2026/06/01 by Amanda Blake Davis · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Literature: history, themes, analysis #Travel Writing and Literature
paper · doi:10.1353/srm.2026.a994669
openalex publication_date 2026/06/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/04
Abstract: Ooziness melds sky, sea, and trees in Shelley's lyric poetry. In the "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker shifts from leaf, to boy, to lyre, imagining poetic utterance in arboreal figurations. In "The Woodman and the Nightingale," the ambiguity of the lyric's "interfluous wood" muddles the more-than-human demarcations between seas, trees, and sky. By thinking through M. H. Abrams's "species" of "greater Romantic lyric" and Jonathan Culler's noticing of lyric's interplay between poet and reader within its "spatial domain," this essay explores how Shelley's interfluous poetics promote mediations between oozy landscapes, the human and more-than-human, and poet and reader.