Nature, Environment and Poetry

This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and Ted Hughes (1930-1998), one of the 20th century's great English poets. It follows how their respective careers follow the accelerating environmental crises of the 20th century, and how their poems address the relationship between language and ecology, nature and nation, human and animal. While both have been well-studied by critical thinkers before, this book reads their poems afresh for their understandings of local places and global crisis in the century of the environment.