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Nadia Elmi

Professor Vicky Angelaki

EN012G

9 July 2021

Environmental Activism

In Spring and All (1923), William Carlos Williams establishes a connection between literature

and environmentalism. Williams casts the writer’s imagination as a force that can encourage

people to reconsider their relationship with the world (9-10). The world can be reframed as the

broader ecology, since his examples envision a ‘self inflicted holocaust’ among humans which

triggers a process of regeneration that restores respect for nature’s autonomy (5-6). Writers, he

claims, subsume the nonhuman world into the human, effectively denying the former a separate

existence (49). Rather than in this way use nature to validate the human world and identity,

literature, he implies, should abandon a man-centred view and adopt a more balanced view that

finds space for plants and animals (20-1, 91). He engages with this philosophy very

meaningfully in poems ‘I’ and ‘III’, which shall constitute the focus of this paper. The paper is

driven by the research question: Can literature encourage environmental activism?

In poem ‘III’, the human figure of the farmer assumes that the landscape is a resource and

a complement for the human subject. The farmer is likened to ‘the artist figure’ (Williams 17),

which proposes that he is exerting power over the idea of nature: he is considering his

environment within the confines of self-interest where nature performs and exists for the

human. Indeed, he imagines that the environment bows to him, ‘leave[s] room for thought’

(13). Hence, he contemplates ‘his blank fields’ (3, emphasis added), and ‘the harvest already

planted’ there (6). This notion that the world exists to serve the human originates, Lynn White

Jr claims, in Judeo-Christian ethics which conceive the human as nature’s master (42-3).

Therefore, people, he argues, operate in their ecology according to the beliefs that condition
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how they position themselves in relation to nature (42). The farmer’s inability to respect

nature’s agency, its right to exist independently of the human, finally turns him into an

‘antagonist’ of nature (Williams ‘III’ 19). The poem holds up for scrutiny the anthropocentric

assumptions that insist on a hierarchical human/nature relationship. It, consequently, bears

directly on our global ecological crises (climate change, marine litter, overpopulation,

overfishing, etc.) as these crises are partly a matter of long-standing ideas and values that

determine how humans view their place, rights, and actions within the broader ecology.

However, the environmentalist images portray the nonhuman world as actively countering

human authority. ‘[T]he world rolls coldly away’ (Williams ‘III’ 10) and contains ‘black

orchards / darkened by the March clouds’ (11-2). This combined image of a boundless and

mysterious landscape undermines the farmer’s pretensions to the ability to control and define

the environment. The adjective ‘coldly’ refers to the cold temperature; however, the line also

personifies ‘the world’, transforming the landscape into an agent who ‘rolls coldly’, or

hostilely, ‘away’. The adverbial of direction ‘away’ does not specify the object – the what or

whom – the world withdraws from. One can only identify the farmer as the most plausible

object. Additionally, the images of ‘rain’ (2) and ‘[a] cold wind’ (7) appeal to the thermal sense

– the weather is wet and chilly – and powerfully demonstrate nature’s refusal to accommodate

to the human: the farmer cannot influence the weather and must content himself with ‘pacing

through’ it (2, emphasis added). Together, these images paint nature as a force that asserts its

independence from the human agent. The cold wind, moreover, acts on ‘the water’ (7),

presenting not only an image of nature’s independent movements, but also the idea that there

are various functions performed within the ecosystem. In this system, Paul Shephard claims,

the members partake in a ‘choreography’ where they ‘act upon one another’ because they are

interlinked in a network of connections (64). By portraying the farmer and nature as agents

who act independently of each other within the same system as well as upon one another, the
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poem represents the farmer and nature as members of a broader ecology. The poem ultimately

criticises the anthropocentric rhetoric which perceives nature as inferior and complementary to

the human world and identity by affirming nature’s independence and expressing the failure of

the human to respect this independence.

The individual’s interaction with their environment is elaborated in poem ‘I’ which opens

‘[b]y the road’ (Williams 1). The preposition ‘by’ indicates the poem’s concern with the

immediate environment. This concern is mostly visual, with the speaker noticing natural

objects around the road which are not conventionally deemed picturesque or sublime: a ‘waste’

covered with ‘muddy fields / brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen’ (5), ‘patches of

standing water’ (7), ‘the scattering of tall trees’ (8), the ‘twiggy stuff of bushes’ (11), and

stunted trees (12-3). Neither decorated nor beautified, these images are not concerned with

natural features’ contribution to a scene’s appeal. On the one hand, the speaker recognises a

value in underdeveloped, struggling, and unsightly vegetation that is separate from artistic and

economic interests. Indeed, the fact that he notices such vegetation, as opposed to neglecting

it, suggests his belief that nature should matter for its own sake and not because of how it serves

us. On the other hand, he simply represents nature as it is, as a separate entity, independent of

the human identity.

However, the road has suppressed nature’s right to flourish alongside the human world.

The interconnectedness between the road and the surrounding landscape defies binary

definitions of the environment as either natural or human; this site oscillates between these.

Hence, the poem asks questions concerning the interaction between the two. Notably, the road

ends at ‘the contagious hospital’ (Williams ‘I’ 1), an image that casts the road as a carrier of a

human contagion into the surrounding landscape. Since the result, as the nature-related images

have demonstrated, is not only an undeveloped landscape but also a displacement and

confinement of the natural world to the sides of the road, this contagion is describable as an
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environmental threat. That the poem relegates the human agent of the speaker to the position

of an observer of anthropogenic environmental impact communicates the necessity for the

individual, as a human in a power position, to step back and evaluate their own environmental

actions and responsibility.

As the analysis has shown, the poems explore the issue of the individual’s engagement with

their environment. Although both poems recognise that humans inevitably act on the

environment, the overarching point is that humans can cultivate an ecological relationship with

nature by understanding the human-nature interaction. The poems, importantly, depict nature

as an independent entity that co-exists with humans rather than exists for humans. While poem

‘III’ presents the individual’s acknowledgement of this independence as a prerequisite for

reassessing their ideological position and fostering respectful behaviour within the larger

ecology, poem ‘I’ demonstrates that the failure to act responsibly towards nature has led to

environmental damage and, consequently, advocates for the need for the individual to

intervene. This way, the poems specifically and literature generally are presented as capable of

encouraging environmental activism.

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Works Cited

Shepard, Paul. ‘Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint.’ Ecocriticism – The Essential Reader, edited

by Ken Hiltner. Routledge, 2015, p.64.

White Jr, Lynn ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.’ Ecocriticism – The Essential

Reader, edited by Ken Hiltner. Routledge, 2015, pp.42-3.

Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. Martino Publishing, 2015.