Ecolinguistics and the Move Beyond Anthropocentrism: A Comparative Study of Linguistic Innovation in the Poetry of John Hollander and Sohrab Sepehri

Abstract

Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the present study examines and compares the linguistic innovations of John Hollander (1929–2013), a prominent American poet, and Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), an Iranian modernist poet, from the perspective of ecolinguistics. The primary aim of the study is to demonstrate that both poets, through different yet convergent linguistic strategies, engage in the process of “decentering the human” in poetic language and attribute agency and subjecthood to nonhuman elements of nature. The research data were drawn from selected poems by both poets, including “Swan and Shadow” and “The Sundial Garden” by Hollander, and “The Footsteps of Water” and “Let Us Not Muddy the Water” by Sepehri. The study employs qualitative textual analysis based on Lawrence Buell’s theories of ecocriticism and Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework. The findings indicate that Hollander, through formal innovation, visual structures, and complex intertextuality, and Sepehri, through syntactic defamiliarization, synesthesia, and personification, each constructs a distinctive “linguistic ecology” in which the boundary between the human and nature is destabilized.