What Powers Have Words?

摘要

The particular genius of the greatest ornithology guides is to epitomize their subjects rather than anatomize them. It is easier, somehow, to recognize John James Audubon's birds in the field by their vividly rendered characters than to relate the living creature to a perfect rendition in three elevations. Attempting to delineate the perfect eco-poetry-the golden lines that might somehow awaken a redeeming love of nature and help us forswear our breeding, polluting, warming, murderous ways-too often, in the branch of literary study known as "ecocriticism," produces a ghastly Platonic form answering to all the moral or metaphysical desiderata: the crime of anthropocentrism undone, say, or the pleasure of harmony with nature extolled.