Sacred Nature: Metaphysics of Place in William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney

Abstract

Abstract William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney are read as practitioners of ecopoetry (in Jonathan Bate’s phrase) and ecotheology. Where each poet locates the sacred is plotted against their depictions of the natural world. How do they see nature; how do they see the divine; and do these views intersect? The Introduction considers a broad history of immanence and transcendence as two roads to the divine. Blake’s historical contexts, in the pagan tradition of the sacred landscape, and the antinomianism of eighteenth-century Britain, including the Moravian sect, are applied to his prophetic books, chiefly Milton and Jerusalem. Blake’s complex and changing view of nature aspires to a reconciliation of the immanent and the transcendent. From Dickinson’s milieu, the Puritan origins of New England and the American sublime, she cultivated poems which view snakes, bees and hummingbirds as “Nature’s People.” This most idiosyncratic of poets brought forth a new aesthetic, the impersonal sublime. Dickinson is also read as an apophatic poet, her lyrics petals around a generative nothing. Heaney digs from the bogland of history ancient queens and sacrifices, wedding them to the poetic tradition of the aisling in his contemporary moment of northern Ireland’s Troubles. Heaney further believes in an ontological power of language to create and shape landscape itself. Blake’s, Dickinson’s and Heaney’s visions of nature and the sacred number among the threads we may weave into a new relation to the nonhuman world, here on the brink of the sixth great extinction.