SOURCE: Kroeber, Karl. “Discovering Nature's Voice.” In Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind, pp. 67‐81. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Kroeber describes the beginnings of ecologically inspired poetry in the work of the English Romantics.

In the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 the first poem by Wordsworth is burdened with his longest title, “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew‐Tree, which Stands near the Lake of Esthewaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect.” This is followed immediately by his co‐author's “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem.” The sequence is especially appropriate if, as some think, parts of the last lines of Wordsworth's poem were written by Coleridge. Be that as it may, the subtitle of Coleridge's poem identifies it as a new kind of lyric, a “conversation” poem, which in theme and...