The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World

Description

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time – and yet too often literature on the subject is considered only in the bracket of ‘environmental’ writing, divorced from culture, society and politics. The New Poetics of Climate Change argues instead that the emergence of global warming presents a fundamental challenge to the way we read and write poetry – the way we think – in the modern age. In this important new book, Matthew Griffiths demonstrates that Modernism’s radical reinvigorations of literary form over the last century represent an engagement with key intellectual questions that we still need to address if we are to comprehend the scale and complexity of climate change. Through an extended examination of Modernist poetry, including the work of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and David Jones, and their influence on present-day poets including Jorie Graham, Griffiths explores how Modernist modes can help us describe and engage with the terrifying dynamics of a warming world and offer a poetics of our climate. FC Half title Environmental Cultures Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1 Climate Changes Everything The climate change poem Criticism and climate change Modernism matters 2 A New Climate for Modernism The modes of Modernism The changing climate of The Waste Land 3 Wallace Stevens’s Fictions of Our Climate Some poems of our climate Models for atmospheric apprentices Notes towards a climatic poetics The poetics of our climate 4 Basil Bunting and Nature’s Discord Nature in Bunting’s Romantic Modernism An economy of elements, the poetics of entropy Bunting unbound Mapping the order 5 David Jones’s Anathemata and the Gratuitous Environment Poetry versus progressivism The fractal form The associative Anthropocene Contingent culture 6 The Poems of Our Climate Change Warming to the theme Sea Change: Modernist poetics and climate change Conclusion: The New Poetics of Climate Change Notes References Index