"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

55
be seen as a stylistic pastoralism, declaring from the start opposing qualities
which he employs to celebrate not only joy, contentment and hope but the conflict
involved in their attainment. To see Campbell’s South African poems too
emphatically as statements of protest in a limiting environment is therefore to
misread in them the intense impulse of a poet whose protest is one aspect only of
a serious attempt to extend consciousness. They are certainly poems containing
his protest, but this is in accordance with his larger purpose to locate himself
imaginatively in an ironic pastoralism of the imagination, where fulfilment is the
fruit of struggle and ‘the black world is fuel / To hearts that burn and battle for
delight’. (161)
Clouts’ term “an ironic pastoralism of the imagination” can as well be applied to
Livingstone’s poetry. He also displays a mastery of form and a control of language.
Livingstone’s ‘pastoralism’ however is portrayed as an ideal in the form of what I call
ecological equilibrium. For Livingstone, the way to be in Africa is through symbiosis, not
appropriation.
Campbell shows traces of ecological awareness in, for example, “The timeless,
surly patience of the serf / That moves the nearest to the naked earth” (“The Serf”
lines12-13) and “Across his back, unheeded, we have broken / Whole forests, heedless of
the blood we’ve spilled” (“Rounding the Cape” lines 9-10). But his view is not as
comprehensive or as scientifically informed as Livingstone’s.
Livingstone was also undoubtedly influenced by the Romantic poets, particularly
Byron and Shelley. The Romantic vision proved to be inadequate for previous South
African poets. This is Stephen Watson’s argument. He says that the tradition of literary
romanticism (with a small r) has disintegrated in 20 th Century South Africa (57). He
claims that the romantic tradition in South Africa lost its original purpose of criticism of
society and became divorced from everything except its “tenuous literary heritage” (60). I
argue that criticism of society is only part of the Romantic tradition and that, for
Livingstone and for literary ecologists, the Romantic communion with Nature and the
role of the imagination are vital. Watson argues from a Marxist point of view that
romanticism has become a refuge (64):
It established its hold on the minds of any number of writers not as a response to
anything like a new mode of production, but to a peculiarly colonial experience of
alienation. Characteristically, it strove to overcome this by means of a ‘projection
of consciousness into the alien: into the African himself, into the African fauna or
landscape’. All its various efforts to establish a subjective intensity and
wholeness, to attain that internal paradise in which the distinction between
internal and external, subject and object, mind and world is momentarily elided,