"Organic Forms: Poetry, Ecology, Food" brings the increasingly prominent discourse of organic food and farming into conversation with the neglected concept of organic form in poetry. In doing so, I analyze the vexed politics and overlooked capacities of a major metaphor that has shaped literary studies and environmentalism--that of a poem, ecosystem, or farm as an organism. While organic form in poetry is associated with Romantic poets and the New Critics, surprisingly diverse twentieth-century American poets have taken up and revised organic form. Organic metaphors, far from leading determinately to New Critical closure, empower formally divergent poetries, from Charles Olson's projective page space to Lorine Niedecker's pared-down serial poems and from Wendell Berry's lyrics to A. R. Ammons' proceduralist experiments. In the writings of organic farming advocates from Sir Albert Howard to Will Allen of Milwaukee's urban farm Growing Power, organic metaphors do not stop with closure either, but instead turn our attention from idealizing holism (the self-sufficient farm) to constructing ecologically sustainable agricultural systems. I find that, while organic metaphors do have real political risks, some twentieth-century versions of them in fact point up the constructedness of forms made in imitation of nature and the necessary openness and ecological interconnectedness on which any partial autonomy depends. This dissertation investigates an exchange between poetics and popular, environmentalist discourses that sometimes takes historically concrete forms--Berry, for example, explicitly links organic form in poetry with organic farming--and that sometimes operates through metaphor. Proponents of the local, organic food movement and poets like Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, and Ronald Johnson converge in articulating an environmentalist aesthetic based not on guilt or apocalyptic dread, but on embodied pleasure in the life of the senses and willing participation in systems that we cannot fully control--a mode of participation that entails vulnerability.