When we think of Wallace Stevens and the question of ecological poetics, we probably are drawn to think of what he called his poetic “mundo”: a poetic universe structured by the turning of the seasons, which themselves correspond to distinct philosophical and phenomenological stances. The world of summer, for example, is a world of fecund imagination creating the world anew, while the world of winter is a world of “decreation” and contraction, a return to “things as they are.” We can get a radically different view of Stevens as an ecological poet, however, if we deploy a concept of environment that is more scientifically contemporary, one that foregrounds the dynamic co-implication and co-production of organism and environment in all its contingency, as highlighted in the contemporary biology of perception and cognition as we find it in figures such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In this light, the ecological dimension of Stevens’s poetry may be located in the fact that his poetics enacts the same “operating program,” with all its attendant paradoxes, of autopoietic living systems, rather than engaging in a representational relationship to what we used to call “nature.”

Mary Tighe’s long Spenserian allegorical romance, Psyche (1805), is one of the major poems by an Irish woman of the early nineteenth century. Shaped by the zealous Methodism of her childhood, Tighe reacted with anguish to the political violence of 1798, offering the reconciling balms of sentiment to the open wounds of sectarian conflict. In Psyche, a mother and a young woman vie for the affections of a son, displacing national struggle into a realm of emotional psychodrama. Connecting with nature, a rejected woman rediscovers the force of attachment and belonging, even as the text accommodates (via Apuleius) a good deal of sexual errancy and threats to feminine decorum. In its drama of female audacity, transgression and outcast heroism, the poem shows Miltonic ambitions, seeding a template much emulated by Tighe’s fellow poets of the nineteenth century and beyond.

This chapter explores a crucial transition in the understanding of infinity during the eighteenth century. Originally a divine attribute, against which the finite is reduced to insignificance (e.g., in Baroque poetry), the infinite becomes a feature to be embraced within the finite world itself. Together with developments in science and mathematics (e.g., the invention of the calculus at the end of the seventeenth century), other cultural spheres played a crucial role in normalizing the ‘anomaly’ (T. S. Kuhn) of the infinite. Chief among them were ‘physico-theology’ and religiously inflected poetry (especially Heinrich Brockes), which celebrated the divine within the grandest and minutest aspects of creation, and Pietism, which explored feelings of the sublime in nature and the soul (especially Friedrich Klopstock).