Notes on Poetry and Biosphere: Symbolic Energy is also Energy of the Living

Abstract

This article is intended as a kind of “conversation” with William Rueckert’s classic paper “Literature and Ecology. An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978). Some of the questions that Rueckert poses in his work are selected as a challenge for literary studies and answers are developed to it; responses that, essentially, argue, as a thesis, that poetry is a powerful source of symbolic energy that is intertwined with the energy of nature. The contribution of poetry to the biosphere derives from the fact that it is a device for the translation, expansion or deepening of human and non-human identities.