Daniel Eltringham. Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure

Abstract

In January 2023, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the wealthy owners of a large area of Dartmoor National Park who sought to overturn an assumed right to overnight wild camping under a bylaw in the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. Provoking public outrage, much media attention and a protest attended by an estimated 3000 people, the ruling represented a symbolic moment in complex histories of land access and usage. Dartmoor had been, until now, the only remaining place in England that allowed overnight camping without the landowner’s permission. Such events highlight the timeliness of Daniel Eltringham’s Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure. As Eltringham eloquently argues, and as the Dartmoor case exemplifies, processes of enclosure continue apace into the twenty-first century, and the potent imaginary of the commons as a space for practices of resistance may be more relevant than ever. Furthermore, poetry engages with these issues in vital ways. By putting into dialogue Romantic-era poetry and British avant-garde poetry since the 1960s, Eltringham traces how and why post-war poetics returns to figures of the commons and practices of commoning in the context of interconnected forms of market-driven neoliberalism and ecological crisis.