Document Type
Lesson Plan
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Abstract
Why read poetry after all, for all the frustration it can stir and the immense degree of patience it often demands (particularly challenging in our age of distractions)? Jane Hirshfield’s quotes offer a lucid insight: good poetry often changes how we perceive our surroundings and our states of existence. It lets us experience life in a transformed way – different before and after reading the poem – and inspires us to view our world with a sharper, more curious eye.
Here, we have compiled an anthology of ecopoetry that features a diverse selection of poems, ranging in time, culture, and themes. Each piece has left us in wonder, offering fresh perspectives that have transformed our way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving nature. It’s these novel experiences that we are eager to share with you. Every poem in our anthology comes with helpful factual information about the poetry and the poets, along with our personal interpretations. But of course, there is never only one way to think about a great poem and we definitely don’t want to monopolize the conversation. So along with the brief commentaries, we also include some questions that continue to puzzle us and hopefully can inspire you to enjoy the poems more deeply and in alternative ways. Whether you have experience with poetry, regard yourself as eco-conscious, or neither, we hope our anthology will offer you a delightful reading experience.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Gabriela Rodriguez , '27; Qing Hao , '25; and Peter Schmidt.
(2024).
"The Whispers Of Magnolias, Nican Tlaca, And The World Around Us: An Anthology".
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/413
Accessible document [Word]
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Comments
Developed by Swarthmore College students, Gabriela Rodriguez and Qing Hao, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71E/Environmental Studies 041, "Ecopoetry and the Climate Crisis," spring 2024.