The New Poetics of Climate Change

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.