The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (Environmental Cultures)

Subject: Climate change is the greatest crisis of our time - and yet too often writing on the subject is separated off as 'environmental' writing, divorced from culture, society and politics. "The New Poetics of Climate Change" argues that the reality of global warming presents us with a fundamental challenge to the way we read and write poetry in the modern age. In this important new book, Matthew Griffiths demonstrates the ways in which modernism's radical reinvigorations of literary form over the last century represents 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 such as Michael Symmons Roberts and Jorie Graham, Griffiths explores how modernist modes help us describe and engage with the terrifying dynamics of a warming world and offer a poetics of our climate Read more... 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 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.