By simply asking Google to give a definition of “nature” you get two definitions, but if you dig a little deeper, not even straying from the first page of results, you can pull up the Merriam-Webster, Collins, Cambridge, and Macmillan dictionaries that’ll have anywhere from three to nine definitions. Just from this knowledge alone, it’s easy to see that even pinning down what exactly nature itself is is a task in of itself, and that is reflected in the vast diversity throughout history we see in nature poetry. While I could contextualize the history of nature poetry here, I believe the most important things to keep in mind when we look at nature writing and its parallels with history is that “our concepts of nature are relative, historically determined. The nature poem is affected by ideology, by literary conventions as well as social and culture ideas” (Hisrch).
This is why we see such a difference between the time of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Coleridge (the Romantic era which took up the majority of the 19th century); the time of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost and Eliot (modernism arose in the late 19th century and continued into the early 20th); and the time of Plath, Lorde, and Rich (all instrumental poets of 2nd wave feminism which lasted roughly from the early 1960s to the 80s). The Romantic era (at least in terms of its art) can be defined by its focus on emotion and individualism while it glorifies nature and the past. It was in part a reaction to the age of industrialization (Romanticism), a reaction to norms of the era that preceded it, the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature (Casey). Looking at modernism, we see a time where people were moving from the rural to the urban (Hass) with the discipline of ecology beginning to immerge. With great strides in technology and massive changes in ways of life, modernist poets were revaluating the ideals of their Romantic predecessors (Glossary of Poetic Terms Modernism). With feminism, we saw many women poets analyzing how the female body had been used to represent nature, and as it became more and more apparent that global warming was becoming a crisis at the turn of the millennia, a sense of urgency about environmentalism immerged (Hass). The old saying of art imitating life is not without merit, but something definitely should be said for the fact that though nature is a very reoccurring subject in poetry throughout time and place, it still has not been easily defined.
The Editor’s Preface to The Ecopoetry Anthology tries to break this down further by placing nature poetry into three distinct groupings: there is nature poetry, environmental poetry, and ecopoetry (Hass). To summarize, nature poetry is simply poetry in which nature is the subject or inspiration. It is poetry not necessarily agenda-driven or accurate in its portrayal leading to anthropomorphism and/or sentimentality. Environmental poetry is actively engaged in the politics and activism of the world’s flora and fauna. While not poetry (unless you count Robin Williams rapping as a bat), the first media example that popped into my mind of environmental writing was the 1992 movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest. The film is a great example of, no matter how well-intentioned, being agenda-driven to the point of painting a man-bad vs trees-good black-and-white narrative belittles your argument. At best, people feel defensive and talked down to and at worst, take your weak argument for what it’s worth and hand-wave it away. The third grouping, ecopoetry, seems less clearly defined. It looks at the other groupings of poetry, other conventions of poetic form, structures, themes, and history, and asks questions and actively deconstructs them within poetry. It plays with the language and structure at its roots to create something new. There can be a lot of overlap between these groupings, but even the preface itself says this is just a starting point to look at nature poetry from many angles (Hass).
While separating nature poetry—which we will be referring to as green poetry as an overarching term for the rest of this essay to avoid confusion—into these three groupings is useful, they feel more like subgenres that are a part of an overarching whole. When reading or writing my own green poetry, I find myself analyzing more of the role of nature itself within the work. Does the force of nature itself effectively become its own character in the work, or is it more of a spring board to talk about other things? One could argue whether using the woods, a river, a mountain, or even aspects of the urban landscape as a background in of itself in writing marks it as “green” in my opinion. I like to think about what the relationship between the speaker (which is not necessarily the poet’s own thoughts and opinions) in the poem and nature itself is. If the speaker or character is merely walking from Point A to Point B through a desert and uses that time to focus on their personal lives and opinions, does the desert itself matter? This is an example of the bedsheet theory of writing place (Prentiss and Wilkins). Then again, a poet could also use nature as a symbol, motif, and/or metaphor while not especially focusing on nature itself. In this case, I think of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, one of my favourite poems:
(Before I continue, I promise not to make a regular habit of name-dropping specific works or literary jargon unless I absolutely have to and will try my best to explain their inclusion as needed. I have personally spent too much time around academic poets who can quote whole poems from memory (awesome for them) and drop philosophers’ and poets’ names into conversation as if everyone will know them. I’m not here for that. However, “The Road Not Taken” is public domain and I can’t help myself.)
“THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, 1915
One could perhaps read the poem literally as a man trying to decide on which path to take when he meets a fork in the road through the forest, and in that case, this feels like green poetry. However, if we dig into the deeper symbolism of the poem, it could be read to be about the decisions we make in life. Do we take the path that other people have taken before, which may be easier and proven to lead to success, or do we take the less trodden path, which may be more exciting but also lead to your downfall? What I love about this poem is you could argue whether Frost gives us a straight answer on this, because though he “took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference” we don’t know if those differences were for better or worse. We all see that he is “telling this with a sigh.” Is it a sigh of exasperation, resignation, relief? We don’t know. We could argue whether Frost’s path less traveled was for good or ill just as much as could argue if it is green poetry, as while nature is certainly used within it, I feel the main focus is on the decision the speaker makes, not on the road itself. I’ve seen similar things argued against Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the movie adaptation of the same name. Watching a movie review of it on the YouTube channel “Homemade Wanderlust,” the lovely Dixie comments how many people don’t consider it a proper hiking book because Strayed focused on her personal story rather than the backpacking itself (Mills).What everyone can agree on however, is that while Cheryl Strayed hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, the trail and surrounding environs were as much a character and force to reckoned with as much as Strayed herself. At times I’m sure it felt to Cheryl nature acted against her as a foe or helped her as a friend, and then at other times she may have felt nature was just as apathetic to her as Strayed felt a victim to lost toenails and creepy men. Personally, it’s this nature as force or character that I look for to define whether I feel a work of art is green or not.
The Ecopoetry Anthology preface talks about how, for nature poetry, nature is simply the inspiration, but that can really apply to all green poetry. I think it’s important to look at what role nature plays in each poem. It goes beyond nature being portrayed as a torrential foe, nurturing ally, something that needs protecting and saving, or an apathetic force with no agenda beside that of its own existence. Nature can be simply a setting or framing device for telling a story, used as imagery to evoke emotion, used as a metaphor to talk about other themes or topics, or some combination of all three and more. Of course, no matter what grouping, category, or label you put on a piece of art, there will always be another way to interpret it, and no one but the writer themselves will know their true intention, inspiration, and what set pencil to page. Many would argue that the original intention or inspiration doesn’t matter when a piece of art finds its way into another’s hands—cue flashbacks to reading Barthes’ Death of an Author in university—but frankly, trying to categorize or define art, or nature for that matter, while helpful in lecture halls and drunken conversations with philosophy majors, is a fruitless endeavour when you’re just starting out, perhaps only restricting one’s views on what can and cannot be green poetry. For the sake of everyone’s sanity while reading, I will go with the broad, overarching definition of green poetry as illustrated in Environmental and Nature Writing A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, in that it is
writing that is as concerned with the physical world as it is with character or plot, writing that speaks to the ways human journeys are bound up in landscape and place, writing that allows us to see the natural world and our place in it more clearly, writing that inspires and challenges us to enter and know the natural world, writing that helps us move through that world with more care and wonder[.]
(Prentiss and Wilkins)
If art could be seen as anything, it is something that gives a voice to someone or something. It is up to you, whether you be a writer or reader, how you will define that voice.
Works Cited
Casey, Christopher. “Broken Noses and Missing Limbs: Foundations.” 30 October 2008. web.archive.org. Web. 4 June 2020.
“Glossary of Poetic Terms Modernism.” 2018. Poetry Foundation. Web. 15 March 2018.
Hass, Robert. “American Ecopoetry: An Introduction.” Fisher-Wirth, Ann and Laura-Gray Steet. Ecopoetry Anthology. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013. xli-lxiii. Print.
Hisrch, Edward. “Nature Poetry: From a Poet’s Glossary.” 2 September 2014. Poets.org. Web. 4 June 2020. <https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/nature-poetry-poets-glossary>.
Mills, Jessica. “PCT Thru-Hiker Breaks Down The Movie WILD.” 22 April 2020. YouTube. Web. 4 June 2020.
Prentiss, Sean and Joe Wilkins. Environmental and Nature Writing A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Print.
“Romanticism.” 13 October 2005. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. 4 June 2020.