Gardening in Exile: Place, Identity and Ecology in the Poetry of Michael Hamburger

Abstract

‘Seit fast vierzig Jahren ist das Gärtnern neben dem Schreiben meine Hauptbeschäftigung’, Michael Hamburger wrote in 1994, and around this time commentators began to refer to him as a gardener as well as a translator, poet, literary critic and memoirist. However, while the role which gardens and gardening played in his life has been acknowledged, their importance for his poetry remains largely unexplored. I argue in this article that gardening served as therapy for Hamburger, whose experience of exile was outwardly less traumatic than that of many other refugees from the Third Reich, but whose life was marked by disruption and linguistic and cultural disorientation, following from his move to England at the age of nine, and that it was a way of making him at home there. However, my principal concern is with the meanings which gardening acquires in his poems, and the links with his quest for identity, his ecological concerns and a particular form of place-belonging. I seek to show that Hamburger’s experience as an émigré led him to develop conceptions of gardening and place-belonging that prefigured the understanding of the human-nature relationship demanded by our situation in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Michael Hamburger
• Nature poetry
• Gardening
• Place
• Identity
• Exile
• Ecology

Notes

1 Michael Hamburger, ‘Gedichte und Gärten’, in Pro Domo. Selbstauskünfte, Rückblicke und andere Prosa, ed. by Ian Galbraith (Vienna: Folio, 2007), pp. 35–38 (p. 35).

2 Michael Hamburger. Documentary film, dir. by Tacita Dean (UK: Film and Video Umbrella, 2007); Michael Hamburger — Ein englischer Dichter aus Deutschland. Documentary film, dir. by Frank Wierke (Germany: Wierke Film, 2007).

3 Dennis O’Driscoll, ed., A Michael Hamburger Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017), p. 40.

4 Michael Hamburger, String of Beginnings. Intermittent Memoirs, 1924–1954 (London: Skoob, 1991), p. 17.

5 See Roger Deakin, ‘Great Expectations from a Pip’, The Independent, 28 October 2000, p. 12.

6 Michael Hamburger, Collected Poems 1941–1994 (London: Anvil, 1995), pp. 109–12. In the following, the Collected Poems are referenced as ‘CP’.

7 Karen Leeder, ‘“Anachronism”: Michael Hamburger and the Time and Place of Late Work’, in Late Style and its Discontents: Biography, Epoch and Modernity in Art, Literature and Music, ed. by Gordon MacMullan and Sam Smiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 174–87 (p. 185).

8 See Andreas Wittbrodt, ‘“The Cruel Absurdity of the Letter I”. Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit und Identität bei Michael Hamburger’, Kulturpoetik 3.2 (2003), 207–25.

9 The term seems appropriate because, although Hamburger addresses many different subjects in his poems, nature and environment are recurring themes. He wrote in 1990 that it made no difference to him whether he was classified as a ‘nature poet’ or an urban one: ‘City, suburb, countryside, and their interactions, have been my concern from the start’ (String of Beginnings, p. 332).

10 Terry Gifford, Green Voices. Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

11 Terry Gifford, Pastoral, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2020).

12 Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well Gardened Mind. Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World (London: William Collins, 2020), pp 260, 324.

13 Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001).

14 See Matthias Müller-Wieferig, Jenseits der Gegensätze. Die Lyrik Michael Hamburgers (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1991), pp. 233–43.

15 Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 280.

16 Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred. The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), p. 11.

17 Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 7.

18 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 38.

19 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 304–07.

20 Michael Hamburger, Late (London: Anvil, 1997), p. 38.

21 ‘Still it’s the season of plums’, in Hamburger, Late, p. 13.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Axel Goodbody

Axel Goodbody is a Professor Emeritus of German and European Culture at the University of Bath, and Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Modern Languages (French and German), and taught at the University of Kiel, Germany, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Romantic and twentieth-century German nature poetry. Since the 1990s his research has focused on representations of nature and environment in German, American and English literature, and ecocritical theory. He was a co-founder of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment and served as it first President (2004–06), and was Associate Editor of its journal Ecozon@ from 2010 to 2020. His recent publications have been concerned with climate fiction, climate scepticism, energy narratives, and human-animal relations. He is currently working on nature writing and garden writing. He is co-editor of the Brill/ Rodopi book series ‘Nature, Culture and Literature’.