashberry ―names the turbulent surface of the living ground on which or in which everything is placed, even imprinted, while this sitting or placement remains always shaken and oscillating in the changes of the becoming‖ (269). The ecopoet, in this definition, uses description to undermine the more accessible comforts of place, ―the nostalgia for home that place humanly implies‖ (269). Man is born free but he faces various problems and is in trouble everywhere. Man evolves as a holistic being interacting with varied experiences in life, he gains wisdom. Knowledge alone cannot accomplish anything; man should learn to coexist with nature to flourish in the biosphere instead of conquering or exploiting it. Only his ecological vision of holism would result in his expansion of mind. His harmoniousness with nature brings in wisdom. Man should learn to coexist with nature to flourish in the biosphere instead of conquering or exploiting it. Only his ecological vision should result in his expansion of mind. Knowledge mixed with experience turns man into a visionary. Nature acts as a catalyst to mould man as a complete man. He alone of all creation is endowed with the power of both constructive and destructive potentialities. His attitude has to change radically to realize wholeness. His interdependence on environment, his interrelatedness, symbiotic relationship and organismic understanding

98 complemented by his metaphysical perception could establish him as a part of the nature and cosmos.

Agha shahid Ali, as a poet in exile, writes poetry mostly about the contemporary issues related to socio political scenario of the world. As a poet of Diaspora, issues of identity, root, and sense of belongingness often takes the poetic form in his poetry. Nevertheless such facts about his poetry, the theme that is found recurrent in his writing is the depiction of nature which reveals a strong relationship between natural entities or its functions and human being. In one of his early poems ‗Postcard from Kashmir‘ which appears in the collection entitled The Half-Inch Himalayas, Ali writes about a postcard that comes to him in abroad from his home land Kashmir. He compares this postcard with his native place Kashmir and calls it his ‗mailbox‘ and ‗my home a neat four by six inches‘. In this poem he shows his relationship with nature by describing and comparing his native place with a famous mountain range in Kashmir called Himalayas. He also talks about his return to Kashmir where he sees the loss of the purity and sanctity of the river Jhelum. Ali writes:

I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this the closest I‘ll ever be to home. When I return, the colors won‘t be so brilliant, the Jhelum‘s waters so clean, so ultramarine. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 29) In this poem Ali portrays the image of his homeland quite evidently by using natural imagery. The very first things that comes to his mind while thinking about his native place, is its aesthetic beauty. The mention of rivers and mountains in this particular poem serve the purpose of linguistic material, where the poet uses them to evolve an effect of expression by showing a sense of relationship with nature. Ali keeps on using nature and natural entities to showcase the relationship of man with nature in his poem ‗A Dream of Glass Bangles‘ first published in ‗The

Half-Inch Himalayas‘ in 1987. Ali begins the poem with an introduction to the seasons. He recalls an incident of his life in his native place Kashmir which might have taken place in the season of autumn, a season in which it is necessary for the people in Kashmir to use quilts during the nights. He states by using very rich natural imagery of ‗waves of frozen rivers‘ with which he compares the bangles of his mother‘s arms and then evokes the ‗sound of ice breaking‘ to produce a special effect thereby impelling the readers feel like entering into the next season, that is winter. To explain the features of winter, Ali portrays, what makes the winter a season of extreme cold is the snow and the icicles. And through these entities he gives vent to his melancholic expressions and feelings of an incident of the burning house. Ali in the poem writes:

Those autumns my parents slept warm in a quilt… On my mother‘s arms were bangles like waves of frozen rivers and at night after the prayers as she went down to her room I heard the faint sound of ice breaking on the staircase breaking years later into winter… (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 32) In this poem the ideas and expressions get a meaning with the help of natural entities that the poet brings out of his experiences in the past. All the images of seasons, snow, icicles and rivers are used by the poet to show the fact that besides producing content, nature can also be very effective becoming the linguistic material for the projection of thoughts and experiences. In one of Agha Shahid Ali‘s poems, ‗Snowmen‘, published in ‗The Half-Inch Himalayas‘ in 1987, Ali portrays his ancestors as mythological figures made out of snow. This poem talks about Ali‘s relationship with his ancestors in an interactive term. He imagines them as mythical figures, ghosts or simply people from the past who continuously play a role in the poet‘s conception of himself. This poem is very

100 challenging in terms of ambiguity to grasp the role of poet‘s wondrous, wintry time and place. In the poem Ali writes:

My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand,… No, they won‘t let me out of winter, and I‘ve promised myself, even if I‘m the last snowman, that I‘ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 34) Ali‘s use of metaphor ‗snowman‘ in the poem is in itself testimony to the fact that he is portraying a relationship between himself and his ancestors that can be treated as his roots or sometimes as nature. The use of words that are very much a part of natural vocabulary serves the purpose of expressing the thoughts more succinctly. Agha Shahid Ali was very much fond of monsoon rains; he has depicted the monsoon rains in quite a good number of his poems. One such poem is ‗The Season of the Plains‘ which was first published in the collection ‗The Half-Inch Himalayas‘ in 1987. This poem shows the attachment of the poet with his mother by using the images of monsoon rain and other such nature descriptions. Since her mother was from Lucknow, monsoon rains were a part of her childhood memories, Shahid used to accompany his mother to her parental home where he too got attracted to this wonderful season of the plains. This poem clearly conveys the love and affection Ali has towards his mother in this poem. As he writes:

In Kashmir, where the year has four, clear seasons, my mother spoke of her childhood in the plains of Lucknow, and of that season in itself, the monsoon… when the clouds

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gather, for that invisible blue god. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 44) In this poem Ali juxtaposes his own memory with the memory of his mother and recollects when she once remembered the plains of Lucknow in the mountainous valley of Kashmir and these memories he adapted into poems. At the very outset of the poem, the poet tries to project the monsoon rains and thereby suggesting clearly a direct connection with his own past. Ali‘s poem ‗Leaving Sonora‘ first published in the collection ‗A Nostalgist‘s Map of America‘ in 1991 talks about a native American tribe called Hohokam, this tribe once lived in Sonoraian desert in New Mexico. He further in the poem imagines a woman who has the special ability to imagine the transformation of coal into diamond. This, if looked at closely, is a process that takes place inside the earth, but Ali finds the proximity of this natural phenomenon on earth with transformation and extinction of Indian Americans. Ali carries on with the lament of some kind of loss and that is but the loss of native American history while he moves in a plane over a desert and could see nothing but ―blue lines fade into the outlines of a vanished village‖ (Ali, 116). Ali carries on this lamentation also to the other poems. Hence, in his poem ‗I Dream I Return to Tucson in the Monsoons‘ published in the same collection he talks about a dream where he sees nothing but the rain, silence, and the desert. Ali uses natural images like sun, moon, and ocean to express the loss of the tribes. As he writes:

For a moment I saw Islands as they began to sink The ocean was a dried floor Below me is a world without footprints I am alone I‘m still alone and there is no trace anywhere of the drowned The sun is setting over what was once an ocean (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 117) Agha Shahid Ali has compared the loss in human lives with the loss in the environment. In the poem Snow on the Desert, Ali recollects his own past with an

102 pronouncing voice. The impact of nature and its purity in the past is so deep on poet‘s mind that he sees it at the very moment when he comes across the natural entities. So, a clear sky on a clear day takes him to his own past. He writes thus in the very outset of the poem:

So when I look at the sky, I see the past? yes, yes, he said. Especially on a clear day. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 167) Nature reflects the human experiences. It is the store house of the human activities that the human being at times has spent, shared and experienced on the lap of nature. And when time comes, nature plays its part by retrieving the past scenes bit by bit. It impels the human mind to think about the past thereby helping the human being retrieve its true identity. Moreover, the nature is the testimony of all our joys and sorrows, pains and sufferings, and all our felt experiences in the course of life. In this way it does make effect on the human psychology. In the same poem the poet evokes a sense of loss with the help of words signifying the natural entities. The tone has an obvious melancholic touch as he seems to be lamenting on the passing of time and with it the passing of everything that he think he had. His own psychology is reflected with the images of the nature. As to mention such an instance of Eco-psychology in this poem, he writes:

. . . it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing. (Ali, The Veiled Suite 167) These lines clearly show that Ali is lamenting some loss in his life and he tries to juxtapose the loss in his life with the loss in the environment. He has used

103 environmental imagery time and again in his poems in order to reveal the ragged condition of what environment has become in present scenario. Here Ali realises the connection between humans and nature and finds it healing for both to work on grief and despair about environmental action and sustainable lifestyles. It is an Eco-psychological approach that includes both the psychological and the environmental reconnection. Further the speaker reflects on the light from the sun and the stars and gives a notion that these rays put such an effect on the leaves and branches of the saguaros plants that takes them back in the past some not very far which are referred to as ‗minutes old‘ and some very far in history referred to as ‗millions of years old‘. This use of natural imagery offers a glimpse of loss which somehow throws light on the fact of its existence. Ali writes:

the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of a planet‘s origin, the rays hurting each cactus… (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 165) The detailed overview shows that Ali is speaking on behalf of the saguaros plants, where they are confused and caught in between deciding whether they themselves are the lost ones or they are the survivors, they are in a continuous dilemma of whether it is the origin of the rays of the sun and the stars that is lost in time or it is we (the saguaros) that are in a remote point in space and history. These lines show a very intense relationship between human and nature, where the poet is not only speaking about his experience with that particular natural entity rather he seems advocating on the behalf of nature. Agha Shahid Ali is a poet who chooses to write about a culture and people which are not his own that is American culture. His point of view towards this culture is purely that of outsider‘s, but at the same time his attitude can be considered humanistic and empathetic. Ali views Americans as fellow sufferers along with the other people in the world at the hands of history. In the poem ‗Beyond the Ash Rains‘, Ali seems very direct about the tribes that are vanishing. This poem is written in first person where a Native American tribesman seems to be portraying his own point of view:

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When the desert refused my history, refused to acknowledge that I had lived there, with you, among the vanished tribe, two, three hundred years ago, (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 110). In these lines it can be interpreted as Ali himself as a tribesman who is speaking about the lost history. Here Ali again seems to be advocating nature by speaking directly on behalf of it. In the poem I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror Agha Shahid Ali highlights the fact of his oneness with the nature and shows how this relationship between man and nature directly and reciprocally put some crucial effect on each other. Thus, he writes:

I see Peru without rain, Brazil without forests—and here in Utah a dagger of sunlight: it‘s splitting—it‘s the summer solstice—the quartz center of a spiral. Did the Anasazi know the darker answer also—given now in crystal by the mirrored continent? (Ali, The Veiled Suite 161) Ali describes a travel which is a visualisation that he sees in a rear-view mirror. He visualises this travel through the history of South America. This is rather a political travel in a post-colonial world or in an on-going neo-colonial age. The poet becomes nostalgic in mood when he goes to such past condition of the country. With such nostalgia he brings back the images of violence caused to the native people as well as to the natural environment of the country. He reminds the persecution of innocent civilians that had been a frequent happening alongside the exploitation as well as the destruction of the nature in the form of global warming, deforestation, irresponsible water management, the nuclear threat. In an interview with Rehan Ansari and Rajinderpal S. Pal, Ali reveals about his poetry and particularly about how his parallel narrations he manages to put in the instances of his narrative. He says:

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‗‗the death of a friend . . . the death of tribes, the death of landscapes and the death of a language . . . create a density‘‘ (Ansari and Pal), which enables the aestheticising of ‗‗big subject matter‘‘ without falling into ‗‗facile‘‘ political or maudlin rhetoric (Klenotic). Ali‘s collection of poems, ‗The Country Without A Post Office‘, published in the year 1997. This collection bears an autobiographical overtone along with the historical materials. The basic theme of this poetic collection is the loss of poet‘s beautiful native land, Kashmir. This collection is a detailed overview of the conflict of uprising of the people of Jammu and Kashmir against Indian state and the poems act as a witness to the often violent events during the historical dispute. The volume is full of natural imagery which Ali often brings forth to evoke the purpose of the portrayal of his personal experiences through powerful ways. In the poem ‗I See Kashmir from Delhi at Midnight‘, Ali puts forth a variety of themes and ideas that could evidently show the situation of a disputed territory and the implications of the war that is being waged there. Ali repeatedly uses the references to the cold in many ways, at the very outset of the poem to reveal the notion of his isolation from his homeland, his yearning of the home is amplified by the wind blowing ‗sheer ice‘, the hands ‗crusted with snow‘, and the comparison of snow to ash seems to elucidate how the chilly weather is not cold enough to cool the fires that have destroyed the lives and homes of millions of the residents of Kashmir. The loneliness of the Ali‘s exilic figure is also exacerbated by the gloom and despair of the chilly weather which forces people to stay indoors. Ali writes in the poem:

One must wear jewelled ice in dry plains to will the distant mountains to glass… From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us like ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods, (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 178-179) Ali uses the words from nature like ice, mountains, snow and ash to successfully and effectively render the track of radical and intimate encounters with non-human and shows an intersection of the emotion and experience through nature.

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In the poem, ‗A Pastoral‘, published in the volume ‗The Country Without A Post Office‘, the poet has brought into light the migration of Kashmiri pundits and their Muslim friends, it is ironically titled to invoke the stark desolation of a place that boasts of an admiring tradition and its everlasting beauty. The poem starts to show how hopeful the poet is about peaceful future of Kashmir and he sends an invitation to his friends to convince them for a meeting again in Srinagar. From the very first stanza the poem makes clear that how much love the poet has for Kashmir and Srinagar where he promises to meet his friends again who under a certain compulsion have migrated to other states of India or lost their lives during any incident of violence or massacre in Kashmir. Ali writes in the poem:

We‘ll tear our shirts for tourniquets and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate- the bird will say—Humankind can bear everything. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 196) The poem has introduced several themes like the portrayal of the city‘s sad state, and also talks about a spirit that the people of the valley have adopted of that of fighting and never giving up. The poet seek help from nature and natural beauty all over the city to fill the spirit of endurance and resistance among people with relation to nature by using words like tourniquets, thorns, ivy, roses and pomegranate, all indicate the fighting spirit of the people living in Kashmir. A poem, ‗The Floating Post Office‘, by Agha Shahid Ali published in his collection ‗The Country Without a Post Office‘, brings forth the description of a very famous and attractive floating post office of Kashmir that according to him carries dreadful messages of destruction and death in the valley. In this poem the poet picturises the floating boat as a messenger of death. The overall scenario of the poem reveals the tragic state of Kashmir and elucidates its roads and walls as drenched with blood of its inhabitants. Ali uses many metaphors like post office and letters and the sole purpose behind that is to bring forth the pathetic and unfortunate tragic condition of Kashmir in front of the whole world to end it once and for all. In this poem Ali has frequently used the words like water and rain to portray the attribute of these natural entities which is to purify, according to him the

107 letters that the floating post office distributes are filled with blood and streets and roads are also polluted with blood strains, so he invokes the rain to come in abundance and drown this world and sanctify these roads and streets. Ali believes strongly that the un-natural and impure actions in the world can be undone and purified by creating an intense relationship with the natural world through invocation to it. Ali writes:

What future would the rain disclose? O Rain, abandon all pretense, now drown the world, give us your word… Our letters will be rowed through olive canals, tense waters no one can close. (Ali, The Veiled Suite, 208) Ali recounts that it is the nature that comes to rescue, when in the poem he finds all the entrances blocked and all the roads shut, it is through the olive canals and waters that people could connect. This can be treated as a strong thread to the fact of man nature co-existence and interdependence. In one of the poems by Agha Shahid Ali ‗In Search of Evanescence‘, published in ‗The Nostalgist‘s Map of America‘ in 1991, Ali starts with a typical American imagery observed by a road trip through the Midwest. During the course of this road trip Ali finds a similar name of the city of ‗Calcutta‘ in America and this similarity lays a bridge between these two distant lands. By this shift the landscapes of Ohio in the mind of the poet starts to fade away and the reminiscences of Indian landscapes start to occupy the poets mind. Further in the poem the poet talks about vegetation of India and its weather, calls upon a climatic phenomenon ‗monsoon‘ prevalent only in Southeast Asia. According to the poet, the monsoon primarily ‗oils‘ and ‗braids‘ the tree leaves, but later the wind comes as a destroyer and parts the leaves from its branches creates a sense of desolation. Ali writes:

… so when the trees let down their tresses the monsoon oiled and braided them and when the wind again parted them

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(Ali, The Veiled Suite,124) Ali in this particular poem has presented nature both as a destroyer as well as a preserver, it is because of this wind that the seed gets buried in the soil and sprouts afresh in the next spring season. Sylvia Plath is known as one of the best confessional poets of the twentieth century. Plath as a poet was not very famous during her life time, but gradually she attained the acclamation but only after her death in 1963. In Plath‘s poems various themes can be found particularly taken from her own life experiences, such as Death, Victimization, Patriarchy, the self-etc., but nature can sometimes be seen as a forceful agent to encourage the output of her creative ability. Plath treats nature not only in her thoughts but makes its use in her poetic craft, it is through the function and phenomenon of natural processes that she could manage to put forth the personal experiences of her life with the engagement of natural imageries. Plath through her poems conveys the ecological idea of death by saying that death is an alienation from one‘s environment and fellow creatures, whereas life requires interaction with one‘s environment and fellow beings. In the poems of Plath one can find a very strong bond of her relationship with nature which provides the material for her language through many devices to explore and project her experiences of life in powerful ways. A just consideration of Sylvia Plath's life and work reveals that the peculiar psychological complex within her mind is largely responsible for her lot, especially in terms of committing suicide. This is clearly reflected in her writings. She is more deceived and defeated by her own psychology than by the society. Naturally in this context, one can say that the very creation of the abnormal psychology of human being can be the result of the part played by fate or destiny in human life. A major perspective of the comprehensive view of Plath‘s life and work reveals a contradiction between a genius and an abnormal psychology. Her poetry and fiction is the direct outcome of this inherent contradiction between the two. The mark of great literature is that it projects or demonstrates the relevant question of life. This raises it to universal height. There are no final answers to these questions. These basic questions about human life have been continually haunting the men of literature. Since the beginning of literature Sylvia Plath's vision of life reflected in her poetry and fiction is thus a significant item in an unending list of the literary personalities. Sylvia Plath‘s poetry was utterly personal and deals with

109 experiences of mental disorder. Poetry as a means, of the expression of self- experiences was common to the confessional poets. In spite of several hurdles in her short life she produced fine work. Her state of mind was fluctuating but that was instrumental to her work. In other words she used fluctuating state of her mind as the dominant theme of her work. She always cared for writing, but she could not bear the tension of expectations from her by her mother and others. Hence she often experienced mental breakdown. Her mind was always preoccupied by the thought of death. Hence we witness gloomy, disillusioned, melancholy, depressed and pessimistic vision of life reflected in her poetry. For her, poetry was self-revelations through similes, images and metaphors. Her early poetry is poetry of experience. Her poems have an emotional and psychological depth. Her poetry is thematically and technically significant. Her middle poetry has transitional quality, and her later poems have mastery, maturity and excellence in the matters of poetic technique and structure. In an interview Plath her self-declared:

…. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experience I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or knife, or whatever it is. I think that one should be able control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience and one should be able to manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important but certainly it should not be a kind of shut box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on (Alexander, 305- 306). Sylvia Plath in one of her poems ‗Mushrooms‘ published in the collection ‗The Colossus and Other Poems‘ in 1962 touches the theme of the upcoming rise of women‘s rights and talks about the view that men held in the society regarding women as mere domestic objects. To put forth this thought Plath uses the linguistic material that paves way to the sense of biological kinship with non- human nature to explore the figurative and aural capacity to evoke the natural

110 world in powerful ways. This aspect can be explored in the poetry of Sylvia Plath in her poem ―Mushrooms‖. Plath writes:

We are shelves, We are tables, We are meek, We are edible, Nudgers and Showers, Inspite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies: We shall by morning Inherit the earth Our foot is in the door. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 139) The effect of personification here is not the projection of human emotion onto nature, the mushrooms display no motivation in their combination of humility and determination, but rather a wise portrayal of the way, to human perception, and mushrooms appear at an individual level to be harmless. Even botanically speaking, it takes a large collection of mushrooms, connected underground, to comprise an organism, no mushroom stands alone. Thus Plath's use of first person plural is not merely a poetic stance, it expresses an ecological fact. In ‗Mushrooms‘ Plath talks about their arrival and the poem reveals the persistence of this fungus. The mushrooms seem to Plath aware about their short life span and the ability to go very rear. This poem at the end strikes an ironic note and its voice becomes mockingly comic which Plath uses in some of her later poems as well. ―The poems use of medial rhymes and repetition also predicts Plath‘s nature style. They create an intricate pattern of assonance and sibilance, which in turn assure an appropriate delicacy of tune as mushroom‘s set about their stealthy activities…‖ (Kendall, 27). Plath effectively shows the human loss through this poem by using the metaphor of mushrooms which symbolises the death and decay of human life. Plath‘s poem ‗Tulips‘, published in her collection ‗Ariel‘ in 1961 is a famous and one of the critically acclaimed poems. This poem was written about a bouquet of tulips which Plath received while she was hospitalised for treatment. The primary theme of the poem can be seen as a woman undergoing a treatment

111 receives a bouquet of tulips and the glaring colour of which troubles her, she gives a detail of the manner in which the tulips bother her as she prefers to be alone in the whiteness of the room. This is a poem which is very rich in bringing the contrast between the whiteness and barrenness of the hospital room with the liveliness of the tulips. Plath prefers and wants to be in the lap of this whiteness and barrenness because she thinks they provide her an existence which is without any self. Plath writes:

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. … upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. (Plath, The Collected Poems,161) These lines make the idea clear that the red color of tulips troubles and gives pain to Plath, and also despite they are being wrapped in gift paper she could hear them breathe through it. She portrays an intense correspondence between the color of her wound and the red color of the tulips. This effect of natural entities like tulips and its color on the psyche of Plath can be found throughout the poem which serves as the main thrust in rendering the personal experience through poetic stance. ‗Dream with Clam Diggers‘, is a poem by Sylvia Plath published in 1956. In this poem Plath talks about a dream or a personal experience, which forms the basic setting of the poem. Plath dreams about a woman who is travelling back to her home town, Winthrop, which is actually the home town of Plath and upon arrival the woman goes to a beach. The woman in the poem seems tired and weary due to long journey which can be taken as a symbol where Plath encounters the real world while she grows up. Upon visiting the beach she recollects her childhood memories of playing by the shore which takes her to the nostalgia of her hometown. A beautiful imagery of throwing stones and pebbles into the ocean is being portrayed by Plath while thinking about how ships sink in the same way. The poem shows a shift from the childhood innocence towards entering into a grown up world of experience when in the poem while playing with

112 the ocean she was called for dinner. Then after dinner she returns to the ocean but this time the circumstances are altogether different, now she has no direct access to play with the ocean as she is stopped by clam diggers. This symbolises the impossibility of returning to one‘s childhood and its beliefs and also the obstacle of clam diggers came as an experience to Plath which enlightened her about the easy passage of a women‘s life, where she had a notion that world is a place with all the good things. Plath writes:

This dream budded bright with leaves around the edges, Its clear air winnowed by angels; she was come Back to her early sea town home Scathed, stained after tedious pilgrimages. … Plucked back thus sudden to that far innocence, She, in her shabby travel garb, began Walking eager toward water, when there one by one, Clam diggers rose up out of dark slime at her offense. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 43) At the end of the poem Plath talks about the condition where the woman does not break emotionally and makes a strong commitment that she won‘t fall prey to these obstacles and hindrances which is quite symbolic to the fact that how the woman put an end to her feelings for others. She at the same time feels reminiscent about her childhood where there used to be no consequences even to the act of throwing stones into the ocean. In this poem Plath simply uses the natural images like sea, leaves, landscape, summer, waves etc. to put forth a very thrilling thought of a shift in the stage where childhood and the impunity of actions changes into adulthood and the consequences of actions. There is a poem by Sylvia Plath which she wrote about melons. The mood and tone of the poem is a happy one and she probably wrote this poem to remember her honeymoon in south Spain. This poem can be treated as a poem written in praise of nature and it is testimony to the fact that Plath not only expressed her grief and trouble through natural imagery but also her merriment, though very little she enjoyed in her short life span. The poem under discussion is titled as ‗Fiesta Melons‘ published in 1956, Plath writes:

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In Benidorm there are melons, Whole donkey-carts full Of innumerable melons, Ovals and balls, Bright green and thumpable Laced over with stripes Of turtle-dark green. Choose an egg-shape, a world shape, Bowl one homeward to taste In the white hot noon: (Plath, The Collected Poems, 46) These lines show a rich natural imagery and a tone of merriment is portrayed where Plath describes melons, she says that they are available in the market in a huge quantity and of different shapes and colour shades. Plath describes some as oval shaped while others are ball shaped, some are green while others have dark green stripes on them, some look like big green eggs where others seem like that of a globe or the world. Through the description of melons Plath succeeds in delineating her inner happiness by using beautiful words and shows an appetite for tasting melons. Hence she seems to believe that when one‘s heart is full of happiness, the ordinary and simple non-human entities around can prove an equipment of celebration. The poem by Sylvia Plath ‗November Graveyard‘ was written in 1956. It uses the images from nature seemingly of negative depiction of death. It provides pictorial matter to the readers to portray its theme in a pessimistic manner where the unbearable cold of this month and the unproductivity of any yield symbolises the truth about death. Some may take this poem as a humane approach of Plath where she wants to show beyond what is being seen through the lens of modernity. People sometimes are very lazy to use their thinking abilities to make a view point and this stubbornness doesn‘t allow them to consolidate the level of consciousness they require to assimilate nature. These philosophical themes in the poem are dealt with the use of natural images and the linguistic material from nature has given the poet an effective voice to express her thought and vision. Plath writes:

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The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year‘s leaves, won‘t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass … At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 56) These lines by the portrayal of trees, leaves, grass, landscape and wind try to put forward the dilemma of Plath where she finds people hardly make use of the capability they are bestowed with, the power of thinking. She calls the mind a bare room where even they do not let the air to pass and calls it starving and hungry. The themes of poetic inspiration, depression and nature can be seen in one of the poems of Sylvia Plath where she makes use of animal imagery, the animate part of nature. The poem is entitled as ‗Black Rook in Rainy Weather‘, it was written in 1956 with a depressing and gloomy tone probably because of her initial struggle to acquire some poetic vision. Initially Plath shows her lack of confidence and is not expecting even a miracle to happen, she feels hopeless for time being. Plath talks about some kind of fire which she uses as an inspiration and the fall of leaves again to portray a negative image when she talks about their fall without any ceremony or potency. She seeks inspiration from the sky above and stays without complaining even if she receives minor light, this still shows her attitude in a negative light. Then she finds her state where her poetic mind can be seen at work where she sees the inanimate objects with a heavenly fire and thus accepts the inspiration she gets through looking at the rook and has a glimpse of spirituality. She finds plenty of love which she was in doubt about in her real life how much Hughes did love her. Now Plath begins to accept that miracles could happen even in the dead landscape around her, she probably talks about her native place Boston here where she grew up, on the east coast beside the sea. The sea has a special importance in the poetic imagery of Plath. Then a spiritual image of an angel comes to fore where Plath is waiting for an angel to flare and gives a physical moving image, portrays a sudden change in the attitude of Plath

115 for the betterment. She then shows a rook ordering his feathers to shine while Plath looks up at this shining creature. She seems to showcase her fear of showing her inner self to the world, an attitude responsible for her death. She talks about the thought of her dilemma of either to attaining vision and inspiration or to portray her real self to the world. Plath writes:

On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain. I do not expect a miracle Or an accident To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 56-57) At the end of the poem Plath comes to terms with her dilemma and believes that the ‗miracles occur‘ (Plath, 57), but at the same time when she looks at the rook again and the mute sky and then the angel of flare and wants them to get away, shows her emotional exhaustion and mental instability. She uses the imagery of the word ‗season‘ for her a change in seasons like from winter to spring means to bring a change in emotions and thinking. This poem seems to be very rich in terms of natural imagery being used to evoke and deliver the psychological self of the poet. Plath‘s poem ‗Old Ladies‘ Home‘, published in 1959 speaks about the inhabitants of a home of old ladies where she presents a depressing detachment from humanity. The speaker portrays the old and elderly women as ‗beetles‘ who spread out of the building of the institution during the day. Their behavior and relationships are shown as knitting, distant and cold and are being compared with photos. Plath writes:

Shared in black, little beetles, Frail as antique earthenware

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One breath might shiver to bits, The old women creep out here To sun on the rocks or prop Themselves up against the wall Whose stones keep a little heat. … Distant and cold as photos (Plath, The Collected Poems, 120) At the end of the poem there is a description of the arrival of death which is indicated by the black color that the ladies wear and by the beds that resemble coffins. This poem actually shows the plight of old age in an institutionalised manner where sadness and horror seems to arise from the rejection of the old. These aspects of the old age are depicted by the poet with the use of imagery from nature. In the poem ‗Sleep in the Mojave Desert‘ published in 1960, Plath sets the tone of the poem by acknowledging the simplicity of the desert. Plath writes: Out here there are no hearthstones,

Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry. And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly On the mind‘s eye, erecting a line Of poplars in the middle distance, the only Object beside the mad, straight road One can remember men and houses by. (Plath, The Collected Poems, 143) In this poem the hearthstones represent progress and civilisation, which Plath believes do not exist in this desert. The repetitive use of the word ‗dry‘ causes the audience to have a feeling of discomfort. The point of view in this poem shifts from third person to the first person and the perspective is that of an observer of the nature. Plath presents a road trip through the Mojave Desert and observed the environment, while the discomfort of the situation caused her to feel isolated from the rest of the world. Plath like in other poems uses images of nature while she places emotions at the core of this poem, specifically feelings of isolation and stagnation. In this poem the dew appears to be the only object in the desert that shows any sign of moving forward and as soon as it seems that hope is found, the

117 dew recedes and the desert returns to being completely dry. Further in this poem, coolness is developed as a representative of relief and by stating that the night, the end to the day, and end to discomfort and stagnation, is short, Plath develops the idea that relief and progress are temporary and the speaker seems to be addressing no one in particular but rather making observations of nature. To sum up, Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath have successfully treated nature as an important medium through which their inner world is explored in their poetry. They brought the sense of their linguistic knowledge often interwoven with their concerns and desires not only for but through nature. Both the poets have dealt with the issues of the destruction of nature by mankind and have in abundance depicted oceans, rivers, landscapes and other non-human entities which ultimately assisted them in the abilities of creating art that is poetry. Ali through nature has given a vent to his nostalgia, childhood reminiscences and the pain of separation from his homeland, while as Plath has dealt with the similar kind of the use of nature by making it a medium to show the pain of her troubled life and her suicidal tendencies. Both the poets portray very radical and intimate encounters with the non-human by bringing forth the personal experiences to make them universal. Ali and Plath have shown the attitudes towards language where they examine it as their specific poetic technique related to ecological matters, their linguistic self-reflexivity seems both outward toward the landscape and inward toward the emotion and spirit.

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Works Cited

Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 2010. Alexander, Paul. Rough magic: a biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Da Capo Press, 2009. Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. 1938. Edited by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fort Worth: College Publishers, 1976. Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd.ed. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

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Conclusion

In such a condition at present where natural environment is at stake due to the human activities, the effort of both the poets is worthy of acclamation not only for their concern for nature but also for evoking the aesthetic element of nature by using it in their poetry. In addition to this, they both promote nature as an important medium through which the inner world of the human being is explored in literature. The sense of their linguistic knowledge is often interwoven with their concern and their desire not only for but through nature. Both the poets have dealt with the issues of the destruction of nature by mankind and have in abundance depicted oceans, rivers, landscapes and other non-human entities which ultimately assisted them in the abilities of creating art that is poetry. Ali through nature has given a vent to his nostalgia, childhood reminiscences and the pain of separation from his homeland, while as Plath has dealt with the similar kind of the use of nature by making it a medium to show the pain of her troubled life and her suicidal tendencies. Both the poets portray very radical and intimate encounters with the non-human by bringing forth the personal experiences to make them universal. Ali and Plath have shown the attitudes towards language where they examine it as their specific poetic technique related to ecological matters, their linguistic self- reflexivity seems both outward toward the landscape and inward toward the emotion and spirit. This study is divided into four chapters which deal with the theoretical frame work of Ecocriticism and its correlation with the poetic works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath in terms of environmental crises and the engagement of the concept of Ecopoetics in creating their poetic stance. In the First Chapter the term ‗ecocriticism‘ has been discussed in terms of its meaning and its historical development as a critical theory. In the process a discussion regarding several works on environmental concerns takes place with the analysis of the propagation and development of environmentalist approach under consideration of the specific objectives of the critical thinkers and their main concerns and negotiations. The further focus has been on the range of the term ‗ecocriticism‘ and its adoption of study in new directions which results in new essays on authors of different periods. In this respect the works of several writers have been taken into consideration to

120 assess the development and growth of environment based movement and its multiple directions and modes. It results in the finding that this movement originated from America and later influenced the British and Western literature. Then comes the concept of Ecopoetry, it is generally considered as an offshoot of Nature poetry where the interdependence of human and non-human life has been juxtaposed inseparably, environmental consciousness thus shown to be in close association with the study of poetry where it began to be known as a cultural trope that put extra responsibility on man in reducing the chances of environmental crises. In the Second chapter there is a biographical and thematic analysis of the poetic works of Agha Shahid Ali and Sylvia Plath with focus on their comparison in terms of the aspects of the theory of comparative literature including Influence and Inter-textuality. This chapter further exemplifies the modern poetic tradition of the localities of the respective poets, it also throws light on the adaptation of the poetic techniques and styles of both the poets. The Third Chapter gives a detailed analysis of the poems of the selected poets which specifically shows an assertion of ecological concerns like the destruction of nature by the interference of mankind and also in terms of the use of natural imagery. The Fourth Chapter is also a detailed analysis of the poems of both the selected poets in comparison where the focus is on the relationship of man and nature under the garb of the concept of Ecopoetics and Ecopsychology. It deals with the embodiment of showing the significant role of nature and environment in appealing the psyche of both the selected poets which turns out to be the pivotal force in the creation of their poetic stance. This chapter gives details with the analysis of poems on the important role of nature which is said to play in not only providing the material for the content but also its phenomena and functions give a powerful expression to the emotions and personal experiences of the poets, which otherwise may have remained untold. In the poems of Agha Shahid Ali Nature has played a pivotal role. He has used it more as a medium to express the nostalgic imagination of his own past life. Particularly through these narratives of nature he evokes an attachment with his own native place Kashmir. Having depicted such natural images in his poems he highlights an interaction between human and the nature. In his effort of dealing with nature as a medium of expression he frequently depicts the natural entities and all its phenomena always as a window to his own past which he feels a better one with all its beauty and plenty than his present life of a migrant citizen far away

121 from his homeland. Ali juxtaposes his memories with the memories of his mother and recollects when she once remembered the plains of Lucknow in the mountainous valley of Kashmir and these memories he adapted into poems. The poet engages with the projection of the monsoon rains and clearly suggests a direct connection with his past through natural phenomenon. The physical nature of Ali‘s homeland is a great source for his peeping into the natural world as well as understanding the relationship that exists between man and nature. The first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks about his native place is its aesthetic beauty. The mention of rivers and mountains serve the purpose of linguistic material. The poet uses these sources of beautiful nature to evolve an effect of expression. The ideas and expressions have been brought to light by using the natural entities like seasons of autumn and winter, snow, icicles and rivers by the poet to show how besides producing content, nature can very effectively produce linguistic material for the projection of thoughts and experiences. The theme of loss is something he finds both in nature and in the human life, he tries to make a connection between the human loss and the loss in nature. So, the poet talks about a dream in which he sees the image of loss in the form of rain, silence and the desert. Ali uses natural images like sun, moon and ocean to express the loss of tribes. Agha Shahid Ali has contrasted the loss in human lives with the loss in the environment, he recollects that the impact of nature and its purity is so deep on poet‘s mind that he can see his past in the eyes of natural entities. He has used environmental imagery time and again in his poems in order to reveal the ragged condition of what environment has become in present scenario. Again, he reflects on the light from the sun and the stars and gives a notion that these rays put such an effect on the leaves and branches of the saguaros plants that takes them back in the past some not very far which are referred to as ‗minutes old‘ and some very far in history referred to as ‗millions of years old‘. This use of natural imagery offers a glimpse of a kind of loss which somehow throws light on the fact of its existence. Furthermore, Ali realises that there is a never ending relationship between humans and nature which work in a reciprocal manner. So, the condition of the human life with all its pleasure, pain, grief and despair are linked to the nature in his poetry. Thus, he finds it healing for both the nature and the man if man

122 becomes cautious in thinking about the sustenance of both natural resources with all its beauty and richness and the human life with its sustainability; it seems to be an Ecopsychological approach that includes both the psychological and the environmental connection. However, his craving for the past, his homeland is the major issue that is evidently reflected in the natural imageries in his poems. This crave put him into isolation most of the time. Ali repeatedly uses the references to the cold in many ways to reveal the notion of his isolation from his homeland, his yearning of the home is amplified by the wind blowing ‗sheer ice‘, the hands ‗crusted with snow‘, and the comparison of snow to ash seems to elucidate how the chilly weather is not cold enough to cool the fires that have destroyed the lives and homes of millions of the residents of Kashmir. The loneliness of the Ali‘s exilic figure is also exacerbated by the gloom and despair of the chilly weather which forces people to stay indoors. Ali uses the words from nature like ice, mountains, snow and ash to successfully and effectively render the track of radical and intimate encounters with non-human and shows an intersection of the emotion and experience through nature. Ali has presented nature both as a destroyer as well as a preserver, it is because of the wind that the seed gets buried in the soil and sprouts afresh in the next spring season. Sylvia Plath employs some very fine techniques in her poetry. She often uses and manipulates the external events and objects. She consciously and very effectively makes use of the power of words. Her control over experience is very much evident by her expertise over the use of words in her poetry. She attains a level of experience where she is able the entire poetic techniques including simile, metaphor and alliteration in her poetry. Plath, like Agha Shahid Ali, uses nature as the open door to all her experiences in life. The themes that her poems evoke, such as; Death, Victimization, Patriarchy, and many such others, are a great deal with the nature. Nature in her poetry, work as a forceful agent in encouraging her creative ability. Plath treats nature not only in her thoughts but makes its use in her poetic craft, it is through the function and phenomenon of natural processes that she could manage to put forth the personal experiences of her life with the engagement of natural imageries. Thus, nature also works as an autobiographical agent in her poetry. Plath in her poems conveys the ecological idea of death by saying that death is an alienation from one‘s environment and fellow creatures, whereas life requires interaction with one‘s environment and fellow beings. In the

123 poems of Plath one can find a very strong bond of relationship between herself and the nature which provides the material for her language through many devices to explore and project her experiences of life in powerful ways. However, nature is an outward expression of her inner feelings. The pain, sorrow, and suffering that she feels and the wounds she gets in her life are all reflected in the form of nature in her poetry. Plath using it as a linguistic material tries to establish a biological kinship with nature to explore workings of the natural elements in shaping the patterns of personal life of the poet. The red color of tulips troubles and gives pain to Plath, and also despite they are being wrapped in a gift paper she could hear them breathe through it. She portrays an intense correspondence between the color of her wound and the red color of the tulips. This effect of natural entities like tulips and its color on the psyche of Plath can be found throughout the poem ‗Tulips‘, which serves as the main thrust in rendering the personal experience through poetic stance. Sylvia Plath makes an effort to correspond with her gloomy and melancholic psyche with the outer dense setting of the moors. The nature can be portrayed as a human character which share common attributes and elucidate a sense of oneness. Through the imagery and personification of the blackberries Plath establishes a deep bond with these natural entities and this bond eventually paves way for her poetic creation with the engagement of natural vocabulary being used as a medium of deliberation of personal experiences and in Plath‘s case troubles. The poet talks about mists where she produces them with some sort of connection to the dead and departed souls, Plath recounts these dead and lost souls as if they are trapped in the sea and this mist or the souls of the dead has some kind of power to resurrect the rocks when they pass over them. Plath talks about walking with the mist by which she is surrounded and when the mist frees her she is left with ‗tears‘. These tears she associate with her own troubles and depression by delineating such rich natural imagery and advocating a strong connection between man and nature where nature not only provides content but its phenomenon forms grounds to express it in powerful and effective ways.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 2010. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

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