Ecological revisions of the Romantic nature lyric: Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, and W. S. Merwin

This dissertation examines how three poets in the twentieth century---Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, and W. S. Merwin---have attempted to revise the Wordsworthian nature poem to create an ecologically informed lyric. These poets explore the environmental contextualization of subjectivity implicit in Wordsworth's lyric conventions while contending with the lyric's inherent egoism. While maintaining the Romantic naturist aesthetic, they directly address changes in the natural environment, focusing on the interdependence between human communities and their surroundings.;Chapter one considers the movement of Jeffers' lyric poetry from a veneration of nature to a grounded ecological consciousness. The chapter focuses especially on Jeffers' deployment of the geologic sublime, which idealizes a human apocalypse that preserves the natural world and which is later manifest in Jeffers' analogizing of violence in WWII to biological processes. Jeffers' work illustrates the moral and aesthetic difficulty of maintaining an ecocentric consciousness.;Chapter two examines how Hughes represents environmental vulnerability to compel an ethic of stewardship. In his landmark volume Crow, Hughes uses surreal imagery, diverse religious allusions, and rapid shifts in tone to interrogate the pastoral mode and develop a global ecological awareness. Troubled by issues of scale and specificity, Hughes' work increasingly addresses Local environmental issues like riparian health and sustainable agriculture, while still deploying a mythological sublime, whereby Hughes evokes environmental recovery in the figures of resurrected gods.;Chapter three examines ideas about environmental community which pervade Merwin's poetry. Early polemical uses of irony later shift to elegies for the lost links between language and landscape in Hawaii and of the lost farming communities of southern France. Merwin asserts the absence of healthy environments, but attempts to instigate their reclamation through a manipulation of Romantic nostalgia, evoking the possibility of environmentally integrated communities through their current and closely felt absence.;The dissertation concludes with a review of recent ecopoetry and a brief study of the Australian poet Les Murray, whose evocation of animal and plant voices in a series of onomatopoetic persona poems resolves the Wordsworthian dilemma of how to sustain an ecocentric perspective, providing a rich model for ecologically compelling verse.