Deep Ecology in Blake’s Milton: Corporeal Pastoral and Mental Georgic

This article examines the representation of nature, the body, and labor in William Blake’s Milton to elucidate the poem’s ecocritical implications, especially its contribution to “deep ecology.” Major works of Blake ecocriticism have analyzed Milton as a poem that exposes the problems of the bourgeoning Industrial Revolution in early nineteenth-century Britain, as they center their arguments on the well-known phrase, “Dark Satanic Mills.” On the contrary, this study sides with another group of ecocritics, who foreground his deep ecology that questions the ontological assumptions and premises of modernity, deconstructing the dichotomies of human and nature, and mind and body, as well as proffering the alternative views of self, community, space, and time. To demonstrate the deep ecological significance of Milton, the article supplements ecocritical inquiry with the study of genres, analyzing how Blake deploys and reinvents pastoral and georgic in his depiction of nature, space, the body, subjectivity, and labor. I argue that Blake constructs what I term “corporeal pastoral” by locating the power for creating the new earth and heaven, not in beautiful nature or leisurely life, but within the human body or a “Globule.” Furthermore, Blake creates “mental georgic” by representing intellectual, social, and cultural struggles to transform the structure of human existence through the metaphor of labor. In doing so, Milton registers the ways in which the pastoral and georgic genres converge with one another in such a way as to enhance Blake’s ecological visions. While the corporeal pastoral in Milton provides an alternative worldview and ontology, the mental georgic delineates the concrete methods and strategies needed to facilitate the advancement of human liberation. Together, the corporeal pastoral and mental georgic for Blake constitute the theory and practice of deep ecology.