Abstract
This thesis proposes that Zen had a strong influence on the ecopoetic imaginations of earlytwentieth-century U.S. poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings. Through such an ecopoetic imagination, these poets merged materialism and
spirituality, thus developing what I refer to as cosmological imagination and cosmopoetics, a
poetics that, rather than privileging logic and rationality, opens up potential new forms of
consciousness. Williams implements his Zen-infused cosmological vision by developing an ethics
of representation that emphasises the insufficiency of human reason and language in determining
the nature of material reality. Furthermore, his theory of the imagination as a material and vital
force reveals the interrelationality and interdependence of human and non-human, organic and
inorganic agencies. Moore’s cosmological imagination emerges from a hybrid vision of ecopoetics
as assemblages that decentre human subjectivity and emphasise non-human agency. Additionally,
her assemblages actualise both material and transcendental becomings, giving rise to new forms of
cosmological consciousness. Stevens emphasises the non-referentiality and performativity of
poetry and its ability to produce new experiences of reality. His cosmological imagination enables
these experiences through the actualisation and interweaving of human and non-human agencies.
Furthermore, they emerge from Stevens’s focus on the openness of human sensory experience to
extra-human meaning-making which enables the development of an integrative and universalising
material-transcendental experience. The thesis closes with an analysis of Cummings’ cosmological
imagination, which arises from the development of assemblagic becomings of human and nonhuman agencies. His extreme experimentation and visual poetics magnifies the vital force of the
imagination, promoting a process of becoming which transforms the products of human
subjectivity into a universal metamorphic effort that dissolves the boundaries between the human
and the non-human, the material and the spiritual. This process, I suggest, fully transforms
ecopoetics into cosmopoetics. I conclude that, due to the influence of Zen, these poets were able
to close the gap between materialism and spirituality, thus developing a cosmopoetics that
engenders new forms of awareness galvanised by the vital and cosmological force of the
imagination.