Can David Wagoner, Poet of Nature and the Environment, Qualify as Eco-poet?

A renowned poet of nature and the environment, David Wagoner has proven himself as a poet for sixty-three years with twenty published books. He has had a long and distinguished teaching career at the University of Washington and many years as editor of Poetry Northwest. So far, however, he has been excluded from the list of poets whose works have been welcomed into the growing canon of eco-poetry. In this essay, I inquire into this evolving canon as well as that of eco-poetics, and reflect upon a number of Wagoner’s poems concerning nature and the environment as I try to assess his contributions to these areas.