The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World

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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 Modernisms 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.

Reviews

The most exciting aspects of The New Poetics of Climate Change are its linking of climate change to texts that do not focus primarily on 'nature', and the comparison of lesser-known environmental poets with major canonical figures. Twenty-seventeen was the third warmest year on record; this book is uncannily topical. * Times Literary Supplement *
Griffithss beautifully written and clever book is full of provocations to think harder about the climate. * The Modernist Review *
A challenging and thought-provoking work. * The Year's Work in English Studies *
Matthew Griffiths offers some lucid and exciting reappraisals of Modernist poets, including some less often discussed (David Jones and Basil Bunting). He traces in these innovative texts the emergent forms of a global environmental ethic. Once fully recognised, the inventiveness of these modernist poets offers a gauge for the possibilities, limitations and strengths of climate change poetry in our own time. * Professor Tim Clark, Professor in the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK *
A thoughtful and searching book which looks back as well as forward to think about the poems and poets of our climate. By exploring how Modernism and global warming disrupt our cherished conceptions of the world, Griffiths shows how poetic experiment and formal innovation can help articulate humanitys entanglements with its changing environment. * Dr Samuel Solnick, William Noble Research Fellow in English, University of Liverpool *

Author Bio

Matthew Griffiths is a poet and literary critic.