Subject definition and general semantics
ii.5.1The recent conceptual shift from nature poetry (Naturlyrik in German where “Lyrik” and “Gedicht” have become almost synonymous) to environment or eco-poetry is symptomatic of an era where human activities are systematically destroying planetary ecosystems. One of the reasons for skirting the term nature is that it implies the conventional separation between human and all other animated or non-animated beings and thus allows an anthropocentric bias widely criticized by ecologists; another, that it vehicles notions such as beauty, health, wilderness, authenticity that are too frequently contradicted by the ecological crisis; finally, that nature is a notoriously difficult term to pin down since it can signify, for example, genes, individual organisms, species, local ecosystems, national parks, or the planetary biosphere. Many argue that in modern usage nature is a cultural construct built on the pedestal of social privilege in the wake of European Romanticism. Therefore, ecocritics who since the 1990s have investigated the relationship between literature, nature and culture frequently replace nature by environment or surround nature with actual or, as in this article, imagined quotation marks. The term nevertheless remains a cultural keyword, at least in western societies. A simple switch of terminology does not do away with the problem of human exceptionalism, as the title of this article implies (environment to humans or humans as environment?).
ii.5.2The choice of environment or eco- in place of nature poetry signals forms of the lyric (and of its criticism) written with an eye to ecology. The poetry considered under this heading may strain, question or reject the classic modes of nature lyricism (Functions of Lyric, Lyric Reception); it may evoke urban landscapes, industrially exploited and polluted terrains, species threatened by extinction or victims of environmental injustice, rather than privileging wilderness, the sublime or the pastoral; instead of being a vehicle of subjectivity and self-discovery, its first-person speaker (or “lyric I”) – provided this figure is not sacrificed altogether – may act as a protagonist in the drama of environmental degradation (Fiction and Referentiality in Lyric Poetry). In what follows, the term environment poetry will be preferred over ecopoetry, which tends to be biased towards anglophone writing (see Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013; Bryson 2002; 2005). Yet, despite their focus on environment poetry, the following paragraphs cannot ignore, in the name of ecology, more than two centuries of nature lyricism. What is at stake, then, is something more than a hard and fast separation between nature poetry and environment poetry, namely, the socio-cultural impact of a literary tradition.
ii.5.3In Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Despedida” (1921–1924), the poet imagines his own passing as a process of self-relinquishment, a merging with a pastoral landscape he cherishes and that in turn shapes his imagination : “Si muero, / dejad el balcón abierto. / El niño come naranjas. / (Desde mi balcón lo veo). El segador siega el trigo./ (Desde mi balcón lo siento). ¡Si muero,/ dejad el balcón abierto! (Canciones, 1921–1924).” Lorca does not invoke a “return to nature,” he evokes the sensual presence of a place he has always felt rooted in. Today, landscape poems, nature elegies or pastorals like Lorca’s – describing, without overt environmentalism yet wary of anthropocentric nature celebration, the personal experience of a place, an encounter with animals, or an appreciation of vegetation – continue to be written, and many can be read with an eye to ecology thanks, essentially, to their capacity of foregrounding the “spell of the sensuous” (Abram 1997). In its recent commented selection of environment poetry, the Poetry Foundation website distinguishes between romantic poets and modern environmental ones. The former, writing in the 18th and 19th centuries about their empirical experience of nature – as opposed to sketching typified settings like the locus amoenus or the locus terribilis – made nature lyricism a popular genre in western cultures (though in other parts of the globe modern environment poetry may have different historical roots, e.g. haiku in Japan or native oral cultures in Africa or North and South America; World Lyric and World Literature). In contrast to Romanticism, modern environment poetry, originating in industrialized, technological western cultures, has with increasing urgency confronted the human impact on the planet; spreading to other parts of the globe (e.g. to the Niger Delta region, ravaged by neo-colonial fossil fuel extraction, or to the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada, another victim of the same industry [see Alexander 2022]), it advocates indirectly or directly for preservation and conservation. Having said that, do the deep differences underlined by Poetry Foundation, in terms of theme, form, tone, vision and context between romantic European nature lyricism and contemporary environment poetry really amount to a kind of paradigm shift as some have argued (see Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013)? Or rather, is environment poetry a sub-genre of nature poetry (Bryson 2002; 2005), Naturlyrik (Zemanek and Rauscher 2018), a self-critical interpretation of lyricism (Collot 2019; 20232023)?
ii.5.4Though today the formal and stylistic characteristics of the lyric – especially its subjectivism – may be distorted or converted into anti-lyric (Lyric as Mode and Genre), a large body of modern poetry written from an environmental perspective does show traces of its former influence. Such resilience can be put down to various factors, among which figure the traditional association of lyric poetry and nature, the relative brevity of such poetry, and, finally, the form’s adaptability – characteristics that allow, for example, for self-reflexive nature contemplation, parody, objectivist and formalist experimentation and political criticism. This is not to say that other forms of environment poetry do not exist; certain long poems (e.g. A.R. Ammon’s Garbage [1993], G. Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End [1996] or A. Oswald’s Dart [2002]) rank among the most challenging recent examples. Undeniably, though, different versions of the lyric are prevalent in environment poetry, giving rise to an extraordinarily varied canon.
ii.5.5The following poems, dating from the final third of the 20th century, though differing in tone and form, are all self-reflexive. They at once evoke and challenge the tradition of nature lyricism and thus exemplify diverse approaches to the transition from nature to environment or to the rupture between the two. In “Going, Going” (1974), an anti-pastoral in which Philip Larkin sarcastically mocks the sentimental stereotypes of British ruralism, satire only partly conceals a sense of dismay and loss that owes less to love of nature than to criticism of consumer society. In the second-to last stanza Larkin suspects poetry like his own – and literary or pictorial art in general – may soon be the only witnesses of an extinct rural England. The poet manages to establish an unsettling equilibrium between satire and elegy: “And that will be England gone, / The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, / The guildhalls, the carved choirs. / There’ll be books; it will linger on / In galleries; but all that remains / For us will be concrete and tyres.” (High Windows 22).
ii.5.6Gary Snyder views lyric poetry not as the outpouring of personal feelings but as an expression of “wildness” echoing that of non-human nature. In “How Poetry Comes to Me” (1992), he dramatizes poetic inspiration: “It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light.” (The Gary Snyder Reader 557). The poet “meets” the creature / poem “at the edge of the light,” suggesting that poetry is a liminal experience of human and non-human nature merging. In environment poetry like Snyder’s, animals frequently dramatize (rather than symbolize) the urge to represent the more-than-human world (see, among others, Robinson Jeffers, James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda). Feminist Adrienne Rich, in “Natural Resources” (1978), is concerned less with achieving a kind of ecomimesis than with the (always already jeopardized) possibility that poems may “reconstitute the world”: “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: / so much has been destroyed / I have to cast my lot with those / who age after age, perversely, / with no extraordinary power, / reconstitute the world.” (The Dream of a Common Language 264). Confronted with the immensity of environmental destruction and the seeming hopelessness of individual action, the poet vows to join the long line of nature poets whose vision, though lagging behind real destruction, keeps alive the “perverse” hope that poetry may lead to practical action. Erich Fried, too, envisages poetry as a stimulus to preserving the environment, though his view of tradition is more sceptical than Rich’s. In “Neue Naturdichtung” (1972) the poet (“he” rather than “I”) hesitates to follow his desire to write about the forest, uncertain about what he can contribute in light of all that has already been said about trees, none of which has manifestly helped to control deforestation. In the final stanza, he expresses the need to confront such destruction poetically: “Das / wäre ein neuer Eindruck / selbsterlebt und sicher mehr als genug / für ein Gedicht / das diese Gesellschaft anklagt.” (Die Freiheit, den Mund aufzumachen 25). The poet taking stock of the effects of over-exploitation condemns the society encouraging it. Here environment poetry is openly political (Functions of Lyric, Lyric Reception). Contemporary anthologies of environment poetry, published over the last 20 years, show how poets from different countries and cultures, throughout the 20th century up to the present day, have explored the connections and tensions between nature and environment, deeply complexifying these in the process and in response to the planet’s increasing uninhabitability (see Astley 2007; Burnside 2018; Dungy 2009; Gnüg 2013; Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013).
Lyric and the environment in contexts
ii.5.7In his comments on Fried’s “Neue Naturdichtung,” K.O. Konrady observes that many 20th century readers in the West were introduced to lyric poetry when they first came across a nature poem in the romantic vein (see Reich-Ranicki 1997, 209). But he also warns, like Fried himself, of the intellectual futility and political naivety today of poetic appeals to an abstract, extra-social domain of nature, revolutionary as such appeals may have appeared in the final decades of the 18th century (e.g. in German “Sturm und Drang” or in the works of Rousseau and Hugo). Both aspects of Konrady’s remarks – the close connection between romantic naturalism and the lyric; the ambivalent effect of that connection – are important contextual markers of our topic. A schematic history of the evolution of nature lyricism may be sketched as follows: in the course of the 18th century the typified scenery of pre-modern literary representations of nature changed dramatically, especially the tendency to represent non-domesticated landscapes negatively, e.g. as “desert” or “howling wilderness”. In British culture, the 18th century evolution of pastoral from a clearly defined genre of poetry to a – frequently sentimental – promotion of rural life across literary genres and art forms (e.g. music) largely contributed to the re-evaluation of nature. The historical background of this process was the rise of modern science and new technologies, of colonialism and mercantilism, of urbanisation and industrialization, fostering the seemingly contradictory forces of, on the one hand, nature domination, and on the other, of nature sacralization.
ii.5.8It is no coincidence, then, that the quest for a lost organic whole should awaken in this period and that this quest should blossom in poetry – the lyric having metamorphosed from a subgenre into the epitome of poetic creativity (see Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 1798) – that drew its inspiration from empirical, subjective experience of particular places and landscapes (“Erlebnislyrik” in German). Appreciation, celebration and awe in the face of nature’s beauty and power – from the idyllic to the sublime – went hand in hand with the desire for individual self-realization, dramatized, of course, by the completed poem (e.g. Goethe’s “Mailied,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). At the same time, the accelerating domination and exploitation of the non-human world nourished the topos (or myth) of a widening gulf between “man and nature,” and in the view of many romantic poets and thinkers poetry – and the arts more generally – provided a privileged means of healing or overcoming that rift (see Goodbody 2014; Häntzschel 2000; Rigby 2016). Moreover, romantics such as Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, Hugo, Novalis, Rousseau, Shelley, Thoreau or Wordsworth drew attention to the dangers of (as yet local) destructions of the natural environment. Examples of such early environmentalism include Blake’s and Wordsworth’s bleak visions of the city, John Clare’s protest against enclosure of the commons, or Coleridge’s prescient allegory in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) of the way violence against a particular species amounts to violence against all living beings, including humans. The vital connection between nature and lyric forged in the course of the Romantic Revolution left a lasting imprint on modern western poetry’s representation of the natural world. One of its effects is the attribution of intrinsic value to nature; another, represented strongly in modern environment poetry, is the influence on the poet’s vision of certain natural sciences and humanities (botany, forestry, zoology, geography, geology and, of course, ecology), upon the model of a Rousseau, Goethe or Thoreau. The history of pastoral (especially Georgics) since classical antiquity also provides significant counter-examples to stereotyped nature representations prior to Romanticism (see Gifford 1995), as do certain non-European cultures such as early Chinese wilderness poetry (see Astley 2007).
ii.5.9Romantic yearnings for poetic reunion with nature have had many echoes in western cultures, even in texts written by environmentally conscious, nature-literate poets wary of facile sentiment and subjectivism. The fascination with wild places and creatures in North American poetry, nourished by nature writers since Thoreau and reinforced by deep ecology, is a telling example (see Snyder supra); Wendell Berry in “The Peace of Wild Things” (1984), evokes the solace from “despair of the world” a wild place can afford him: “I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds / (…) For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” (Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013, 177). Indeed, the comfort or energy we may draw from landscapes, plants or animals, be they wild or not, remains a frequent theme of environment poetry. Thus German poet Günter Eich, in a very different cultural context from Berry’s, evokes the “solace of trees” in the first line of “Ende eines Sommers” (1954–1955): “Wer möchte leben, ohne den Trost der Bäume!” (Gnüg 2013, 84). Eich voices the need for affective attachment to the non-human world, all the more vital given the urban, industrialised background of the poem’s conception (Categories of Space, Time and Duration in Poetry). He asserts his right to strong emotions about nature at a time when such emotions may appear outdated or naïve. Isn’t his and many other modern poets’ expression of yearning, affection or anxiety (see Fried, Larkin and Rich supra) a legitimate form of caring about non-human as well as human nature?
ii.5.10The dividing line between nature and environment poetry clearly reflects the ever more complex relations between human and non-human nature, which is what makes it is so difficult to clearly define that division. In the postface to his poetry collection Natürliche Gedichte (“Natural Poems”; 2004, 73), Hans Magnus Enzensberger comments on lyricism between nature and environment, including his own, suggesting that nature poetry is out of sync with imperatives of preservation, sustainability and ecology: “Grün ist gut. Naturschutz, Ökologie, Nachhaltigkeit – niemand scheint etwas gegen die Natur zu haben. Nur die Naturlyrik hat einen schlechten Ruf.” We are all “naturally” in favour of nature, he ironically claims, but (or, therefore) we distrust nature poetry. Indeed, as late as the 1990s, French philosopher Jacques Rancière declared nature lyricism to be dead (see Collot). French symbolists like Baudelaire, Malarmé and Verlaine were wary of what they felt to be the blatant subjectivism of the romantic lyric (Enunciative instance in lyric poetry), and their example would influence the anti-romanticism of avant-garde poetry in the early 20th century (see Rilke or Hoffmansthal). The insistence on language as the central concern of poetry (e.g. in French poetry of the 1960s and ’70s or in North American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the 1980s and ’90s) draws into question the notion that poetic language may translate across the divide supposedly separating human and non-human nature. Post-romantic British poetry developed a strong anti-pastoralism due to that genre’s tendency, dating back to the 18th century, not just to idealize but also to stereotype rural life (see Larkin supra), thus covering up, for the consumption of urban readers, the hardships and social injustices suffered by the rural poor. German “Naturlyrik” after 1945 was frequently associated with the homeland myth that had fuelled Nazi-ideology and propaganda in the ’30s (e.g. the German forest, the German countryside). After such ideological pre-emption, who would still dare to write poems about trees (Producer of Lyric)? This is the question Bertolt Brecht famously asks in “An die Nachgeborenen” (1939): “Was sind das für Zeiten, wo / Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist, / Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!” Thus, nature poetry stood accused of political escapism, of being blind to society’s ills. In various guises this suspicion survives to the present day (see Adorno, Mortimer, Solnick). To this criticism, the work of the poets quoted above seems to respond that in times of multiple dangers to the planet’s ecosystems it makes little sense to hierarchise the many “crimes” (“Untaten”) that call for denunciation.
ii.5.11“The dreamy quality of immersion in nature is what keeps us separate from it,” Morton claims (Morton 2007, 202). Upon closer observation, the history of nature lyricism provides many examples of poems that approach nature without seeking “dreamy immersion” – i.e. approach it as environment. Precisely for this reason, the tradition presents itself as a complex interplay of continuity, rejection, reconsideration and innovation. For Baudelaire, despite his criticism of romantic subjectivism, nature remained the supreme challenge to the poetic imagination (see Collot). American modernist W.C.Williams evokes the nature of cities “where nothing will grow”, using a style that emphasizes precise sense impressions without foregrounding the observer’s self, as in “Between Walls” (1938): “The back wings / of the // hospital where / nothing // will grow lie / cinders // in which shine / the broken // pieces of a green / bottle” (Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013, 36). With respect to the romantic cult of pathetic fallacy, Robinson Jeffers claims in “Carmel Point” (1951): “– As for us: / We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we are made from” (Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013, 45). Jeffers calls for (and exemplifies) a poetic voice that represents more than purely human concerns, eschewing “dreamy immersion”. By inserting the adverbial perhaps (“peut-être”) in a comparison between trees and humans, Philippe Jaccottet “Arbres III” (1961–1963), demonstrates just how the poet may go about “unhumani[zing]” the representation of the environment: “Arbres, travailleurs tenaces / ajourant peu à peu la terre // Ainsi le coeur endurant / peut-être purifie” (Poésies 1946–1967, 140).
ii.5.12Thus, in the course of the last century, within their different socio-cultural contexts, poets embraced environmental concerns and anxieties at the same time as they shaped a post-romantic aesthetics. Can the beginnings of a transition from romantic nature lyricism towards environmental consciousness be pinned down historically? Is strict periodization even desirable since, arguably, this “transition” dates back to the “Romantic Ecology” (Bate 1991) itself? A movement of rejection/reinvention of the lyric tradition was clearly underway, mainly in Europe and North and Latin America, from the first decades of the 20th century (Lyric as Mode and Genre). Therefore, the anthologies of environment poetry referenced in this essay feature numerous poets born in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, active until the 1940s or ’50s and sometimes beyond (e.g. Brecht, Garcia Lorca, Jeffers, Williams cited supra). The work of this generation must obviously not be reduced to the theme of nature. That being said, the reflection on the natural world present in their writing contributed significantly to the embracing of more explicit forms of environmentalism and ecology in contemporary lyric writing. Brecht’s poem “Tannen” (1953), about his perception of pine trees, draws a stark historical dividing line between the two halves of the 20th century: “In der Frühe / Sind die Tannen kupfern. / So sah ich sie / Vor einem halben Jahrhundert / Vor zwei Weltkriegen / Mit jungen Augen” (Gnüg 2013, 21). Focused on the horrors of war, Brecht’s poem insists on the importance of context to the poet’s vision; a half-century of war has taught him not to idealize nature. In fact, though the process of rejection/reinvention of nature lyricism had begun well before World War II, it was essentially in the post-war context, especially that of the various environmentalist movements since the 1960s, that pressing ecological issues (pollution of soil, water and air; loss of biodiversity; species extinction; global heating; environmental injustices) forced their way into poetry (Functions of Lyric, Lyric Reception). The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1965 is often considered as an historical marker.
ii.5.13The confrontation of the aesthetics of lyric poetry with the biocentric ethics and politics of ecology of course exacerbated the tension between tradition and revision / rejection that is so characteristic of the semiotic field of poetry addressing nature. Can lyric poetry contribute to bringing about the paradigm shift in human relations to the environment which would usher in an ecological revolution? Can formal and stylistic choices (Lyrical Style, Poetic Language, Stylistic Devices) serve as vehicles of an ecological ethics? Poets confronting such questions face novel challenges to their poetic creativity and to their socio-cultural role; numerous are poets’ essays and manifestos devoted to poetic environmentalism and, more generally, to the relation between literature and ecology (e.g. Enzensberger 2000, Gander and Kinsella 2012, Snyder). This observation goes some way toward explaining the thematic, formal and stylistic diversity that characterizes contemporary environment poetry. While one powerful branch continues to develop contemplative, self-reflexive or phenomenological stances, another, more overtly environmentalist and anti-lyrical, explores the potential of employing scientific, technological, economic, political and other “non-poetic” discourses; the number of ramifications between these two principal branches seems almost infinite. Whether or not one considers that contemporary environment poetry emerged after a complete break with the tradition of nature lyricism, it undoubtedly contributes in many western countries – and, increasingly, all over the globe – to ecological thought and sometimes to political action (e.g. German “Ökolyrik,” a form of eco-propaganda promoting the “Green” movement in the 1970s and 1980s). The anthologies on which this article draws feature (despite their manifest anglophone and Euro-American bias) poets from African nations, from Australia, India, the Caribbean, Israel or from Latin American countries (World Lyric and World Literature). Though general categories such as “environmentalist” are insufficient to define the work of many poets included in the corpus (e.g. E. Cardenal, E. Fried, Ph. Jaccottet, N. Parra, W. Szymborska), environment- or ecopoetry anthologies are symptomatic of the way contemporary ecological issues engage the poetic imagination.
ii.5.14Beyond western cultural traditions, African poets confront the environmentalism of the poor (including themes like deforestation, water management, impacts of mining, oil/petro capital, environmentally induced displacements). In Nigeria, for example, Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni poet and activist assassinated because of his political position, protests the devastation wreaked by fossil fuel extraction in the Niger delta in his powerful “Ogoni ! Ogoni !” (see Astley 2007, 169). The work of Tanure Ojaide, a celebrated Urhobo poet, confronts the same neo-colonialist injustice. The following is an extract from his “Delta Blues” (1998): “This share of Paradise, the delta of my birth, / reels from an immeasurable wound. / Barrels of alchemical draughts flow / from this hurt to the unquestioning world / that lights up its life in a blind trust” (Delta Blues 1998, 21). Tightly weaving together environment and society, Ojaide describes the local destruction caused by global corporations serving consumers in economically dominant parts of the planet (“the unquestioning world”). Native American women poets Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan, among several others, draw their poetic creativity from the holistic worldview of indigenous story telling in which the suffering of all living beings is related across species-boundaries. Indigenous cultures, eco-feminism and cosmopolitanism rather than the lyric tradition inform their poetic ecology. Harjo states: “Being native, female, a global citizen in these times is the root, even the palette,” (Astley 2007, 177) and Hogan’s “To the Light” (1985) has been designed using that very “palette:” “We have stories / as old as the great seas / breaking through the chest, flying out the mouth, / noisy tongues that once were silenced / all the oceans we contain / coming to light.” (Astley 2007, 179–178). Such poetry strives to adapt to an intricate network of land, water, climate, human and non-human animals where abstract categories of “man” and “nature” seem less significant than in western traditions.
ii.5.15How do poems trace the multiple connections between sense of place and sense of planet (see Heise 2012) which globalized economic and socio-cultural relations, but also the ecological disruptions caused by them, impose on us? Can the personal experience of specific places be connected to planetary systems and processes? An enormous challenge to poetry is posed by scientific concepts such as the Anthropocene according to which anthropogenic activity now impacts the planet to an extent comparable to the forces that shaped the long history of geological eras. In its number on “Solastalgia and Poetry of Place,” the poetry journal Windfall points to the difficulty of writing lyric poetry about topics such as climate disruption or species extinction since these planet spanning dangers are said to explode the individual sphere conventionally associated with lyric poetry (see “Solastalgia and Poetry of Place”). As if in response to such concerns, Michael Palmer builds the disruption of the personal sphere into the very syntax of his one line poem “Notes for EchoLake 9” (1981): “Was lying in am lying on I is I am it surrounds” (Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013, 422).
ii.5.16In “For a Coming Extinction” (1967), addressed to the gray whales, W.S. Merwin writes: “Gray whale / Now that we’re sending you to the End / That great god / Tell him / That we who follow you invented forgiveness / And forgive nothing” (Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013, 401–402). Speaking across species boundaries, the lyric “I” takes responsibility for the poem’s discourse (“I write as though you [i.e. the whales] could understand”; Enunciative Instance in Lyric Poetry). Merwin’s lyricism, fiercely self-critical, eschews individualism, describing humans (“we”) as one (destructive) species among all the others. With as wide a perspective, Robert Hass’s “State of the Planet” (2010) observes: “Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth, / To set aside from time to time its natural idioms / Of ardor and revulsion …” (Fischer-Wirth and Street 2013, 306–312). A poem concerned like this one with anthropogenic disruptions to the planetary system integrates the individual “I” in the species-specific “we” of human responsibility “setting aside its natural idioms”; the poet thus reaches outward to “comprehend” planetary processes, remaining present as “I” only to situate the voice in time and place (Categories of Space, Time and Duration in Poetry). Can one define such poetry as “Anthropocene Lyric” (Bristow)? Contemporary environment poetry certainly includes many examples that can be read with the notion of the Anthropocene in mind even though combining that notion with lyricism strains this genre to the utmost. That being said, contemporary environment poetry thrives on questioning lyricism, whether it focuses, among many other themes, on what nature (and poetry about it) has come to mean in an endangered world or on environmentalism (and the need for action) in different parts of the planet.
State of the art
ii.5.17Anglophone ecocriticism in the 1990s had its roots partly in the heritage of the Romantic Revolution (see Bate 1991; Goodbody 2014; Rigby 2016), partly in the nature writing tradition of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold or Carson, as well as in eco-militantism and theory (especially deep ecology, environmental ethics and phenomenology). Its intellectual parenthood with North-American and British canons of nature lyricism is evident. Since the turn of the century, the study of literature, culture and the environment has become an increasingly international undertaking that explores, generally speaking, more sociocentric paths rather than building on models of individual nature contemplation. This move is accompanied by a widening of perspective from local to global. There has also been increased cross-polinization between ecocriticism and post-colonialism or ethnic minority literatures (World Lyric and World Literature); from outside literary studies, eco-feminism, post-humanism and the environmental justice movement have been powerfully influential.
ii.5.18Unsurprisingly, the evolving corpus of environment poetry is scrutinized through a variety of eco-critical lenses in the growing number of studies or essay collections dealing with this subject; the majority of these were published after 2000 and pioneered by anglophone critics. In the North-American context, Bryson’s work is foundational; his essay collection Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002) grapples with the question of definition, bringing together essays by leading critics of the field who comment on the environmental vision of poets such as W.C. Williams, Snyder, Merwin, and Harjo; his The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (2005) provides detailed discussions of some of the same poets as well as reflections on the rapports between place and space in poetic ecology. Quetchenbach’s Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (2000) focuses like Bryson’s work on a selection of representative North-American environment poets whose contribution to environmental studies (e.g. the question of wilderness preservation) and ecocriticism the author evaluates. Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (2012) reflects on how (mainly) modern nature lyricism tries to conjure the sensory experience of the natural world through the poetic shaping of language (i.e. through sound, rhythm, syntax, line breaks, shape on the page; Lyrical Style, Poetic Language, Stylistic Devices). In Britain, Bate’s Romantic Ecology (1991), focusing especially on the Young Romantics, has become a classic as has its eco-phenomenological successor, The Song of the Earth (2000). Gifford’s Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (1995) is influenced by the critic’s work on pastoral and “post-pastoral”; it offers ground-breaking discussions of representative British environment poetry (e.g. Ted Hughes; see also his Pastoral, 1998). In France, Collot’s Le Chant du monde dans la poésie contemporaine française (1991) assembles and discusses a corpus of post-formalist lyric poetry engendered by the environmental crisis (e.g. Y. Bonnefoy, M. Deguy, P. Jaccottet, J.-P. Michel, B. Noël); his study contributes to his wider project of developing a “literary geography” or geopoetics (géopoétique: a transdisciplinary field bringing together science, the arts and literature; see Collot 2023; Bouvet and Posthumus 2016; White 1994). Vinclair elevates poetry to a means of ecological resistance due to what he considers (like Snyder) the “wildness” of poetic language (Agir non agir: Éléments pour une poésie de la résistance écologique, 2020). The essay collection Ecopoetry. Poesia del degrado ambientale (Scaffai 2018) presents a broad discussion of Italian environment poetry dealing with the irretrievable damage caused to the natural world (“degrado ambientale”). Campos López’ “Estudios sobre la ecopoesía hispánica contemporánea: Hacia un estado de la cuestion” (2018) attempts to describe the ramifications of ecopoetry in Spain and Latin America, while Zemanek and Rauscher (2018), Graczyk (2004), and Kopisch (2012) explore the rich corpus of modern Germanic Naturlyrik (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) analysing its historical roots and contexts and adopting a perspective strongly influenced by cultural and political ecology.
ii.5.19According to Solnick (2017, 25), studies like these largely correspond to an ecocritical “mainstream” in that they approach poems as examples of dealing individually with alienation from the natural environment and hence for adopting a more responsible attitude. What value do ecocritics actually attribute to the central concept of the oikos? Is it simply another word for harmony or care? What are this “household’s” exact dimensions (see Philips 2003, The Truth of Ecology)? Bristow’s The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person and Place (2015) and Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene. Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2017), both devoted mainly to established British and Irish poets (e.g. Heaney, Hughes, Mahon, Prynne), argue that the growing risk of environmental catastrophe on a planetary scale calls for constant revision of ecopoetic perspectives. Their primary concern is the question of the Anthropocene, which at once reinforces – negatively! – the preponderance of the human in the way we conceive of our planet’s history and radically calls into question the nature-culture separation. What is its impact on ecopoetics? In their respective studies both authors bring to their ecocriticism the awareness that the biosphere can no longer be contained within local or even regional or national boundaries. Similarly, Keller’s Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene (2017) analyses the representation of pollution, dislocation, eco-apocalypse, but also the linguistic and formal impact on poetry of notions such as deep-time and inter-species communication. Cocola’s Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry (2016) is one of the few multi-ethnic and transnational studies in the field that compares poets from different linguistic backgrounds (it includes readings of Neruda, Santos Perez, Cardenal, Harjo). French critic Françoise Besson’s Ecology and Literature in English: Writing to Save the Planet (2019), though not exclusively concerned with poetry, is probably the most transnational study to date, including, for example, indigenous poetry from Latin and North America as well as Asian and African examples (World Lyric and World Literature).
Contemporary practices, methods and debates
ii.5.20If, as Auden says, “poetry makes nothing happen,” it can perhaps, through the poet’s work on language, form and image, prompt concern over practices and discourses that frame our relationships with the non-human world, on a local as well as a planetary level. Indeed, attachment to place – essential to environment poetry – in relation to planet forces us to re-think the very notion of human agency. It has certainly become increasingly difficult to foreground individual experience when as a species we humans have emerged as a geophysical force beyond our own control. As critics such as Alaimo (2010), Morton (2007), Phillips (2003) or Solnick (2017) insist, eco-awareness requires something more radical than adopting ecology as a moral imperative, namely, the will to understand the ways in which organisms, species, societies and environments are connected. It requires confronting the challenge that the Antropocene period poses to our understanding of what constitutes human agency; this may include questioning the idea of the Anthropocene itself – after all, the movements of tectonic plates, for example, are not human induced though we may exacerbate the damages caused by earthquakes and tsunamis. By way of consequence, ecocriticism attempts to examine environment poetry in the context of broader concerns such as environmental justice, eco-feminism, post-humanism, bio-semiosis, political and cultural ecology, geo-poetics, systems theory, geology, biology or physics (Functions of Lyric, Lyric Reception). For example, doesn’t our immersion in incalculable numbers of material agencies (i.e. our environment) draw into question the way we separate, at least in western cultures, human from non-human nature? Is such a separation not in reality a politically, economically and culturally convenient myth which has legitimated extractivism as well as nature lyricism?
ii.5.21What, then, might be the manifestations of post-humanist lyricism? A possible answer, in Belgian eco-philosopher Isabelle Stenger’s terms, could be poetic voices that invite readers to “thinking through / with the environment” (“penser par le milieu”; Stengers 2019, 46). Such voices could figure among the multiple manifestations of an active ecological and social culture that the philosopher wishes to see emerging, all over the globe, from “devastated environments” (“milieux ravagés”); a culture that represents more-than-human environments or worlds inhabited by a multitude of beings with their own needs, claims and forms of communication rather than only as “resources” for human consumption (Alaimo 2010). Such voices will inevitably be both ecological and social in outlook. According to Stengers (2019, 20) once more, ecology is a “practice of observation, attention and imagination”; this definition contains both an invitation and a challenge to lyric poetry turned towards the (human) environment.