Aims
This course aims to:
• introduce you to the history of poetry focused on nature and environmental themes
• develop your knowledge of literary criticism, specifically analysis informed by ecocriticism and animal studies
• investigate urgent themes around the climate crisis as they are addressed by contemporary ecopoets
Content
This course will explore the depiction of nature in a range of poetry from different periods and places. We will read from the tradition of nature writing inherited from romanticism to contemporary ecopoetry written by poets responding to ecological crisis and biodiversity loss. We will study poets including William Wordsworth, Gary Snyder, Alycia Pirmohamed and Alison J Barton.
Presentation of the course
The course will be taught through a combination of informal lectures and seminar style discussion. It is expected that students will have read the set poems in advance of the course. All poems will be made available to read via the course VLE.
Course sessions
1. Nature and ‘Nature’
We will begin by considering the history of nature poetry and how it attempts to represent the natural world but also creates discursive constructions of ‘nature’ as a category in contrast to the ‘human’. We will look at poems by Romantic poets including Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Clare and examine key terms such as ‘the sublime’ to help us in our subsequent readings.
2. More-than-human life
Examining poems from Romanticism to the present day, we will examine how poetry attempts to be a voice for nature and animals, or to express a sense of the agency and being of the environment, and look at how contemporary ecopoetry has wrestled with the politics of voicing more-than-human life.
3. Water
In this session we will focus particularly on watery poems and the representation of rivers, seas and other forms of liquid landscapes.
4. Green
This session will focus on the poetry of all things that grow, from the fungal to the arboreal. We will read poems which investigate what critic John Charles Ryan calls ‘the botanical imagination’.
5. Urban Ecopoetry and the Anthropocene
In our final session, we will read into the city and encounter work by poets including Gary Snyder and Tommy Pico who examine the complexities of urban landscapes, juxtaposing the artificial with the organic and highlighting the tensions between ecological fragility and urban worlds, heightened by the pressures of our current climate emergency.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• to develop an understanding of the tradition of nature writing, from Romanticism to contemporary ecopoetry
• to explore how historical, cultural, and ecological contexts influence poetic expressions of nature, comparing how the works of poets identify evolving perspectives on nature and the environment
• examine the connections between poetic form, content, and ecological philosophy
• to reflect critically on personal perspectives toward nature and the environment inspired by the course readings
Required reading
Required reading will include several poems for each day which will be made available via the course VLE. The course will be taught with the expectation that students have read the set poems in full before the class.
