I Am So Sick of Nature Poetry

I am so sick of nature poetry. Today, I was browsing in Readings and came across a book of poetry by David Brooks, an old lecturer of mine at university. It was full of the most insipid nature poems you could imagine. Not only is this thing boring, it's dishonest; you'd think that Brooks would have a little to say about life at university, marking students essays, editing anthologies, that sort of thing ... which is how he makes his money. Not a bit of it!

Wordsworth and the Romantics started it all, and it all went downhill from there. It's one thing to have a mystical experience like Blake, and 'see the world in a grain of sand'; it's another thing altogether to write, at great length, about insignificant items like a thorn and expect to learn something about 'society':

There is a thorn; it looks so old,
In truth you'd find it hard to say,
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey.

Wordsworth goes on this way for another twenty-two stanzas. You wonder how anyone could stand him. I could write a poem about, say, a rock that sits by the road and derive just as much meaning and significance from it as Wordsworth did from his bloody thorn:

There is a rock, a little rock,
Its home is by the road;
And ever and anon I pass
Its pebbly abode.
"Sir Rock, good day - good day, Sir Rock!"
I shout as I pass by,
But, being a rock, it does not talk,
And thus makes no reply.

What does it do all day, this rock?
I really would not know:
The rock will never tell me
(I think about it, though)
Perhaps it spends its rocky day
With its sedimentary friends,
While ever and anon men pass
Before turning round the bend.

Nature poetry! Bah!