Welcome

The subtitle of this course poses a rather odd and surprising question: Can Poetry Save the Earth? A 2009 book by this title makes the counterintuitive claim that yes, indeed, it can. In this course, we’ll explore why someone would ask this question and what assumptions about poetry, nature, and environmentalism are encoded in it. We’ll begin with a survey of recent arguments that trace origin of modern ecological thought to poetry of the Romantic period in British literature, roughly 1780-1830. On the cusp of the industrial revolution and in the midst of political turmoil and war, authors from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Charlotte Smith and John Clare sought for a more integrated and sustainable relationship between human beings and the environment—a relationship conditioned by scientific and technological developments, an awareness of ecological change, aesthetic traditions, and ideas about human consciousness and will. Wordsworth’s dancing daffodils, Shelley’s sublime “Mount Blanc,” John Clare’s homely badger, and Charlotte Smith’s apocalyptic “Beachy Head” each put forward an ecological position—powerful legacies we have inherited. To understand how their writing shaped modern concepts of nature and the development of ecocriticism, we’ll pair a series of poems with excerpts from 18th-century natural philosophy, 19th-century aesthetic theory, and 20th-century ecocritical arguments.