A Study Of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris From The Perspective Of Ecological Holism

Louise Glück,who served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature,deserves credit as a prominent poet in contemporary America.The Wild Iris is one of Glück’s mid-term poetry collections,which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carroll Williams Award in 1992.This poetry collection was initially interpreted as a text infused with religious temperature based on the Bible.But actually,Glück rewrites the religious elements to shape the collection of poems into a modern ecological text based on the principle of holism;and the relations between the three types of protagonists in the collection reflect Glück’s expectations of the relation between man and nature in modern society.Therefore,this thesis makes a study of Glück’s The Wild Iris from the perspective of ecological holism based on Leopold’s land ethics theory and Rolston’s natural value theory.This thesis consists of five parts.The first chapter introduces Louise Glück and her poetry collection The Wild Iris,and reviews the current situation of domestic and international research on Glück’s work.The second chapter introduces the background and development of ecological holism,Leopold’s land ethics theory and Rolston’s natural value theory.The third chapter analyzes the literary techniques used by Glück and discusses the implication of ecological holism they embody from four aspects: the rewriting techniques,narrative techniques,application of images,and impersonal expression of emotion.Firstly,it discusses the rewriting of the religious protagonists and stories,and through rewriting the poet gives the poetry collection ecological color;Secondly,it analyzes how the poet uses the transformation of narrative point-of-view and the rearrangement of plot structure under the holistic thinking to make the poetry collection suggest a strong implication of ecological holism;Thirdly,it discusses how Glück uses the images of positive nature and negative nature to emphasize the intrinsic value and instrumental value inherently exist in nature;Finally,it analyzes how the poet completes the extension of her individual emotion into a universal emotion toward nature through the impersonal expression of emotion.On this basis,the fourth chapter analyzes the eco-ethical thought of ecological holism embodied in the ternary relations of the three types of protagonists: the disappearance of Yahweh in the end,the epiphany of the gardener in continuous practice and the self-awakening of nature in the question,gradually achieving equality,balance and harmony in the relations between man and nature.The last chapter is a a summary of the full thesis,and illustrates that Glück,as a poet with a high sense of social responsibility,always strives to lend her voice at a wider expression of the global environmental and ecological crisis.The implication of ecological holism contained in The Wild Iris makes Glück an important ecological poet in contemporary era.This poetry collection brings new enlightenment for promoting ecological protection consciousness among people and exploring the ideal mode of harmonious coexistence between man and nature.