What is the relationship between the habitats a culture chooses to build and the forms of experience available to its members? Can poetry train us to pay keener attention to our surroundings, especially their nonhuman aspects we usually call nature? Situated between World War II and the 1970s, this project explores those two questions by looking at how Wallace Stevens, Richard Hugo, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery represent and critique midcentury America's dominant built environment: the suburbs. White, middle-class suburbia was rooted in pseudo-pastoral ideology according to which a family expresses its prosperity through control of a modest, manicured swatch of nature around its home. But suburbia is actually industrialized pastoral, supported by an infrastructure of cheap oil, easy credit, landscaping firms, asphalt roads, corporatized food production, water-supply regimes, and transnational media.

The poets considered here understand "medium nature" (a term from Stevens) in two ways as they develop a set of mobile imaginative practices that can ultimately describe modified environments outside of this project's temporal and cultural frame. First, they delineate spaces where nature appears in stylized, commodified, fragmentary forms like golf courses, city parks, lawns gorged on petrochemicals, ornamental poplars, house pets, or flower troughs outside supermarkets. These places often seem---and often are---stale, artificialized, even poisoned, because they are saturated with technologies and their byproducts. Yet nonhuman phenomena are not entirely absent from the suburbs, a fact that helps us think beyond rigid binaries like city/country and nature/culture. Though problematic, suburbia renders visible the links between cultural practices and material contexts.

These practices include poetry itself, which, Chapter Two contends, Stevens theorizes as a hybrid of imagination and biotic fact using material drawn from West Hartford, the wealthy suburb where he wrote most of his poems. Thus, contends the more theoretical and historicist Chapter One, suburbs revive the term "nature" in the face of recent dismissals by some philosophers. Second, "medium" frames nature as a matrix though which humans form relationships with one another; these poets explore the sociopolitical geographies coded into suburban landscapes. Chapter Three takes up Richard Hugo, whose poetry asserts that the construction of auto-centric transportation networks hurts marginalized groups more than others, in his work's case Nisei farmers whose land was stolen during the war and used to build new suburban infrastructures outside Seattle.

Chapter Four uses Plath's journals, letters, and poems to argue that her Gothic version of pastoral disrupts the routines of middle-class life by ironizing the attendant belief that nature can be privatized, commodified, and managed, a move that is clearest in Ariel. Chapter Five examines how Ashbery extends suburbanized modernity's fetish for environmental control to an absurd end. Instead of tidy green space, Ashbery sees a bricolage of junk and ersatz nature. His airless, grimly comical dioramas evoke the way economic stagnation, social anomie, and anxieties about pollution damaged the suburban dream during the 1970s, which mark the close of its ostensible golden age.