Subject Liaison
Reference Source
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by Call Number: Ebook (Choose Read Online)ISBN: 9780691154916Publication Date: 2012The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built a reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry. At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth.
Paris Review Interviews
For more than 60 years, The Paris Review has conducted in-depth interviews with leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. These revealing, revelatory self-portraits have come to be recognized as themselves classic works of literature, and an essential and definitive record of the writing life. The following are some of the interviews with poets you have read/discussed in class.
Example Online Sources
- Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, Library of CongressListen to audio-recorded readings of former Consultants in Poetry Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost; Nobel Laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Czeslaw Milosz, and more.
- The Dickinson Electronic Archives 2A creative and critical collaboratory for reading Dickinson's material bodies and for featuring new critical and theoretical work about Emily Dickinson's writings, biography, reception, and influence, the Dickinson Electronic Archives 2 is a scholarly resource showcasing the possibility of interdisciplinary and collaborative research and exploring the potential of the digital environment to reveal new interpretive material, cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts.
- Poetry Center Digital ArchiveThe Poetry Center's dedicated online archive makes available new original video recordings (with audio downloads), plus early original audio recordings from the 1950s onward. New recordings are added as programs occur each season, Fall and Spring, in The Poetry Center Reading Series. Poets reading include: Forrest Gander, Juliana Spahr, & Langston Hughes; readings by others of poems by Frank O'Hara.
- Poetry FoundationThe Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.Search for a poem or poet and look for related articles.
- poets.orgPoets.org is produced by the Academy of American Poets. The site was launched in 1996, becoming the original online resource for poems, poets' biographies, essays about poetry, and more.
- Th Wilfred Owen Collection, The First World War Poetry Digital ArchiveThe First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7,000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas.
- The Walt Whitman ArchiveDrawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the world, the Whitman Archive is the most comprehensive record of works by and about Whitman—and continues to grow.
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an ebook you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
Research Using Library Databases
The UVA Library subscribes to hundreds of databases that contain scholarly resources not available on the free web. Access to most of these databases is restricted to current members of the UVA community. Since you will be accessing materials from off Grounds, you will be prompted to sign in with NetBadge when using these resources. For some resources, you may need to use the VPN - see tab on left side menu (also see the Off-Grounds Access link for more information).
The best way to connect to the library's databases is through the research portal. This guide provides a list of recommended databases, ebooks, interviews, and online sources for your assignment. There are many more resources available that might be useful.
If you would like research help, please email me your questions, or I am available for meetings virtually using Zoom. You can schedule an appointment with me by clicking the button in my information box to the left, by selecting a day/time on my Make an Appointment page, or by contacting me directly at slb4kt@virginia.edu. When you make an appointment, I will send you a Zoom link for us to meet. If Zoom will not work for you, please email me and we will find another option for meeting. Need help right away? Please contact a librarian using one of our Ask a Librarian options.
Databases for Finding Articles about Poetry & the Environment
Think broadly when brainstorming terms to use when searching databases.
- What synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
- You can combine search terms using AND ("Sea Change" AND nature) and OR (nature OR environment OR ecology OR planet).
- In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol that will match all possible endings for a word stem. For example, environ* will match environment, environmental, environmentalism, etc.
- Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need.
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature (including poetry) in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations.For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries,” or look up the journal title in VIRGO.
Literature Online - The Criticism search includes ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) and references from articles and books on English language and literature. Many cited journals are available in full text. Literature Online also includes the full text of many works of poetry from America, Canada, England, and other countries, mostly through the early 20th century.
Columbia Granger's World of Poetry contains full text of over 250,000 poems, mostly in English, but also including poems in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. It also includes information about and citations from thousands more poems, plus biographies of poets, and analyses of poems. Use the History & Criticism option to search for articles in books like Columbia History of American Poetry, Columbia History of British Poetry, Lectures on the English Poets, and more. Brief commentaries of some poems are also available.
Humanities International Complete indexes over 2000 journals as well as books and other publications. Topics covered include archaeology, art, dance, drama, ethnic and women's history, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, religion.
Project Muse provides full-text searching of recent articles from major scholarly journals, including roughly 120 journals about literature. Like JSTOR, Project Muse is not as comprehensive as the MLAIB, but offers the advantages of full-text searching and instant access to PDFs.
Biography & Biocritical Databases
Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) traces the lives and careers of selected authors, critics, screenwriters, journalists, scholars, and publishers from all eras and genres, with lists of recommended books and articles. Search for the author you want and choose the Biographies tab. The DLB link above will take you to Gale Literature, a larger collection where you can also find criticism, reviews, and more.
Scribner's Writers Online includes brief biographies and critical studies of authors, mostly of literary works in English.
Twayne Author Series includes full text of ca. 600 books on the lives and works of U.S. and international authors. Recommended books and articles.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) provides articles on the lives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century. Note: We only have limited access so please close your browser when finished with this resource.
Recommended E-Book Collection
The Cambridge Companions Complete Collection includes several hundred books. Each Companion is a collection of introductory essays on aspects of a writer, artist, philosopher, religious thinker, cultural topic, or period. You can also find individual titles using the library's catalog, Virgo. Below are some examples of works included in this collection.
Finding items using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together, or view those results separately, using the facets provided to limit your results by author, format, publication period, and more. To find online content in the catalog, use Format limiters like EBook, Streaming Video, or Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example subject terms:
- Conservation of Natural Resources in Literature
- Ecocriticism
- Ecology in Literature
- Ecolinguistics
- Environmentalism in Literature
- Environmental Protection in Literature
- Nature Conservation in Literature
- Nature in Literature
- Philosophy of Nature in Literature
Example E-Books of Interest
Below are just a few of many examples of ebooks available that discuss poetry and the environment. Try searching for a particular poem or work, for a poet, or use the subject term recommendations above to get started searching in Virgo for relevant materials. Limit your format to EBook to find books available for online reading. Most ebooks have a search feature and/or index that will help you find sections relevant to your research topic.
Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 0300137508Publication Date: 2009Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth. In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.
Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781558499553Publication Date: 2012Ecocritics and other literary scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. In this book, Scott Knickerbocker argues that it is time for the next step in ecocriticism: scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways. Ecopoetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world in the work of modern American poets-in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to, make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice-not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. In examining their work, Knickerbocker charts a new direction for ecocriticism.
Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 0674983491Publication Date: 2018Hearing Things is a meditation on sound's work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets--Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald--Leighton's scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.
Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Poetrics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes by Call Number: Ebook - Use link in Virgo record to access.ISBN: 9781138743588Publication Date: 2017The environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is poetry. This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation. This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney
A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 0674012011Publication Date: 2004Amid gloomy forecasts of the decline of the humanities and the death of poetry, Angus Fletcher, a wise and dedicated literary voice, sounds a note of powerful, tempered optimism. He lays out a fresh approach to American poetry at large, the first in several decades, expounding a defense of the art that will resonate well into the new century. Breaking with the tired habit of treating American poets as the happy or rebellious children of European romanticism, Fletcher uncovers a distinct lineage for American poetry. Drawing variously on Complexity Theory and on fundamentals of art and grammar, Fletcher argues that our finest poetry is nature-based, environmentally shaped, and descriptive in aim, enabling poets like John Ashbery and other contemporaries to discover a mysterious pragmatism. Intense, resonant, and deeply literary, this account of an American poetics shows how today's consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people. While centering on American vision, the argument extends our horizon, striking a blow against all economically sanctioned attacks upon the finer, stronger human capacities. Poetry, the author maintains, is central to any coherent vision of life.
A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781609382711Publication Date: 2014Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are widely acknowledged as two of America's foremost nature poets, primarily due to their explorations of natural phenomena as evocative symbols for cultural developments, individual experiences, and poetry itself. Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson's and Whitman's poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature's relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones. Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture's view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.
Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination by Call Number: EBook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781138186286Publication Date: 2017Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses the relationship between language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. Scientific, philosophical, and literary frameworks enable the author to develop an interdisciplinary approach to examining the role of plants in poetry. Drawing from recent plant science and contributing to the exciting new field of critical plant studies, the author develops a methodology he calls "botanical criticism" that aims to redress the lack of emphasis on plant life in studies of poetry. As a subset of ecocriticism, botanical criticism investigates how poets engage with plants literally and figuratively, materially and symbolically, in their works. Key themes covered in this volume include plants as invasives and weeds in human settings; as sources of physical and spiritual nourishment; as signifiers of region, home, and identity; as objects of aesthetics and objectivism; and, crucially, as beings with their own perspectives, voices, and modes of dialogue. Ryan demonstrates that poetic imagination is as essential as scientific rationality to elucidating and appreciating the mysteries of plant-being.
This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 0820323667Publication Date: 2002Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s - Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan - and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a ""compost"" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry. This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.
Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics by Call Number: E-book: Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 0877459037Publication Date: 2004How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman's poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman's language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman's language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman's poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman's feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of "This Compost" Whitman's greatest contribution to the literature of ecology, from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman's regional, even local appeal---demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America's first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature.
The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 087745955XPublication Date: 2005In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics. Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, "The West Side of Any Mountain"participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field. One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan's place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin.
