More-Than-Human Ethics of Care in the Poetry of Mary Oliver

Abstract

This essay examines how Mary Oliver’s poetry enacts an ethic of care that encourages the reconsideration of boundaries between human-nonhuman worlds and the intrinsically valuable nature of human-nonhuman relationships. Her poems evoke environmental awareness disarticulated from information-deficit models of ecological behavior and remain attuned to modes of thinking-with, thinking-for, and dissenting-within human-nonhuman relationships.

Keywords:

• de la Bellacasa
• feminist ethics of care
• Mary Oliver
• more-than-human
• poetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Oliver devoted much of her life to caring about every living creature and inanimate natural object she came upon as she wandered in the woods and along the shorelines near her New England and Florida homes, and to articulating through her verse a caring attitude for them. Her poems are widely read by professional conservation biologists and ordinary citizens alike, many, as shown in this article, who claim to take inspiration from her work. For a summary of Oliver’s influence, see Franklin (2017).

2. In our essay, we assume that the poet Oliver and the narrators in her poems are the same person.

3. For a more explicitly religious interpretation of Oliver’s verse, see Murphy (2017).

4. Verhoeven (2010) makes a similar point about this kind of ethical discourse in environmental communication: by creating “‘new possibilities for everyday lived experience,’ environmental rhetors can borrow the artistic potential of each individual’s life, a potential that might culminate in beautiful, responsible, ethical behavior” (p. 26).

5. One author of this paper was first introduced to Oliver’s poetry by a field biologist/ecologist who carries a volume of Oliver’s poetry around as part of her field gear.

6. Costello (2010) arrives at a similar conclusion about the rhetorical efficacy of literature and poetry as “the awakening of phenomenological awareness can serve an environmentalist agenda” (p. 331).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth Zagacki

Kenneth S. Zagacki is a professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. He teaches classes in rhetorical theory and criticism, ethics of communication, and communication theory. His research interests include the study of American foreign policy rhetoric, religious rhetoric, scientific rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. He has published numerous articles in major scholarly journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

Cynthia Rosenfeld

Cynthia Rosenfeld Ph.D. Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. Rosenfeld is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Communication at North Carolina State University.