On the Grasshopper and Cricket

JOHN KEATS

The Poetry of earth is never dead:    
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,    
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run    
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;    
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead      
  In summer luxury,—he has never done    
  With his delights; for when tired out with fun    
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.    
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:    
  On a lone winter evening, when the frost     
    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills    
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,    
  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,    
    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

In May 2022, Helen Boden and Elizabeth Rimmer held an online discussion, hosted by the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, about Poetry and Geopoetics which got a good deal of response from those who heard it. After it we felt that although the beauty of geopoetics is that it is so wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary, poetry itself would benefit from a bit of focussed attention. There is so much going on in the fields of eco-poetry and place writing, but we feel we have something distinctive to add. This website is an attempt to keep this discussion going. We have a core group of contributors whose work in this field is established, and we hope to post articles, reviews and analysis, backed up by meetups and discussions as we can arrange them.