Poetry has long been assumed to mediate the relationship between humans and the natural world. To Ovid, for example, poetry subdues, bringing nature’s awesome power under control. By contrast, Philip Sidney evidently believed that poetry needed a champion, someone to retrieve it from the shoals of irrelevance. Much of his defense of this literary mode hinges on poetry’s ability to lift humans above the debasement of the material world. Not incidentally, in our own era, it seems that aggressor and victim, vis-a-vis the unfolding story of humans and nature, have swapped positions: now, poetry is being asked to rescue nature from humans’ ruinous assaults on it. An updated defense of poetry (that is, a theory of its prime usages) is provided by poet Glyn Maxwell. He emphasizes the elemental functions of the ancient but ever-relevant mode, concluding: “Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts.” Maxwell construes poetry as an intense form of chiaroscuro, one whose patterning displays of black ink against swaths of whiteness—the artfully devised arrangements of lines and line-breaks—can thus be understood as attempts to cope with the passage of time, or the daunting prospect of being banished from its sequential movements. All of these perspectives on poetry attest to its unique significance for ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism encompasses a diverse array of approaches, but they might be conveniently distilled to their shared emphasis on examining relationships between humans and the natural world.