The British Landscape Conserved by its Poets

The Ecological Gain of Invoking Landscape in Verse

Nov 15, 2009

Britain's landscape poets have done more to preserve its countryside than any environmental or ecological conservancy has.

Britain’s greatest cultural heritage is said to be its poets. We have great composers, but Vienna and Rome drown their songs. We have great artists, but their works are out-dazzled by Paris and New York. We can dance, but St Petersburg brings us to stillness. Even our popular music sells lyrics with as much gusto as rhythm and blues.

The British Landscape Evoked

One resource of poetry lies in its power to evoke landscape. All great poets are eco-poets. Shakespeare’s Dover Cliff is now Shakespeare Cliff and still one of the finest landscape sights in the world. Across the world Captain Cook named a cliff in New Zealand, after the same lines in King Lear:

Of course in the play, Edgar is kidding his blinded dad the cliff is there. Samphire is found on level beaches. Beware Cook’s Byron Bay, New South Wales, named after the poet’s grandfather.

The British Landscape Conserved

The British poets are the British ecology’s greatest defence. Views are more likely to be preserved because a poet first summoned them into literary existence. Like it or not the planners avoid Richmond Hill, first invoked by Chaucer, Arnold’s Dover Beach, Dyer’s Grongar Hill, Ben Jonson’s Penshurst, Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester, Tennyson’s Farringford, Wordsworth’s Windermere and Crabbe’s Aldbrugh Coast.

Mere mention is not always enough. Marvell’s Upon Nun Appleton House, obviously was not descriptive enough to avoid the great house’s demolition. What stands there to-day did not know Marvell. Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop did not save the railway station from Beeching’s axe. Yet, if the Thames is sweeter, it is because Spenser first called it so.

The tradition continues until today. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Louis McNeice, T.S.Eliot, Auden , Betjeman and Larkin have all made lasting contributions to it. If anything the achievement of the Twenty First Century might outmatch the past. Alice Oswald has taken the River Dart as a project and made a poem, Dart. Some poetry organisations commission poets via local organisations to evoke their ecologies of place. Others simply fall in love with locations, such as Lesley Saunders’ Her Leafy Eye which is as superb a verse-guide to Rousham Gardens in Oxfordshire as you can get.

So strong is the tradition that landscape poetry became a cultural export. Landscape was subordinate to other aims such as evoking Time or Nationhood, in continental poetry until the English Romantics left English shores for Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Another sub-theme is the tradition of being wildly inaccurate; Byron could never have stood on the Bridge of Sighs. It is physically impossible. Keats' Cortez never got to Darien and

It was an explorer called Balboa. To both the poet would no doubt answer, “it’s what might have been that right.”

The British Ecology Gained in Praise or Blame

Not all poets need to praise, Betjeman’s Slough immortalised a ditch turned into a housing estate. Later his daughter apologised officially . The place faulted by the poet became an even greater honour to both.

The copyright of the article The British Landscape Conserved by its Poets in British Poetry is owned by Duncan McGibbon. Permission to republish The British Landscape Conserved by its Poets in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.