Our environment is collapsing; good governance and good government are sporadic. For change, more people in what the International Monetary Fund calls ‘Advanced Economies’, many more, need to care about the planet. One of the best ways is to encourage contact with the natural, and experience its aesthetic richness and sense the interconnected lives we share the planet with. As David Attenborough remarked, ‘No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.’

Birds appear in many of his important poems, but Stevens was not interested in birds as dinosaurs or predators, pollinators, scavengers, seed dispersers and ecosystem engineers. He was born into a wealthy family and became a rich businessman who worked in insurance. John Leornard wrote, ‘Wallace Stevens seems to have been the sort of person who . . . almost didn't allow life to happen to him--at least the kind of life we romantically associate with fine poets. No illegitimacy, drugs, drunkenness, wenching, war, inversion, disease, tragedy or even travel.’ii His family disapproved of the beautiful stenographer he married, and Stevens didn’t speak to his father ever again, but he and his wife and he led separate lives. His life was not happy, he was a depressive and did drink to excess. He liked routine went to the office each day into his seventies. His boss remarked, ‘Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.’iii Stevens was a fan of Mussolini, but his poetry is elliptical, abstract, usually philosophical.

Stevens wanted language to transcend the conversational, the local, the immediate, he preferred the world within and imagined reality. He demonstrates no love for nature, unlike Gary Snyder, whose poem ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’, begins,
all you can about animals as persons
the names of trees and flowers and weeds
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
and the moon . . .’

And I’d add birds
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John Leonard, ‘Books of The Times’ New York Times, July 22, 1970. Reviewing, Samuel French Morse, Wallace Stevens: poetry as life, ‎Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970.

Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Insurance Man The life and art of Wallace Stevens’, New Yorker, May 2, 2016.

Gary Snyder, Regarding Wave (1967) New Directions, 1970. Ted Hughes also wanted poetry where, ‘The descriptions will be detailed, scientific in their objectivity and microscopic attentiveness.’ Poetry in the Making, Faber and Faber, 1967. Cognitive naturalism supposes that nature appreciation is best illuminated by the natural sciences.