Abstract:Eiseley is an early practitioner of what we now call ecopoetry. His poetry brings scientific language and concepts into lyric form, presents what Boardman would call an appropriate anthropomorphizing, attempts to connect readers to the natural world, encourages a compassion for and identity with a natural order that fewer and fewer readers have any direct contact with, and attempts to depict deep time and space in the limited medium of language. An appreciation for the evolutionary matrix of all living things is fundamental for Eiseley in all his poems and essays. Importantly, Eiseley does not separate the human realm from this matrix; for this reason, his poems emphasize a biocentric, not an anthropocentric, worldview. For Eiseley, this recognition of an evolutionary process is not simply an intellectual gambit, Eiseley grasps this reality somatically, as tactile sensation.