The Essential Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch

Author:Edward Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

SEE ALSO ballad, epic, imagism, mock epic, oral poetry, saga, verse novel.

nature poetry, nature in poetry The natural world has been one of the recurring subjects of poetry, frequently the primary one, in every age and country. Yet we cannot easily define nature, which, as Gary Snyder points out in No Nature (1992), “will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions” and “will dodge our expectations and theoretical models.” Yet the urge to describe the natural world—its various landscapes, its changing seasons, its surrounding phenomena—has been an inescapable part of the history of poetry. Wendell Berry defines nature poetry as poetry that “considers nature as subject matter and inspiration.”

Our concepts of nature are relative, historically determined. The nature poem is affected by ideology, by literary conventions as well as social and cultural ideas. Raymond Williams contends that “nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” The term nature is itself contested now because it seems to assume an oversimplified relationship between the human and the environment. “Nature” has been the site of so many different naive symbolisms, such as purity, escape, and savagery. That’s why poets and critics often prefer the concept of ecopoetry, which presupposes a complicated interconnection between nature and humankind.

The idea that the seasons structure the actual rhythms or symbolic passages of life goes back to antiquity. The Canaanite mythical Poem of Aqhat (fifteenth century B.C.E.) rotates around seasonal change. Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century B.C.E.) takes special interest in agricultural practices. There is a long tradition of the pastoral, stemming from Theocritus’s Idylls (third century B.C.E.), which honor the simplicities of rural life and create such memorable figures as Lycidas, the archetypal poet-shepherd who inspired John Milton’s pastoral elegy “Lycidas” (1638). Virgil’s Eclogues (37–30 B.C.E.) define the tradition by characterizing the serenity of shepherds living in idealized natural settings. The Chinese Book of Songs (tenth to fifth century B.C.E.) is rife with seasonal poetry, as is the Japanese haiku, which began as a short associative meditation on the natural world. Think of the Old English “Seafarer” and the Middle English “Cuckoo’s Song,” of the passage of seasons in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century). In the Renaissance, urbane poets apprenticed themselves to poetry by writing pastoral soliloquies or dialogues, which construct and imagine rural life. The tradition is exemplified by Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1580) and Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579). Rural poetry flourished in seventeenth-century retirement and garden poems, in landscape poems that delivered formal and structured descriptions of topography, such as John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642).

James Thomson, the first important eighteenth-century nature poet, infused his descriptions in The Seasons (1730) with his age’s sense of God’s sustaining presence in nature. Alexander Pope leads “Essay on Criticism” (1711) with the rule “First follow Nature.” For him, “following nature” means honoring classical precedent: “Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; / To copy Nature is to copy Them.” Pope describes these rules as “Nature Methodiz’d.” Writing at a time when

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