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.

Given the gender segregation of the times, Irish women poets in the decades between the Famine and the revolutionary period often wrote about events they had witnessed but not participated in at first hand. Nowhere is this gap more noticeable than in representations of conflict and the valorous male warriors who waged it. In the mid-nineteenth century the poets of the Nation, including Francesca Elgee (‘Speranza’) employed ballad forms to orient women’s poetry firmly towards nationalist self-assertion. In Revivalist times Katharine Tynan wrote sensitively of Anglo-Irish relations, and of soldiers’ lives in the First World War, a conflict in which two of her sons served. Martyred Irish manhood is a classic nationalist trope, but acquires wider resonances when applied to First World War elegies too. The neglected work of Winifred Letts is also considered, helping to build a larger picture of the connections between Irish and English traditions at a time of conflict and transition.