The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”

“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”

The Romantic poets, who were the forerunners of what is now called eco-poetry, marveled at the splendor of the natural world—albeit one arguably less tainted by climate change, the massive elimination of species, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, tornados, and dense urbanization everywhere. Or were they simply naïve and idealistic, able to ignore the haze of emphysema-inducing coal dust that hung permanently over London in their time, companion to the sewage running down its streets? They evoke a sense of purity in poem after poem, such as Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.”

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

In the 21st century, “nature poetry” continues to be written, though often with a more critical eye. As the 2008 anthology Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology puts it, “poetry is the most distilled verbal expression of environmental awareness.” Rapture as such at the forest, mountains, rivers, and seas comprising Earth never goes out of style, yet it is more difficult today to discern whether that half-hidden violet is seen through a haze made of morning fog, or just polluted air. In “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” the moderator, Angela Hume, reflects on this very process of development from Wordsworth et alii to now:

“While eco-poetics may lead to a kind of ‘nature poetry’ reframed or re-conceived, it is still very much rooted in the soil of the earlier practices and of Romanticism…Eco-poetics may not necessarily be inspired directly by scientific evidence of human environmental impact. We can see, for example, what we might call an eco-poetic sensibility quite active in the work of the modernists- long before science could tell us definitively that we humans are responsible for a changing climate and a global water crisis. And yet: that moment came at which poets could no longer write ‘nature’ as something not entirely implicated in and by human society.”