"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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circular or dialectical process. What I am really talking about is my reading of
Livingstone’s poems and my writing about them. The analysis of the poems (chapters
three, five and six) will demonstrate that an ecopoetical approach (rather than, for
example, a political approach) is essential for a deeper understanding of much of
Livingstone’s poetry. This does not mean it is the only approach, but it is the best one I
could find given that “the truth is very difficult to get at”, as Livingstone himself said
(1990: 59). A.S. Byatt has this to say on reading, writing and the hermeneutic tangle:
[T]he truth … is that we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know,
it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries,
physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend –
not infinitely, but violently, but giddily – the variations we can perceive on the
truths we thus discover. (2000: 237)
The role of the imagination
At the start of this chapter I said imagination can act as a healer of humanity’s severance
from an instinctual understanding of the Earth and so help restore our ecological
equilibrium. But what is the imagination? The OED defines it as: “The mental faculty
which forms images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses…” and “The
creative faculty of the mind; the ability to form new and striking concepts”. Simply,
through the imagination we are able to see the world in a new way. Poetry, through
language, communicates these new or altered perceptions. Shakespeare describes this
process with eloquence and depth:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1, 11-17)
Like science and art, the imagination and reason are often seen as sparring
partners. But is this so? The imagination can best be seen as a catalyst. The Romantic
poets were aware of this and did not discount the faculty of reason. Livingstone’s poetry
reflects this view. He sees the imagination as part of the pursuit of truth and uses a gritty
version of the Romantic valorisation of the imagination and the sublime in his poetry.
The Romantic poets introduced a concept of the imagination which pervades and
informs the modern view of this faculty. In “A Defence of Poetry”, Percy Bysshe