What ecopoetry is
There is no agreed definition. What follows is what a number of published sources say, credited to them. Where they disagree, that is noted rather than resolved.
The common ground
Most accounts describe poetry that engages the non-human world while assuming humans are part of it rather than outside it, and that is aware of environmental damage. Beyond that, the definitions diverge.
The definitions, and whose they are
J. Scott Bryson, introducing Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (University of Utah Press, 2002), sets out three characteristics: an ecocentric perspective acknowledging the interdependence of all things; humility in relations with both human and non-human nature; and scepticism toward hyperrationality and the technological progress it underwrites. → uofupress.com
Terry Gifford, in Green Voices (1995), uses “green poetry” for nature poems that engage directly with environmental issues, and distinguishes pastoral, anti-pastoral and post-pastoral modes.
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, editing The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), deliberately decline to impose a single definition, and their critical prefaces set out competing ones. → tupress.org
Jonathan Skinner, founding the journal ecopoetics in 2001, used ecopoetics for poetry as an ecological practice — a question about form and language, not only about subject matter. The archive is online. → ecopoetics.wordpress.com
Timothy Clark surveys the term and its problems in ‘Ecopoetry’, in The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge, 2019). → cambridge.org
The editors of Channel have said that all writing is nature writing of a sort, since human thought and language are ecologically derived — which, if accepted, makes the category a phase rather than a genre. → Interview, 2020
Related terms
Ecopoetry and ecopoetics are often distinguished, the second being the more formally experimental. Climate poetry is narrower again. Eco-justice poetry foregrounds who bears environmental costs. Nature poetry is older and broader and overlaps with all of them.
→ Glossary
Ireland
Irish coverage on this site rests on three things that can be checked:
- an early Irish nature-poetry tradition, available in English chiefly through Kuno Meyer’s Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (1911, out of copyright) and Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford, 1956)
- a body of contemporary Irish work gathered in Empty House (2021), A Different Eden (2021) and Windfall (2023) → Books
- a dedicated Irish journal, Channel, founded 2019 → Journals
The scholarship is listed under criticism.
Last checked 2026-08-13