It was good to see that unresolved 2015 debate between Mark Cocker and Robert Macfarlane on the “new nature writing” given another airing in Alex Preston’s review of The Way of the Hare by Marianne Taylor (Review, 24 June). It needs sorting out more than ever, but to put it in terms of a “reanimation of CP Snow and FR Leavis’s old ‘Two Cultures’ argument” only skirts an issue which really has much more to do with language and purpose than obsolescent arguments about poetry versus science.
Good nature writing, almost by definition, needs both, and is informed by both. New nature writing’s current problems lie largely in the lack of recognition, or acknowledgment, of that old truth, that you write to find out what you think, often relying instead on too much poetry on the one hand or too much science on the other. As to purpose, George Orwell had it right when he observed that “where I lacked a political purpose … I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
Nicholas Usherwood
Bungay, Suffolk
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