Refiguring the work of ecopoetics
Maybe it’s time for poets to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to the environment, poetry is part of the problem. Poetry may even be the root of the problem: it’s a Romantic rhetoric of the sublime that makes nature into something eternal, infinite, divine, and separate from humans. For a famous example — and I’ll come back to it later — a few lines from Wordsworth’s 1798 “Tintern Abbey”:
