While working on this project, I read a diverse selection of poetry that I think contributed in various ways to the final product. William Blake’s writing, especially Songs of Innocence and of Experience, informed a large portion of my poetry both in content and style. Many of my poems, particularly in the first section of the project, involve archaic or obsolescent language: archaic in that it is not used in everyday speech, but I feel that it can still be understood in poetry and helps bring to mind the poetic tradition. Blake’s persistent use of nature in poetry drove me to pursue the topic in the first place. Robert Frost’s concern for nature and use of more modern, colloquial language to color his poetry with subtlety informed the language in the more reflective poems in my project, like the opening and closing poems. I was also struck by his vocabulary style; I think a reader can get an idea of the sort of words he would and would not use even after reading only several poems. This made me aware of what individual words can do to the overall tone and helped me fortify my vocabulary in some poems. Reading Li-Young Lee’s poetry alerted me to the value in using personal experience and memory as a guideline for understanding my concerns. He also seemed to be quite comfortable in writing about his relationships to the people in his life, which gave me many ideas for the second section of my project. Reading Anthony Hecht and James Merrill helped to assure me that metered and rhyming poetry can still be used in interesting and effective ways. I noticed a sometimes humorous side to Hecht’s poetry that provided me with some confidence in using a bit of humor and sarcasm in my own poems. Merrill’s poetry came off to me as often enigmatic and thoughtful – I wanted to see if I could somehow include all of these varied elements to my project in some way in order to diversify my poetry. I read many other varied poets over the last year under the assumption that an idea cannot be truly lost once we understand it.

The process of writing Human Nature had ups and downs for various reasons. One of the most significant “downs” was realizing that a single poem is hard to write when trying to keep the theme of an entire project in mind. I found I was much more comfortable with coming up with whatever idea I wanted and writing what I wanted about it regardless of whether it fit in with a preordained theme. I found, in the end, that despite not planning a thematic consistency, one happened to emerge anyway. A person’s true concerns will probably show up in his actions whether he plans for it or not. Another setback was the pressure of putting out a creative project of this size and knowing that it would be read and evaluated along with critical theses. Of course, the pressure in writing a critical thesis is also great and can also interfere with research and writing and essay, but I did feel as though I somehow needed to validate a creative project as worthy of receiving the same distinction through my work (which was, in a way, also exciting). There was really no way to alleviate that pressure other than to focus solely on the project. I have had a lot of support, especially from my peer, Zachary Bushnell. The experience of working on our projects simultaneously proved to be a great help and a source of affirmation and support.

Human Nature was started with admittedly vague concepts in mind. Primarily, I thought my writing would revolve around the life cycle of trees: seeds, sprouts, saplings, trees, blossoms, and fruit. I hoped to find, by paralleling this cycle with appropriate metaphors, some manner in which other concepts (e.g. time, memory, change) could be made sense of in bucolic terms. I had no idea what patterns or complications would arise from doing this, but being concerned with maintaining an overall focus to the project, I thought it would be a good idea to only write poetry about trees. It wasn’t until nearly halfway through my project that I realized my desire to write about trees stemmed from a deeper concern about how humans, especially poets, see their ideas come alive in nature through the use of metaphor, no matter how inherently unnatural these ideas may be. Robert Frost’s sonnet “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same” set my ideas in motion; the poem tries to explain how mankind came to see its reflection in nature and accounts for the entirety of metaphorical tradition, but to me also reveals the tragedy that humanity is an entity entirely distinct from nature. Nature is, in a way, that which is not man or manmade.