ABSTRACT
Kathleen Jamie’s aesthetic formations of the natural world are pervaded by an engagement with the past. Discussing poems from Jamie’s The Tree House (2004), The Overhaul (2012), and The Bonniest Companie (2015), the chapter acknowledges but also significantly revises the common observation that Jamie’s aesthetic of self-effacement and descriptive attentiveness repudiates Romantic legacies. Close readings of Jamie’s poems in dialogue with the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Smith, Clare, Hölderlin, Burns, and others demonstrate that Jamie’s work both critically asserts its difference and takes inspiration from Romantic precursors. The observations of non-human lives and landscapes found in Jamie’s poems amend, rather than fully discard, Romantic concepts of poetry as based on emotion and reflection and of the natural world as a creative force that engenders aesthetic forms. Elsewhere, Jamie’s writing harks back to a Romantic world view that is fascinated by the fragmentary and the irrational, the supernatural and the folkloristic, while evoking a landscape and language that are recognisably twenty-first-century Scottish.
