Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 12
Preface: The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead......Page 14
Introduction: Care in Such a World......Page 16
PART ONE......Page 32
"stony rocks for the conies" Singing Ecology unto the Lord......Page 34
"Western wind, when will thou blow"
: Anon Was an Environmentalist......Page 43
"The stationary blasts of waterfalls": Blake, the Wordsworths, and the Dung......Page 49
"The white Eddy-rose… obstinate in resurrection"
: Coleridge Imagining......Page 54
"last oozings hours by hours"
: John Keats Eking It Out......Page 61
"Its only bondage was the circling sky": John Clare at Home in Helpston
......Page 71
"Nature was naked, and I was also"
: Adamic Walt Whitman......Page 79
"Earth's most graphic transaction"
: Syllables of Emily Dickinson......Page 90
"sick leaves… storm-birds… rotten rose… rain-drop": Nature Shadowing Tho
mas Hardy......Page 103
"Freshness deep down things": The World Charged by Gerard Manley Hopkins
......Page 109
"O honey bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare": Nature Versus History in W. B. Yeats
......Page 119
PART TWO......Page 128
"strangeness from my sight": Robert Frost and the Fun in How You Say a Thing
......Page 130
"white water rode the black forever": Frost and the Necessity of Metaphor
......Page 138
"Larks singing over No Man's Land": England Thanks to Edward Thomas, 1914-1917
......Page 145
"the necessary angel of earth": Wings of Wallace Stevens
......Page 151
"broken / seedhusks": Reviving America with William Carlos Williams
......Page 156
"source then a blue as": Williams and the 
Environmental News......Page 164
"room for me and a mountain lion": D. H. Lawrence in Taormina and Taos
......Page 177
"not man / Apart": Ocean, Rock, Hawk, and Robinson Jeffers
......Page 185
"submerged shafts of the / / sun, / split like spun / glass": Marianne Moore's Fantastic Reverence
......Page 191
"There, there where those black spruces crowd": To Steepletop and Ragged Island with Edna St. Vincent Millay
......Page 199
"Gale sustained on a slope": Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu
......Page 209
"the wild / braid of creation / trembles": Stanley Kunitz -His Nettled Field, His Dune Garden
......Page 217
"Bright trout poised in the current": Things Whole and Holy for Kenneth Rexroth
......Page 250
"I swayed out on the wildest wave alive": Theodore Roethke from Greenhouse to Seascape
......Page 255
"That they are there!": George Oppen's Psalm of Attentiveness
......Page 262
"surprised at seeing": Elizabeth Bishop Traveling
......Page 267
"Why is your mouth all green?": Something Alive in May Swenson
......Page 278
PART THREE......Page 288
"care in such a world": Earth Home to William Stafford
......Page 290
"The season's ill": America's Angst and Robert Lowell's
......Page 298
"that witnessing presence": Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov
......Page 305
"the tree making us / look again": Shirley Kaufman's Roots in the Air
......Page 314
"that the rock might see": News of the North from John Haines
......Page 321
"asking for my human breath": Trust in Maxine Kumin
......Page 329
"What are you doing out here / this windy": Wind in the Reeds in the Voice of A. R. Ammons
......Page 333
"between the earth and silence": W. S. Merwin's Motion of Mind
......Page 340
"bear blood" and "Blackberry Eating": Zest of Galway Kinnell
......Page 348
"Kicking the Leaves": Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at Eagle Pond Farm
......Page 357
"I dared not cast / / But silently cast": Ted Hughes Capturing Pike
......Page 366
"the still pond and the egrets beating home": Derek Walcott, First to See Them
......Page 374
"It looks just like the Cascades": Gary Snyder's Eye for the Real World
......Page 383
"Just imagine": Can Poetry Save the Earth?
......Page 394
Sources......Page 398
Text Credits......Page 412
Acknowledgments......Page 417
A......Page 420
B......Page 421
C......Page 422
E......Page 423
G......Page 424
I......Page 425
K......Page 426
L......Page 427
M......Page 428
P......Page 429
R......Page 430
S......Page 431
V......Page 433
W......Page 434
Z......Page 435