Beyond civilization-versus-nature: Dennis Lee's new ontology of the natural world in Civil Elegies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: More than forty years after the publication of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies (1972), an epic nine-part exploration of the spiritual history of modern Canada, some of the poem's most profound accomplishments remain unsung. While Civil Elegies has generated a number of critical responses over the years-on everything from the influence of George Grant and Martin Heidegger on Lee to the poem's use of air pollution imagery-one of the most intriguing and potentially fruitful statements about the poem was actually made by another poet, Lee's colleague and Griffin Poetry Prize winner Don McKay. In his landmark essay 'Great Flint Singing' from Open Wide A Wilderness (2009), McKay remarks that there exists in Civil Elegies the basis for a 'new ontological understanding of the natural world.' This different way of being draws its power from a paradoxical reading of colonial alienation, and is companionable with insights from continental European philosophy and Eastern wisdom traditions, in particular the interpenetration of being and nonbeing found in both Heidegger and the Bengali sage Saraha. It is this 'new ontological understanding of the natural world' I would like to explore here. Lee's poem not only completely dismantles the natural resources paradigm upon which the Canadian economy has been built-one so entrenched in four centuries of colonial history as to constitute an article of faith-but, more importantly, does away with the very spatial logic inherent in the Civilization-versus- Nature binary that assigns meaning to certain landscapes while banishing it from others. At its most hopeful, Civil Elegies brings together 'green of the earth and civil grey,' allowing nature and the city, the eternal and the everyday, to intermingle and coincide as part of a single, indivisible whole, as 'what is.' It is a primal encounter with the earth- an encounter with the land as it exists beneath and outside the categories of colonial and modern consciousness-that is the foundation of any human community if it is to survive and flourish through time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".