Earth's poesy: Romantic poetics, natural philosophy, and biosemiotics

This chapter undertakes an exploration of the pre-history of contemporary
biosemiotics in Romantic ecopoetics, beginning with the ways in which Romantic
natural philosophies, such as those of Schelling and Goethe, opened the way for a renewed appreciation of the subjective 'worlds' or Umwelten, as Jakob von Uexkilll later termed them, along with the agency, communicative capacity, and, in some cases, ethical considerabllity of more-than-human beings. Secondly, I will examine the implications of this philosophical re-animation of materiality for the reconceptualization of human language, especially as deployed to poetic ends. Here, I turn to Friedrich Schlegel's (1967 (1800]) "Conversation on Poetry," in which human poiesis, the crafting of ideational worlds by means of words, is repositioned as an emergent property of the prior autopoiesis of natural becoming. Finally, I will indicate how this German proto-biosemiotics finds a literary counterpart in the ecosemiotics of English Romantic literature, focusing on John Clare's birds' nest poetry.