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 coda considers how music might be put to queer use through a reading of Amy Levy’s poem “Sinfonia Eroica”.

Tracing the movement of print and literary forms in the later nineteenth century uncovers a complex transnatonality and intersectionality embedded in what might otherwise seem the most esoteric and confined of literary movements: the fixed-form verse revival of the late 1870s and 1880s. Reaching across national and temporal borders, the male coterie of Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, and Andrew Lang extolled villanelles, ballades, sestinas, rondeaux, and triolets as means to discipline contemporary English verse and delight connoisseurs. However, the movement did stay confined within elite class or gendered formations but infiltrated popular print in humorous penny weekly papers or political poems and also beckoned to women poets from A. Mary F. Robinson to Amy Levy to participate. Ultimately the fixed-form verse revival was a byproduct of a transatlantic literary market, so that the revival rested upon dynamic movements across bodies of water as well as across ostensible divides of nation, gender, and high versus popular culture.