THE “SENTIENT PLUME” : THE THEORY OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY IN ANGLO-AMERICAN AVIAN POETRY, 1856-1945 By ERIC EARNHARDT Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2016 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Eric Earnhardt Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.* Committee Chair Kurt Koenigsberger Committee Member Michael Clune Committee Member Sarah Gridley Committee Member Todd Oakley Date of Defense 22 March 2016 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.                                 2 Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Acknowledgments 3 Abstract 6 Chapter 1: Introduction 8 Part 1: History and Theory Chapter 2: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century 38 Chapter 3: Critical Anthropomorphism and the Pathetic Fallacy: Ruskin, Darwin, 75 and the Birds of Victorian Ecology Chapter 4: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the Early Twentieth 101 Century Chapter 5: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy from the Late Twentieth 154 Century to the Present Part 2: Poetry Chapter 6: The Missing of Minds in Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias!” 190 Chapter 7: Nested Fallacies: The Pathos of the Mockingbird in Whitman’s “Out of 199 the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” Chapter 8: Prosopopoeia and Overheard Bird Speech: Theories of Animal Lyric in 211 G. M. Hopkins and J. S. Mill Chapter 9: Impersonal Impersonations: The Birds of The Waste Land, “Landscapes,” 239 and Four Quartets Chapter 10: Other Voices: Extending the Method 284 Epilogue 309 Appendix 313 Bibliography 315                                 3 Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinarily generous and intelligent mentorship of Kurt Koenigsberger. Thanks for accepting and encouraging my project, and for knowing what I needed to hear, and when. To Michael W. Clune, I am eternally grateful for your emphatic defense of literature, for the excellent speakers you brought to campus, and for your encouragement and insight along the way. To Sarah Gridley, I owe the incalculable debt of keener insights than anyone has a right to expect delivered at every stage of this dissertation. Thank you for noticing when my syntax betrayed an intellectual knot in need of untying. Thanks also for the marvelous books, and for proving that one can both keep one’s soul and cultivate it through the trials of the academy. To Todd Oakley, for agreeing to serve as an outside reader and then providing exceptional feedback not just on metaphor, cognitive science, and philosophy, but also, and unexpectedly, on birds, thank you so much. To my colleagues with whom I discussed portions of this project, you have my sincerest thanks. These include Catherine Forsa (who pointed out the “nature faker” controversy to me), Jason Carney, Cara Byrne, Marcus Mitchell, Scott Weedon, Thom Dawkins, Kristin Kondrlik, Ray Horton, Drew Banghart, Kate Allen, Michelle Lyons- McFarland, Jess Slentz, and CWRU lecturers Denna Iammarino, Joshua Hoeynck, Eric Chilton, Mark Pedretti, and others. Thank you, Kate Allen, for organizing an environmental reading group. To Kenny Fountain, thanks for sharing your time and tracking down rhetorical figures that illuminated the pathetic fallacy. To Erika Olbricht, thanks for meeting with me to discuss pastoral and ecocriticism. Kim Emmons, thank you                                 4 for accommodating my teaching requests and making our courses truly educational and enjoyable for everyone involved. I’d like to thank the English department for awarding me with the MacIntyre Prize and Adrian & Salomon Fellowship. The first provided me with much needed confidence, the second with much needed time. To Marie Lathers, my French professor, merci beaucoup! Thanks to my fellow graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Seminar and to its directors, Ken Ledford and Martha Woodmansee. Also, thank you to Marshall Brown for providing feedback on Darwin, Ruskin, and Arnold. To Mark Turner for early comments and interest, you have my gratitude. To my fellow presenters on “the pathetic fallacy and animal life” at ASLE, George Hart and Thomas Doran, thanks for your thoughts on birds, science, and poetry. To members of my family who supported me in this very long educational endeavor, the Dieters, Earnhardts, Flickingers, and Leasures, thank you so much. To DeeAnna and Dana Leasure, thank you for letting us live in your house and enjoy your hospitality for what turned into five years––no thanks could ever be enough. I’d like to thank my partner, Amber, for her love. Thank you for the companionship that both informed and distracted me from this work. Thank you for your heroic sacrifice and your irrational and incessant faith in me. I could not have done it without you. To my brilliant and beautiful children, Lochlann and Molly, thank you for being so magnificent. Finally, I’d like to thank my sister Kimberly, who lived somewhere behind or before or beyond this project. I imagine her now with the parakeets she loved, and who seemed to love her, too. I would say that this dissertation is for her, but it seems more fitting to say, for her, that it’s for the birds.                                 5 The “Sentient Plume” : The Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in Anglo-American Avian Poetry, 1856-1945 Abstract by ERIC EARNHARDT Critics often deem John Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy a prohibition on projections of human-like qualities onto nature, including animals. This supposed prohibition has seemed not only anthropocentric by denying real resemblances between human and nonhuman life, but also a severe restriction upon the freedom of poets to use figurative language to express sympathy or emotional connection with nature. Critics have not, however, sufficiently accounted for how Ruskin, a recognized forerunner of ecological consciousness, could have developed this supposedly anti-ecological theory; moreover, they have overlooked how the twentieth-century dismissal of the theory’s relevance contradicts its evident influence upon Victorian and modernist poetry. This dissertation addresses these neglected critical problems by examining the humanization of birds in literature and science, considering the theory of the pathetic fallacy alongside the scientific practice of “critical anthropomorphism.” This approach explains how the theory of the pathetic fallacy advocates critical anthropomorphism among poets while distinguishing between figurative language and illusions amidst violent emotions. Ruskin’s theory appreciated the aesthetic and artistic possibilities produced by “the instinct which leads us…to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature,” as well as                                 6 the human susceptibility to be deceived by it. By advocating an informed and critical awareness of this instinct, Ruskin theorized a less personal style of lyric poetry and urged poets to use pathetic fallacies only as tools for faithfully representing interior landscapes, thereby anticipating T. S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry and his concept of the “objective correlative.” The first part of this dissertation, therefore, explains the history and theory of the pathetic fallacy, often as it relates to birds, from Ruskin and Charles Darwin’s anthropomorphic methods of speculation, to the theory’s continued if often concealed influence in the literary criticism of George Santayana and T. S. Eliot, to the theory’s relevance for today’s ecological and cognitive literary critics. The second part applies this critical method to poems that attempt to present “real birds,” such as Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias!,” Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Sea and the Skylark” and “The Woodlark,” and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “Landscapes,” and Four Quartets, as well as a number of other poems by modernist, postwar, and contemporary poets. Instead of rejecting Ruskin’s aesthetic values, modern poetry that attends to the lives of animals often exhibits Ruskin’s aesthetic and ethical commitment to a more critical and “careful anthropomorphization” as encouraged by Jane Bennett and other ecological critics. A sympathetic reading of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, therefore, enhances understandings of Anglo-American poets who imagine the inner lives of animals in poetry, and reveals the necessity of critically relating their imaginings to human perception and interior experience.                                 7 Chapter 1: Introduction The idea that poets are only “Pretending to be interested in birds” (Andrews) speaks to a truth about a lot of poetry, which is that poets use birds to talk about other things. Robert Frost defined metaphor as “saying one thing in terms of another,” and wrote that “Poetry is simply made of metaphor” (“The Constant Symbol” 446). Likewise, A. R. Ammons stated that “clarification or intensification by distraction, seeing one thing better by looking at something else,” was a central method of poetry (“A Poem is a Walk” 115). Ammons even drew upon Robert Frost’s “The Wood-Pile” to illustrate his point. Indeed, “The Wood-Pile” stages an encounter with a bird that is not really about the bird – or is it? The speaker narrates his meandering through a frozen swamp when a bird flies into view: A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather–– The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. (Frost 101) Imagining the bird’s careful flight, Frost’s speaker seems to realize only dimly that he cannot know the bird’s thoughts. After registering the foolishness of assuming he knew what the bird thought, the speaker assumes in the very next line that the bird “thought that I was after him for a feather.” Should readers trust this assumption? Furthermore, does the bird also recognize the foolishness of such thought-projection? The poem’s careful phrasing makes the third-person pronouns of the third and fourth lines ambiguous, so that the he who is so foolish as to think he knows the other’s thoughts could refer to the bird or the speaker. As a result, the poem implicates not only the bird, but also the                                 8 speaker, as resembling one who takes everything that is said (or done) personally. Still, readers may conclude that Frost talks about a bird only in order to present a human topic. The bird is only “like” one “who” takes things personally, and is probably not contemplating the same philosophical problem, i.e., the human “problem of other minds.” By this logic, uncertainty about the reality and substance of the thoughts of others is what Frost, through the figure of the bird, makes clearer and more intense. But doesn’t the poem in some sense depend upon the bird? Is Frost concerned only with projections of human minds? Could the poem have staged the same encounter with a rock, or a plant, or some human artifact? Would the effect be the same, or merely another kind of pathetic fallacy: a reflection of human thoughts and feelings on a different surface? Is the human mind the only important feature of the poem? For that matter, would it not be more prudent to stage the problem with another human? Such a poem would avoid the troubling ambiguity of the unknowns of birdbrains. In reality, this ambiguity, the speaker’s alienation from the bird’s consciousness, is precisely what makes the encounter so interesting, strange, and even a little unsettling. For one thing, conceiving of similarities between human and avian cognition contrasts with human habits of thinking about animals. The mechanistic view of nature proposed by Descartes, which strongly separated thinking from the body, justified a view of animals as soulless machines, automatons ensnared in the mechanisms of instinctual and unthinking nature. From this point of view, humans only falsely invest animals with feelings, sensations, emotions, and thoughts resembling those we, personally, feel. Yet, such thinking contains one uncomfortable proviso, the conspicuous exception that it makes for human animals. In its momentary admission of a reciprocation or equivalency                                 9 in some aspect of avian and human thought processes, Frost’s poem glimpses the flimsiness of this humanistic exception, but does not explicitly consider its more frightening implication, the implication that extending thought to animals may also extend the automaticity perceived in animals to humanity. Although the “song of birds is found beautiful by everyone,” according to Adorno, “something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed” (Aesthetic Theory 91). The spell of nature that ensnares the birds alarms humans because it initiates doubts about our freedom; it hints at nature’s domination of the human that is always already achieved by our inextricable entanglement in the ecological “mesh” (Morton The Ecological Thought 28). This possibility does not trouble Frost’s speaker, who simply forgets the bird’s “little fear” and shifts his attention “without so much as wishing him good-night” (101). However, the speaker’s attention shifts to a long-forgotten pile of wood and its “slow smokeless burning of decay” (102), which begins to signal to him the fate he shares with everything else in nature, wherein purposeful lives and careful handiwork are all forgotten, all decay, life and poetry included. At the poem’s end, the speaker feels fear at the sight of the forgotten woodpile, but readers may remember, too, how the speaker has forgotten his encounter with the bird, a creature that signified for the speaker “the way I might have gone” (101). The speaker’s forgetfulness, therefore, makes the poem’s final scene both ironic and poignant, since following the bird might have kept him from becoming lost in a frozen swamp, morbidly contemplating a pile of wood. A more accurate picture of humans and birds analogously “caught” within nature occurs in W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” a poem in which Yeats scorns any                                 10