This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.
Lynn Keller's Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene makes the case that the formal and linguistic experimentation associated with avant-garde poetry yields important contributions for environmental literature and ecocriticism. Written under the influence of Wittgenstein's pronouncement that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world," such poetry has long been animated by the idea that the very linguistic structures of language privilege certain modes of thought and preclude others. 1 If language shapes what we know, who we are, and even our inmost desires, experimenting with its conventions through disjunctive grammar, juxtaposition, and other experimental techniques may open up radical new ways of thinking and being in the world. This capacity to guide us toward thinking otherwise, Keller suggests, may be contemporary poetry's most important contribution toward "recomposing" the environmental attitudes that got us into our planetary predicament.
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