Eco-Poetry from the Romantics to the Pre

Wordsworth famously wrote that “Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her,” but is the reverse true?

This course will explore the entanglement of literature and the environment from two vantage points: the first is Romantic-era England, which coincided with the onset of the industrial revolution that put the earth on a course of mass extinction and climate change. The second is the period from around 1980 to the present, after the birth of the modern environmental movement, when the devastating effects of human activity on the earth became an unavoidable subject for many poets. After spending time with both canonical and overlooked Romantic nature poetry (including Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Shelley, John Clare), we will turn in the second half of the semester to a global group of contemporary eco-poets variously taking up, transforming, deflecting, or unraveling Romantic-era ideas of “Nature” in light of contemporary environmental crises and the age of the Anthropocene.

The course will focus on close reading and discussion of poems, but will also introduce some elementary concepts, concerns, and practices of what is called “eco-criticism,” a relatively recent mode of reading literature first developed by scholars of Romanticism. Some questions we may consider include: How might poetic language be particularly attuned to intimations of ecological change and collapse? How do and how should poetic forms and traditions shift in the wake of environmental crisis? How might poems help us cultivate arts of noticing, forms of resistance, and modes of dwelling in common with non-human life? Reading contemporary poets like Will Alexander and Etel Adnan, we will also explore how literature can connect with various scales and dimensions of existence, including the seasonal, the elemental, the planetary, and even the cosmic. Along the way, we will critically explore how both ecology and poetic practice are inflected by issues of race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism.