This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

This chapter traces the modernist short poem’s hauntings by the lyric, most particularly in thinking through what came to be regarded as problems of emotion and expressive subjectivity within the discursive strains defining the modernist lyric, especially as clustered around a poetics of impersonality. The “lyric discontent” of modernism marks multiple modalities energizing modern American poetry’s varied points of emergence in the 1910s and 1920s – particularly associated with women and African American poets – among which the distrust of emotion and embrace of impersonality endured contested influence in defining the modernist lyric. Locating this discontent in the years concurrent with early articulations of modern poetry’s extinction of personal emotion and expressive subjectivity – roughly the mid-1910s to early 1920s and before New Criticism takes hold – invites consideration of poetry’s exploration of affective constructions of subjectivity that grapple with elements of emotion, expressivity, and the lyric gaze.