Earlier generations of poets often looked to Nature for spiritual inspiration, as with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous line “The world is charged with the grandeur of God “ in his poem God’s Grandeur. Even so, Hopkins recognized the effects of the industrial revolution on the natural world “searing”,” blearing” and “smearing” and concludes ” the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”  Yet finally Hopkins had an optimistic vision of the natural world “ And for all this, nature is never spent.”

In this workshop Bob Hass and Brenda Hillman, whose own poetry is so deeply attuned to the natural world, will explore the genre of Eco-poetry, what some have called “worried nature poetry.”

Modern eco -poets, living as they do in times of environmental degradation, express not only the love of the planet, but bring relevant perspectives on the difficulty of being on earth in current times. This selection of poetry beginning with Hopkins to twentieth century poets Robinson Jeffers and Denise Levertov, to several contemporary writers, reflects the ecological challenges of the non-human world and the stress it is under. These poets offer different aesthetics and spiritual perspectives for our discussion, including demonstrating inventive new styles of writing.