Nature Poetry

As a poem that spotlights the natural world, “The Wild Iris” stands in a long tradition of poetry devoted to nature. This tradition goes back to the pastoral poetry of Greek and Roman antiquity. Written by poets from urban centers, pastoral poems projected idealized images of the peaceful simplicity of shepherds’ lives in rural nature. Although pastoral poetry fell out of favor in the middle ages, it made a resurgence in the Renaissance and remained popular among neoclassical poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, the British Romantic poets departed from conventionally pastoral depictions of nature. Instead of depending on highly idealized conventions for portraying rural life, the Romantics sought to forge more personalized, individual relationships with the natural world. Each in their different way, Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Shelley explored their own unique emotional and philosophical responses to nature’s beauty and sublimity. Across the Atlantic, the American Transcendentalists took a similarly serious approach to representing the relationship between humans and nature. Poets like Walt Whitman and philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson reframed the natural world as a wildly beautiful and divine frontier.