“Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter…the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.” [1]

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, sc.1.

Poetic “genres” usually refer to a form, metre or style of writing, so we get an ode or a sonnet or a ballad and of course free-verse. Sometimes there is a reference to the nature of what the poet is doing with the poem, so we might get a narrative poem, satirical verse, even metaphysical verse. It is rare that the adjective, whatever it is, actually signifies a distinctive world view or some kind of paradigm that the poet subscribes to and develops in the poem. Nature poetry may be about nature but what it says or how it approaches the natural world can be very pluralistic; the same might be true of religious verse. I want to argue that “ecopoetry” is more specific and does at least suggest certain expectations of a distinct approach to the natural world. And this is so not because of any doctrine or dictum but because of the way the prefix “eco” is generally used; what we usually refer to as “general usage”.

The compound word itself is not in my edition of the Oxford Dictionary nor does it appear in its hyphenated version; it cries out for definition. It is of course a synthesis of “poetry” and “ecology” and we do have some other examples, some in the dictionary and some not, of synthesis type pairings of ecology with other words or disciplines: we have for example, ecosphere, ecosystem, ecofeminism and the one I particularly want to consider later, ecopsychology. And all these uses of the prefix “eco” suggest a particular and distinctive way of looking at the “stem” word; in this case poetry. First of all however, it is crucial to look at the meaning of “ecology” which gets bandied about a lot at the moment and is central to the nature of the poetry we are considering here.

“Ecology” is a branch of biology and it refers to “the relationship between living organisms and their environment” (Collins English Dictionary) The Shorter Oxford Dictionary is fuller, it has: “The branch of biology that deals with organisms’ relations to one another and to the physical environment in which they live.” The important concept in both definitions is “relationship”. However, I don’t think these definitions accurately reflect the present context and time in which we find “ecopoetry”. Both definitions talk of “living organisms” and the relationships between them and other living organisms but suggest that the relationship these living organisms have with their environments is different. The Oxford definition refers to the “physical environment in which they live” and the Collins simply has “their environment”: in both cases there is no suggestion that the environment is living. In the case of the Oxford it is described as “physical”; which one might assume implies it is therefore not biological. It concerns rock, soil, temperature, water, sunlight etc. and these are not living organisms. This view has now to be radically re-visioned when we view our planet through the lens of Gaia Theory.
Gaia theory argues that our planet is a self-regulating system similar to a living organism and some would go further and say that if you see the Earth from a truly holistic point of view you have to see the entire planet as a living organism (Lovelock, 2005)[2]. Indeed, when we talk about global warming, we talk about harming the planet not just the living organisms in it. As Alan Watts said: ‘You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean”[3]. To see the planet in this holistic way, as the procreative womb of life as we know it, is essential, in my opinion, to this poetic view of ecology and to the synthesis suggested in the concept “ecopoetry”.
The pre Gaia view of planet Earth makes a split between communities of living organisms and the environment of soil, air, water and temperature that these life forms inhabit, however, the biological definition of life has changed very much since I was a student in school. I learned then that living organisms must fulfil certain conditions to be thought of as alive. These conditions included qualities such as: an ability to respond to stimuli, the ability to reproduce, to excrete, to ingest food, to grow , to respire or breathe etc. but a more contemporary understanding is that of “Autopoiesis” (Maturana and Verela, 1972)[4],  which suggests that living organisms are defined by their ability to organize and produce the components necessary for their continued existence.[5] With this in mind one can see how the planet as a whole could be seen as a living system and the concept of a boundary between living organisms and environments is thereby illusory. This is a concept anticipated in Ken Wilber’s early book, “No Boundary”[6], in which he describes our skin and body as being an illusory boundary between us and what lies outside it: we are the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink.
To see the Earth otherwise is to fall into the Cartesian trap of a subject object split; after all, an organism’s environment contains other living organisms as well as what we tended to call the physical, i.e. rocks, water air etc. and to make this split is to denigrate even the complex multicellular living beings simply as “objects” in our environment. However, as a result of this new way of seeing the Earth we redefine Ecology: now Ecology signifies the relationships between living organisms as well as relationships between these and their living environments so that each relationship involves a participation, not only an I–Thou but a sharing of being, a holistic recognition of a partnership and dependency between the substance of being itself. Jorge Ferrer, in his book “Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality” (2002), discussing the inadequacy of Descartes’s subject/object split and introducing “reciprocal participation” as a radical way of relating to the world about us, suggests a blurring of identity and an almost symbiotic dependency which involves this shared sense of being:
“The coming together of subject and object, or the knower and the known, in the act of knowing obliterates their distinction in the moment of contact…. To the degree that contact occurs, it involves an ontological shift – it is not a matter of the subject “viewing” the object but rather the subject is now “being” the object.” (Page 32)
This radical philosophical view suggested in Ferrer’s book is reinforced by an equally radical scientific view almost 20 years later in Merlin Sheldrake’s book about fungi, “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.” (2020) He is discussing “identity” from a number of scientific points of view, he says:
“…it is no longer possible to conceive of any organism – human included – as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with. The biological identity of most organisms can’t be prised apart from the life of their microbial symbionts.”
He goes on to help with that definition of ecology discussed above:
“The word ‘ecology’ has its roots in the Greek word oikos meaning ‘house’, ‘household’ or ‘dwelling place’. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms are dwelling places. Life is nested biomes all the way down.” (Page 102)
This loss of our imagined identity might be seen as a confusing deconstruction leading to a diminished sense of “being” or more positively as an expansion of  our  consciousness similar to the mystical nature experiences of many people as described in the work of Evelyn Underhill (1993), R. M. Bucke (1991) and particularly Paul Marshall’s “Mystical Encounters with the Natural World” (2005).
Given this new, radical, holistic view of our place in the life of planet Earth we need a new  poetic imagination in order to cope with and understand the sometimes complex and bewildering readjustment necessary in our ways of participating  and relating with the natural world. Stephan Harding, author of “Animate Earth” (2009) and “Gaia Alchemy” (2022), in a conversation with Morag Gamble puts it this way: and what follows is my paraphrase:
“So I’m trying to put together the science but in a poetic way…so we can use the science to awaken our poetic nature. So unless we have a poetic relationship, a love relationship (with Gaia and our planet) we are not going to do anything about it (that is the crisis in nature right now) I want to fall in love with nature much more.”
I also want to flag up the corollary of this idea: we can use the poetry, “our poetic nature” to begin to explore the  science.
Stephan goes on to talk about the deep psychological relationship between Gaia and the human psyche, implying the dissolution of the old cartesian split between the human psyche and the anima mundi, or the world soul, or spirit if you will, which is Gaia herself. He says:
“For me it’s integrating Jung’s four functions; thinking, feeling, intuition and sensing; put them together then in the middle is Gaia. When we integrate our psyche in that way then we can really fall in love with this amazing Cosmos of ours.”[7]
Thom Gunn, the poet (1929-2004), talked of how poetry helped him understand the world. He is talking I think about his psychological state but “the world” also suggests to me the entire eco-psychological world which Stephan talks of above. Gunn says:
“Writing poetry has in fact become a certain stage in my coping with the world, or in the way I try to understand what happens to me and inside me.”[8]
Why is there this deep connection between poetry, ecology and psychology? Some may think the answer is obvious but let’s examine it a little.
We have above the example of how Thom Gunn unpacks his psyche into poetic forms and we have Wordsworth’s claim that poetry is the most “philosophic of all writing”:
“Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so:”
And he goes on to give us the very basis for poetry’s deep connection  with human psychology and also with our ecological relationship with the Earth: “Poetry is the image of man and nature.” He also stresses how poetry has access to knowledge via the heart, that is through an emotional and intuitive understanding: he says of poetry:
“…its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative, not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature.” [9]
So poetry is not dependant on empirical scientific evidence but on a deep sense of intuition given by nature itself; this intuitive knowledge, given by nature, is dependent on this reciprocal relationship which is based in turn on a deep sense of ecological unity of being. Gaia is somehow Wisdom herself, what The Jewish Torah, in the Book of Wisdom, calls “Sophia”. In an unpublished M.Sc. thesis, “Therapeutic Transpersonal Encounters with Dolphins”, my eight co-researchers, told me significantly, that when they swam with a wild dolphin in the open sea the dolphin gave them a new knowledge[10].
Poetry allows access to these things and is the very language of all psychological dynamic therapy which involves knowing one’s self and one’s place or relationships in the World. Metaphorical language, the language of the heart and intuition, is the very essence of a client therapist relationship. (Hobson, 1985)[11]. When, like Shakespeare’s Othello, we are “wrought” and “perplexed in the extreme” sometimes only the poetic imagination can rescue us.
Radical psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers have been exploring the relationship between our psyche and our planet-wide ecological relationship for some time now, e.g. Shepard, (1982). Roszak, Gomes and Kanner, editors, (1995). Abram, (1996). Metzner,(1999) and the compound word “ecopsychology” is well established. I mention “ecopsychology” in this context because it seems to me that “ecopoetry” can be seen in many ways as the artistic and social language of “ecopsychology”.  I mention David Abram here who I think sums up what has been said so far about Ecology and Ecopsychology in his short “Foreword” to Andy Fisher’s book, “Radical Ecopsychology”, (2013) :
“In recent years the science of ecology has disclosed the radical interdependence of the manifold organisms that populate, and constitute, this earthly world – including, of course, the human organism. The new awareness of our coevolved embeddedness within the terrestrial web of life inevitably raises the question of whether the human intellect can really spring itself free from our carnal embedment in order to attain to a genuinely objective, or spectatorlike, understanding of nature – or whether, in truth, all our thoughts and our theories are secretly dependent on, and constrained by, our immersion in this earthly world, with its specific gravity and atmosphere, its particular landscapes, its myriad plants and animals, so many of whom are now threatened with extinction. The latter intuition is that which motivates the emerging field of ecopsychology. Yet if ecopsychology is to pursue this intuition, it is in need of a much more humble way of speaking than that which prevails in the conventional sciences – a new style of speech and of thought that honors the dependence not only of our bodies but our minds on the more-than-human natural world. Such, in fact, is the poetic language that was gradually being developed by various phenomenologists at mid-century – and so it is only natural that the new field of ecopsychology would begin to resuscitate and carry forward the rich work done by some of those thinkers.” (pages x to xi)
David Abram mentions the poetic language of the phenomenologists of the mid-century but  poets themselves were also engaging in this new alignment with the natural world. One could even go back to Wordsworth, as mentioned above, and perhaps to Hopkins and Whitman but certainly more recently there have been others among whom I think Gary Snyder would be well known. Warwick Fox in “”Towards a Transpersonal Ecology” (1995)[12] cites the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) whose work, Fox says, describes an “ecological-cosmological” paradigm that I would argue can be seen as the essence of ecopoetry. He quotes Jeffers’ explanation of the meaning of one of his poems, “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”:
“Orestes, in the poem, identifies himself with the whole divine nature of things: earth, man, and stars, the mountain forest and the running streams; they are all one existence, one organism. He perceives this, and that himself is included in it, identical with it.” [13]
Here is a taste of the Jeffers poem that Fox makes reference to:

“I entered the life of the brown forest
And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone,
I felt the changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have
our own time, not yours; and I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was
the stars,
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own
summit; and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was
mankind also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone . . . they have not made words
for it, to go behind things, beyond hours and ages,
And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the
motionless and timeless center,”

One image is startling I think because he uses it to identify with an extraordinary life form; the lichen. He says:
“I was
mankind also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone . . .”

I describe the “lichen” as an image but it isn’t really an image at all; he is transcending metaphor entirely; maybe the “cheek of the round stone” is an image in the same way as Shakespeare’s “the cheek of night” is in Romeo and Juliet, but the Lichen is real, actual, it represents nothing but itself and the poet feels he is a part of its being: there is the ontological shift that Ferrer (2002) mentions which was quoted above.

To Jeffers, I feel, this identity is pure intuition; it is part nature mysticism. I have no idea what he knows about the biology of lichens; does he know they are actually a symbiosis of an alga and a fungus, that they are millions of years old , that they preceded soil and that most of the minerals in our bodies have probably passed through a lichen! Living in 2023,  we might know the wonders of this ecology, we may have read about it in Merlin Sheldrake’s wonderful book “Entangled Life” (2020)[14] or visited Trevor Goward’s website, “ Ways of Enlichenment” and all of that makes me gasp when I read, “a moving lichen/ on the cheek of the round stone” but in another way it doesn’t explain anything. The creative flash of reciprocity between the poet and the organism on the cheek of the stone is “ecopoetry”.
It is his poetry that attempts to give me the imaginative understanding of the emergent (what I dare to call) new consciousness. Warwick Fox (ibid) cites Frances Vaughan:

“In personal growth individuals recognize that development apparently proceeds from dependence, through independence, to interdependence. Conceptualizing the self as an ecosystem existing within a larger ecosystem can therefore facilitate the shift from thinking of the self as a separate, independent entity to recognizing its complete interdependence in the totality.” [15]

This shift that Frances Vaughan mentions here, which is so crucial to the eco-poetical perspective can be remarkably simple, as I found in a poem called “At the River”, by Lupe Gómez, a poet from A Coruña, Galicia[16] :

At the river
I drank
with cow’s lips.
River water
penetrating
and penetrated
by my body.

In the same collection there is another poem, “After Amergin” by Belfast poet Michael Longley. I single this out because Amergin Glúingel was a druid poet found in “The Book of Leinster” compiled in around 1160. Amergin’s poem is simply called “Song of Amergin” and begins:

‘I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean…”

This is a wonderful example of an Irish poem from the 12th century that has this eco-poetic perspective in a time when there was not the object/subject split of modern times, a time when humans felt much more one with nature; a feature found in First Nation American tradition too. Longley’s poem follows this tradition and begins”:

“I am the trout that vanishes
Between the stepping stones
I am the elver that lingers
Under the little Bridge…”

There is a moving fragility within Longley’s poem, his shifts of identity vanish or linger, they disclose and then conceal, they never stray into anthropomorphism but finally there is a loss in death perhaps an oblique reference of yearning for the lost Amergin and our present ecological crisis.

“I am the otter dying
On top of the burial mound.”

So we find very early examples of poetic tradition that reflects our own changing perspective of our ecological dependency, as for example in my introductory quotation from Shakespeare; we also find poetry from poets that I would not essentially describe as “ecopoets” but who on exceptional occasions really exemplify for me an intuitive grasp of this shift that Vaughan speaks of above.  I mentioned Thom Gunn above and he has just such a poem, “From the Wave”. I am reminded of the significance of “the wave” for Amergin; a breath creating the energy that is the wave; and we come from the Earth as the wave from the sea; the unity and mystery of the emergent. Here is Gunn’s poem:

“It mounts at sea, a concave wall
Down-ribbed with shine,
And pushes forward, building tall
Its steep incline.

Then from their hiding rise to sight
Black shapes on boards
Bearing before the fringe of white
It mottles towards.

Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight
With a learn’d skill.
It is the wave they imitate
Keeps them so still.

The marbling bodies have become
Half wave, half men,
Grafted it seems by feet of foam
Some seconds, then.

Late as they can, they slice the face
In timed procession:
Balance is triumph in this place,
Triumph possession.

The mindless heave of which they rode
A fluid shelf
Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,
Loses itself.

Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals
Loosen and tingle;
And by the board the barefoot feels
The suck of shingle.

They paddle in the shallows still;
Two splash each other;
Then all swim out to wait until
The right waves gather.[17]

No ecopoet would describe a wave as “the mindless heave”, I suspect, and if at a reading I had described his poem as having an ecopoetic perspective, Gunn would have smiled, shrugged and said something like, “Well if that works for you.” Nevertheless, I want to dig out the “ecopoetic tendency” of the poem so as to further refine and summarize our definition. The crucial lines I suppose if we are looking for that “shift” are:

“The marbling bodies have become
Half wave, half men,
Grafted it seems by feet of foam”

This reciprocal union is only in one sense a balancing act:

“Balance is triumph in this place,
Triumph possession.”

Balance is after all a harmonizing of energy, a reciprocal kind of homeostasis, one might think of riding a horse or learning to ride the mythical winged beast in the movie Avatar and energy is not “mindless” in the wave; to the ecopoet it is the life blood of the cosmos. The first stanza suggests this animated earth-force whether intentionally or otherwise. So there is this real sense of union continued in the line:

“…the barefoot feels
The suck of shingle.”

His observation here must be based on his own experience, his barefoot experience of that gravitational pull, that suction the Earth has which pulls us in; what Stephan Harding has called “the hug of Gaia”. The “triumph” of “possession” might be seen as anthropomorphic, the human controlling the force of nature. but in fact, I think a surfer would tell you that the surfer is as much possessed by the wave in which he has to use his skill to find balance; “he imitates” it after all.

In conclusion, I have attempted to show that “ecopoetry” has tentative beginnings well before the present time and in poets not immediately thought of in connection with this genre and that its philosophic approach owes much to a new psychological and philosophical world view. The new psychological perspective to which I have referred is usually described as ecopsychology. This linkage between psychology and ecology points to a new way of seeing the planet on which we live and forms the need for a new philosophical language to make sense of it; this is the role, as I see it, of “ecopoetry”. In many ways it requires a growing appreciation of the hypothesis that the planet on which we live, the Earth, is alive and therefore to which we must attribute some form of consciousness. Such an idea requires a revolution in our appraisal of consciousness itself. Even as early as 1989, writing about the ecological crisis, Paul Devereux in “Earthmind”[18], Chapter 6, page 169, says:

“Having created this unhealthy state of affairs, we have to look hopefully towards some sense of balance, some deep change of mind and heart in mainstream culture…A major step in such a colossal process has to be the acceptance of the idea that the Earth is alive – only such a simple, direct image can hope to move people’s feelings …The key to this vital step is to accept the idea of the planet being, in some way, conscious. In turn, such a concept will ultimately have to spring from a reappraisal of the nature of consciousness itself.”

Hopefully ecopoetry will now assist in steering our collective imagination to a new knowledge of our deep dependance on our relationship with the Earth and even the cosmos itself.

END NOTES:

[1] This Shakespeare quotation from Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, is both prophetic and indicative of a distinctive 16th. Century worldview. People thought and felt, by reason of this view, that there was a reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world; a great chain of being. The Fairy Kingdom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a metaphor for this spiritual relationship, or if you prefer, what Jung might call the collective unconscious world of archetypes. It is not simply a matter of how we damage the environment with insecticides and global warming gasses but how our psychological alienation also causes a damaging disharmony to the ecosystem of which we are a part.
[2] Lovelock, James, “Gaia: medicine for an ailing planet,” Gaia Books, 2005
[3] Alan Watts, “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” (1966), 2009, Souvenir Press Ltd; Main edition.
[4] Maturana and Verela,  “De Maquinas y  Seres Vivos: Autopoiesis: La Organizacion De Lo Vivo”,  Chile, 1972.
[5] For a more detailed explanation of Autopoiesis see Margulis and Sagan, 1995.
[6] Wilber, Ken: “No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth”, Shambhala, 1979.
[7] For this conversation see:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33npAXZIXJg)
[8] Thom Gunn, “My Life Up To Now” in “ The Occasions of Poetry”, Faber and Faber, 1982.
[9] Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802”, Oxford World Classics, 2013, page 105.
[10] https://hugofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/therapeutic-transpersonal-encounters-with-dolphins.pdf
[11] Hobson, Robert F, “Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy,” Routledge, 1985.
[12] Fox, Warwick, “Towards a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism”, State University of New York Press, 1995.
[13] Quoted in Bill Devall and George Sessions, “Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered”, Peregrine Smith Books, 1985, page 102.
[14] Sheldrake, Merlin, “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Vintage, UK, 2020.
[15] Vaughan, Frances, “Discovering Transpersonal Identity”, in Journal of Humanistic Psychology 25 (1985): 13-38, page 20.
[16] In: “A Different Eden: Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia.” Dedalus Press, 2021. Translations by Keith Payne and Isaac Xubin.
[17] Thom Gunn, “From the Wave”, in “Moly,” Faber and Faber, 1971
[18] Devereux, Paul; Steele, John; and Kubrin, David, “Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia”, Destiny Books, 1992, first published Roxby 1989.