Loren Eiseley is remembered today primarily as a writer of creative nonfiction. But in his younger years he considered himself a poet. During the 1920s and 30s he published in a variety of “little magazines,” especially Prairie Schooner. Then, in his later years, he returned to poetry, publishing four major collections during the 1970s, Notes of an Alchemist (1972),The Innocent Assassins (1973), Another Kind of Autumn (1977), and All the Night Wings (1979).
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I have argued in “‘The borders between us:’ Loren Eiseley’s Ecopoetics,” that Eiseley is an under-recognized figure in the development of what has come to be known as ecopoetry. It would be nice to see him get more recognition for this.
There are two publicly available audio recording of Eiseley reading and discussing his poetry:
Loren Eiseley Lecture, YWHA, March 1968 – Prose and Poetry
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Loren Eiseley Reading His Poetry, Library of Congress, March 1974
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In addition, many of his poems are reprinted online. In no particular order, here are links to some of those.
Selections from Prairie Schooner courtesy of Poetry from the Plains.
“Against Cities”
“For a Lost Home”
“Incident in the Zoo”
“Never Like Deer”
“Nocturne for Autumn’s Ending”
“Poem to Accompany a Poem”
“Prairie Spring”
“Poison Oak”
“Return to White Mountain”
“Sonnet”
“Spiders”
“The Quainter Dust”
“The Trout”
“These Are the Stars”
“Winter Visitant”
“Words for Forgetting”
“Words on a Spring Road”
Poems from other sites
“Tasting the Mountain Spring” and “The Spider”
Tom Lynch's Homepage 