Poetry & Nature

Classically, an idyll is a pastoral poem about shepherds. In more contemporary contexts, an idyll is often seen as similar to a pastoral or descriptive poem depicting a peaceful, idealized, rural scene or setting. It often celebrates the beauty of nature, rural life, and the harmony that can be found between people and the natural world. Idylls typically evoke a sense of tranquility and nostalgia, as well as a longing for a simpler, rural way of life.

Well-known historical examples of the idyll include “The Shepherd” by William Blake and “To Autumn” by John Keats. Contemporary examples, which often challenge, question, or complicate the idealized assumptions of the idyll and place the rural landscape in contrast with the urban, include James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” Ariana Benson’s “Hotbeds in Norfolk, Virginia,” and Tracy K. Smith’s “Watershed.”

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Raleigh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s “Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”

Ecopoetics places emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the writing of poems—and the environment that produces it. It arose out of the increasing awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster in the late twentieth century. 

As a multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as particular attention to innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is related to but not the same as nature poetry.

The influential journal Ecopoetics, edited by Jonathan Skinner, publishes writing that explores “creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology” and features poets such as Jack Collom, Juliana Spahr, and Forrest Gander.

In his introduction to a collection on ecopoetry and water, Forrest Gander writes, "there are, of course, long traditions of pastoral or “nature” poetry in both Eastern and Western-language literature. But whereas 'nature poetry' often takes for its themes the so-called 'natural world' as though it were separate from the human world, ecopoetry asks how we are involved in—and a part of—all that surrounds us. Ecopoets attempt to offer insights, both formally and thematically, into the complex interrelationships between nature and culture, language and perception."