Matter, Experience, Language: Peter Redgrove’s Materialist Ecopoetry

Peter Redgrove won the acclaim of prominent fellow poets but did not reach a wide reading public. While critics have noted his relevance to debates around psychoanalysis and gender, some have argued that his extensively theorised ideas of worldly interconnection fail to affect the matter of his verse. This article explores this issue via perspectives that have arisen in the years since these assessments, namely ecophenomenology and new materialism, to suggest that Redgrove’s professed materialism both foreshadows these theories and finds its expression in his distinctive formal techniques. Seeking to embody, rather than merely illustrate, the underlying animism of sense perception, the porosity of bodies and the affectivity of matter, Redgrove’s grammatical ambiguities, figurative estrangements and formal self-reflexivity render his verse an anticipatory form of ecopoetry.