chapter 4
Environment and Space
READING SPACE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
L
awrence Buell in The Future of Environmental Criticism states
that ‘In one form or another the “idea of nature” has been
a dominant or at least residual concern for literary scholars and
intellectual historians ever since these fi elds came into being’.^1
Throughout literary history, poetry has always been attentive
to the environment that surrounds the perceiving subject. More
recently these ideas have been framed in terms of ecocritical think-
ing and theory. In considering ideas of environment and space, this
chapter initially examines the term ‘ecocriticism’ and how poetry
is responsive to the construction of identities through regional
identifi cations – often referred to as a ‘poetics of place’. During the
twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries our ideas of ‘nature’ poetry
have become more complex. Some poets exercise a taxonomist’s
eye for detailing the natural landscape and evoking a geographical
history. Yet it should be stressed that contemporary poetry’s rela-
tionship to ‘nature’ is being thought of as representing not only the
immediate environment, but also its relationship to economic and
cultural change, as well as physical threat. This difference between
poetries is explicated succinctly by Jonathan Skinner: ‘critics have
made a useful distinction between nature poetry and ecopoetry – to
paraphrase Juliana Spahr – one focuses (apolitically) only on the
bird, the other considers as well the bulldozer about to destroy the