ENGL 101 Poetry and the Environment
What use is poetry in a time of climate emergency? This course will pose this question through an introductory study of the history of English-language poetry’s consideration of human relationships to the environment, with a particular focus on the US, UK, Caribbean, and Pacific Islands. Topics may include: the poetics of agricultural labor and natural disaster; poetic responses to the historical effects of industrialization, colonialism, and slavery on nature; Romantic, modernist, and Indigenous meditations on human alienation from our embeddedness in nature; and recent poetry about the human and environmental consequences of mining, oil and gas extraction, and climate change. Students new to and experienced with poetry are equally welcome to enroll. Participants in this class will learn to read, interpret, and write about poems carefully and persuasively, and study the specific forms of environmental thinking that poetry in English has developed in the modern world.