Humility and the face of nature: Towards an ecological ethics of humility in the works of Henry Thoreau, Susan Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Marianne Moore

Through a close examination of the complex manifestations of ecological humility in the works of Thoreau, Cooper, Whitman and Moore I attempt to show how the careful study of the presence of an humble stance toward nature in their respective works allows us to gain new insight into the way in which these authors develop an ecological ethics and, moreover, the lessons this can teach us, as students of literature and culture, about the ways we approach our earth. In so doing, I attempt to shift the focus from discussion solely about particular environmental texts, to a concomitant critical engagement with the ethical stances inherent in these texts.;My introductory chapter, "Humility, from the Ground Up," investigates different traditions of religious and secular thought on humility in order to arrive at a contemporary working understanding of ecological humility, an humility which recognizes the human interest as interdependent with and mutually constitutive of the natural world. I compare an Eastern valorization of humility based on interconnection, with a Christian tradition which stresses humility as a marker of the infinite separation between the human and the divine, and with Jewish tradition, which sees human beings as intermediate between the transcendence of the divine, and the earthly realm of creation. I juxtapose Taoist and Buddhist statements on humility, from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and Thich Nhat Hanh's Miracle of Mindfulness , with Christian and Jewish perspectives on humility by authors such as the twelfth-century abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and the current Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, as well as an examination of the etymology of the word in English.;In my second chapter, "Thoreau: Ecological Humility, Mindfulness and the Romantic Sublime," I examine Thoreau's Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod with an eye to discerning the role humility toward the earth and its systems plays in Thoreau's burgeoning ecological sensibility. While Thoreau is commonly remembered for his arrogant and self-righteous stance toward his fellows in Walden, I argue that he actually negotiates between Western arrogance toward the natural world and a more Eastern, humble appreciation of the interconnections present in nature, including human beings.;In my third chapter, "Rural Hours: Susan Cooper's Humble Ecology," I show how Cooper, through the use of the journal form to convey the minute particulars of her environment, expresses a stance of ecological humility toward the movements of the land itself. Cooper, I argue, lives and writes according to the type of humble relation to the earth which Thoreau struggles to theorize and come to terms with during his brief life. While Buell correctly notes the discrepancy between Cooper's seemingly effortless disavowal of egotism and Thoreau's struggle toward the same, I show how the superficial contrast in tone between Thoreau and Cooper belies their convergence on quite similar ideas of humility in the face of nature.;My fourth chapter, "Whitman, the Ecosexual and Ecological Humility," introduces the term ecosexual to describe Whitman's understanding of sexuality and sexual desire as involving the same ideas of complex interrelation and harmonic organization as that which is entailed in the ecological. I put my idea of the ecosexual into conversation with Angus Fletcher's "environment-poem" and M. Jimmie Killingsworth's discussion of cycles of decomposition in Whitman's "This Compost" by showing how Whitman not only uses metaphors rooted in ecological insights, but at times literalizes metaphor to bind his poems yet closer to the rhythms and cycles of the earth. I go on to show how the ecosexual, as well as other ecologically fertile techniques, leads the reader to a manifestation of ecological humility in Whitman's lines whereby human beings are seen as interlinked with a greater sense of nature through our sexuality and our participation in cyclic flows of energy and materials.;In my final chapter, "Marianne Moore: An Ecopoetics of Humility," I look at Moore's poetry with an eye to discerning an ecopoetic architectonics, by which Moore's poems come to stand for ecosystems in their formal complexity and interwoven aspects. Working with Jed Rasula's formulation of poems as ecosystems, I put this structural aspect of Moore's poetry into conversation with her subject matter, specifically the animals and natural objects that appear in her writing. While Bonnie Costello argues that Moore's humility toward nature is in tension with her need for a certain aesthetic mastery over nature in her poetry, I argue that Moore's poetry is an embodiment, both structurally and thematically, of an ecological humility which calls for the respect of animals and the environment through an ethics of leveling and interdependence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...