The question at the heart of Poetry's Nature is "How is poetry a living art?" Based on Stewart's 2023 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford, it explores four paradigms that illuminate poetry's relation to other natural phenomena. By reframing poetry in its relation to nature, Stewart hopes to reframe our relation to the world in which we live.

Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator, and the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, emerita, at Princeton University. Her books of poems include Columbarium, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her prose works include The Ruins Lesson, The Poet's Freedom, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and On Longing. A former MacArthur Fellow, Berlin Fellow, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.