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Nature poets?

26 replies

Gormenghastly · 09/06/2024 17:34

I am interested in discovering more poets who write about nature and the elements, as in Ted Hughes and Christina Rossetti.

Not a fan of Wordsworth to be honest, after having lived in the Lakes for many years, but would love to hear of any classic and/or contemporary poets who utilise a similar imagery - nature, weather and wilderness - in their work.

OP posts:
eddiemairswife · 09/06/2024 18:04

John Clare

cherryassam · 09/06/2024 18:16

Not quite what you asked for, but I recently read North Country edited by Karen Lloyd and loved it. There were a range of classic and contemporary poets, alongside excellent nature writing

Gormenghastly · 09/06/2024 18:32

Wonderful, thank you!

OP posts:
Ohthere · 09/06/2024 18:39

Studied this recently so can also suggest William Morris (the lapse of the year, which is exquisitely illustrated), Vita Sackville-West, and if you search on the guardian website in about 2010 (I think) they had a whole series of nature poems by contemporary poets inspired by the climate crisis. Also try searching on ‘poetry foundation’ as there are several other great women poets whose writing is very focused on nature whose names I can’t quite remember at the moment!

MaudGone · 09/06/2024 18:57

Edward Thomas! Try 'Sedge-Warblers' for an example of his poetry. Some editions of his work contain extracts from his prose nature-writing, as well.

MaudGone · 09/06/2024 19:01

Thomas Hardy's poetry as well.

Cornishmumofone · 09/06/2024 19:22

Seamus Heaney

FizzingAda · 09/06/2024 19:37

John Clare and Thomas Hardy.
Emily Bronte also wrote a few.

MotherOfCatBoy · 09/06/2024 19:44

RS Thomas has a lot of nature in his poetry but it is a bit bleak - set in North Wales isolated places. I loved it in school though.

Modern American - try Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry.

Gormenghastly · 10/06/2024 02:07

I can do bleak!
Will check all of these out, thanks everyone.

OP posts:
Cooper77 · 10/06/2024 17:49

Did you mean just Brits? Chaucer's Canterbury Tales open with a lovely piece of nature writing. And there are some beautiful passages in Milton's Paradise Lost. (He's describing Eden, of course, but in reality it's the English countryside.)

Blake's poetry includes lots of vivid, intense, almost psychedelic descriptions of nature. Keats' odes contain some gorgeous nature writing as well. Have you tried Coleridge? I remember a lovely poem by him about watching his infant son asleep, and how the cottages were "smoking in the morning sun," or something like that.

D. H. Lawrence would be another obvious choice. Plus Thomas Hardy and John Clare. Even Philip Larkin, who is often thought of as a gloomy suburbanite, wrote some exquisite poems about the natural world. It may only be there in the background, but some of his lines are breathtaking. Actually, if you browse the canon, most of the great poets draw on nature – even Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Auden, Wilfred Owen, etc.

Oh, and John Betjeman wrote some lovely poems about the Cornwall. He also wrote some of my all-time favourite lines:

Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane,
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire

MotherFeministWoman · 10/06/2024 17:51

Kathleen Jamie

KnitnNatterAuntie · 10/06/2024 17:57

I have a lovely book called "Green & Pleasant Land" edited by Ana Sampson . . . it contains so many lovely nature poems grouped by season

I've just looked on Amazon and it's very expensive but you may strike it lucky in a second hand bookshop . . . .

muddyford · 10/06/2024 18:16

Edward Thomas, one of the WW1poets.

muddyford · 10/06/2024 19:29

KnitnNatterAuntie · 10/06/2024 17:57

I have a lovely book called "Green & Pleasant Land" edited by Ana Sampson . . . it contains so many lovely nature poems grouped by season

I've just looked on Amazon and it's very expensive but you may strike it lucky in a second hand bookshop . . . .

Loads on eBay for c£3.

Gormenghastly · 13/06/2024 00:35

Have only just realised that I think I am looking for women writers. I am ever so slightly tired of the Old Guard, as wonderful as they may be.
If male, perhaps contemporary?
I do so love Blake though.

I hear you about Amazon, will be having a scout on ebay!

OP posts:
MsNeis · 13/06/2024 15:40

Mary Oliver

Cooper77 · 13/06/2024 23:25

Gormenghastly · 09/06/2024 17:34

I am interested in discovering more poets who write about nature and the elements, as in Ted Hughes and Christina Rossetti.

Not a fan of Wordsworth to be honest, after having lived in the Lakes for many years, but would love to hear of any classic and/or contemporary poets who utilise a similar imagery - nature, weather and wilderness - in their work.

I was watching a YouTube clip on Ted Hughes recently, and someone argued that he isn’t really a nature poet at all. A true nature poet writes about nature itself, whereas Hughes is interested in what lays behind or within nature - the elemental forces of lust and violence and so on that move the natural world. I thought it was an interesting point. If you think about the crow poems, for example. I mean, they’re not about the animal at all. Crow is merely a symbol for the life force itself.

BurbageBrook · 14/06/2024 11:22

Kathleen Jamie.

AsYouWantToBe · 14/06/2024 11:27

Alice Oswald. Maybe start with her first two collections, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Wall and Dart (the latter about the river Dart in Devon), or her more recent Falling Awake.

WaitingForMojo · 14/06/2024 11:34

Mary Oliver

HoneyButterPopcorn · 14/06/2024 11:50

David Henry Thoreau

powershowerforanhour · 16/06/2024 12:38

Auatralian bush poets - the likes of Banjo Paterson, WH Ogilvie, Henry Lawson and David Campbell- have some of the best nature poetry I think.

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