"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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as the Earth. The poetry demands this use of terminology because it does not lend itself
to the idea of pictorial natural scenery, as implied by the term landscape. Livingstone’s
poetry reflects the divide between manmade environments (the urban) and natural
environments (the rural or, even, pastoral). When referring to the human habitat or our
ecological position on the Earth I have favoured the terms ‘place’ and ‘home’ in my
analyses. Julia Martin points out that
In some recent critical discourse, instead of “landscape” or “nature”, terms such
as “place”, or “home” and the concept of situatedness have been developing
connotations which suggest an embodied locatedness in particular environments,
an experience primarily of land rather than landscape. (1999: 53)
The thesis consists of six chapters. The first two chapters are more theoretical and
the remaining four concentrate on the poetry of Douglas Livingstone.
Chapter one deals with the theoretical framework of the thesis and examines
ecology and ecological literary criticism. The second chapter offers a brief biography of
Livingstone and an overview of the existing critical material on his poetry.
The third chapter examines Livingstone’s earlier work (the first five poetry
collections) and argues that his ecological preoccupation is evident in these collections.
This chapter offers four broad themes within the ecological framework and examines key
poems in detail to support this ‘categorisation’. The themes are: evolutionary theory,
humankind’s ambivalent relationship with nature, ecological equilibrium and ecological
destruction.
Following an introductory chapter on A Littoral Zone, the last two chapters
concentrate on this, Livingstone’s final collection. Chapter four examines what
Livingstone called “humanity’s physical element” and what I dub the material view – the
biological and scientific explanations of life and the physical world. This chapter offers
analyses of poems which deal with Darwinism and humankind’s abuse of nature. It
concludes that (despite scientific knowledge that humankind is part of the evolutionary
process and therefore part of nature) humanity has engineered itself into a position of
ecological destruction.
The final chapter examines an ideal state which I have termed ecological
equilibrium. It analyses poems in A Littoral Zone which explore the power of art and the
power of love and argues that these fall into Livingstone’s category of “humanity’s
psychic element”, or what I see as Livingstone’s Romantic aspect. The poetry implies