Abstract
Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. In the face of this realisation, the human subject enters a melancholic state, which, in turn, permits deeper insight into the fate of the more-than-human world. The rhetoric of loss, identified by Juliana Schiesari as a key to melancholy, can be traced throughout contemporary poetry, which offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings. This essay will explore these dynamics in a range of poems by contemporary Irish and British women, revealing an encounter between the embodied self and nature that has profound effects on the construction of the poetic subject, and on traditional approaches to form.
Highlights
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Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death
The rhetoric of loss, identified by Juliana Schiesari as a key to melancholy, can be traced throughout contemporary poetry, which offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings
Summary
Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. The insights that emerge as part of this process shape contemporary poetry by women in important ways This poetry, in turn, offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings. As Val Plumwood has pointed out, this removal of boundaries troubles the binary between emotional and rational states, which has been necessary to a construction of ecologically responsible human behaviour, grounded in ethical reflection. In this scheme ‘the particular and the emotional are seen as the enemy of the rational, as corrupting, capricious, and self-interested’ (Plumwood 1991, 6). Ecological melancholia is situated in an uneasy space between a private emotion, at times difficult to disclose, and a recognition of shared loss that transcends the particularity of experience
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