William Stott (1857-1900), “Pastoral”
‘Nature poetry’ . . . ‘pastoral’ . . . ‘environmental poetry’ . . . ‘green poetry’ . . . ‘ecopoetry’: this proliferation of names for related sub-genres highlights the diverse and changing ways in which poems construct ‘nature’ as a subject. For all their differing contexts, objectives, attitudes, and forms, such poems are linked by their common history, inherited tropes, and shared responsiveness to the natural world.
As we analyse the particularities of individual poems and explore points of connection between them, we'll consider such questions as the following: How does poetry illuminate the varied and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments? How do historical and cultural circumstances inflect writing about nature? Does the prospect of climate catastrophe impel writers to reimagine traditional genres?
Readings will include selections from the English tradition of pastoral verse; the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; poems by Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver, and Seamus Heaney; and a spectrum of recent publications by distinguished and emerging environmental poets currently writing in the UK, Ireland, and America.
Each student in the course will keep a daily nature journal. Paper assignments will offer opportunities for creative, critical, and reflective writing.
An overnight study trip will take us to Exmoor National Park and the Quantock Hills in Somerset, where ST Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived as neighbors and produced some of their most extraordinary writing. Walk a stretch of the Coleridge Way, with spectacular views of the scenery that inspired Lyrical Ballads and ‘Kubla Khan’. Visit Coleridge Cottage and the village of Porlock. At nightfall (weather permitting), stargaze from the remote uplands of Exmoor, Europe’s first designated International Dark Sky Reserve.
Professor: Alison Hickey, Associate Professor of English, Wellesley College ahickey@wellesley.edu