‘I am quiet with the earth’: Nature and the Lyric Self in the Work of Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew’s selfhood was intensely ecological. For her, the natural world offered myriad possibilities for interrogating the permeable negotiations between the material and imaginative systems that structure subjectivity. Fascinated by testing the thresholds of knowledge hierarchies, Mew’s work critiques the pastoral and lyric traditions, examining them both as inherited structures that can at once support and obstruct our interface with the natural world. The critical framework of queer ecology echoes Mew’s interest in contesting and reconceptualizing epistemological systems that otherwise attempt to curtail nature’s inherent multiplicity. Two examples of her work, the late poem ‘Moorland Night’ and short story ‘The Wheat,’ provide cogent examples of this queer ecological impulse, in which the aesthetics of rural and wild spaces are transformed by her enquiries into the division of self/world . Through her work, Mew explores the liberatory potentials that an ecologically conceived model of being might offer a subject beleaguered by modern living. Her work considers the natural world as both an aesthetic and material phenomenon, explored through the confluence of sensorial and imaginative modes of experience. In queering nature through attention to these moments of tactile contact with the earth, Mew exposes untraversed pathways leading to new and unfettered forms of self-knowledge.