For a poem to be an ecopoem, it must have a strong environmental message. 

Even though ecopoetry draws on nature poems with its vocabulary, its environmentalist message distinguishes it from nature poems genre.

 

Ursula K. Heise declares that ecopoetry is ‘related to the broader genre of nature poetry but can be distinguished from it by its portrayal of nature as threatened by human activities’.

 

The issue that ecopoets are facing is that some readers view anything a bit political to be didactic.

And as Jorie Graham said in an interview with Earthlines: ‘They [suspicious readers] feel they “know this information already, so why do they need it in a poem.” That is precisely the point. They “know” it. They are not “feeling it.” That is what activists in the environmental movement are asking of us: help it be felt, help it be imagined’.

​