We generally think of contemporary eco-poetry as having its taproot in the Romantic revolution, and for good reasons. Like us, the Romantic poets were acutely aware of the way industrial and technological advances threatened not only the beauty and diversity of Nature, but also the foundations of life itself. Long before it was named by the scientists, the poets had sensed the ominous arrival of the Anthropocene age. Choosing his adjectives with a poet’s precision, William Blake saw the factories around him as “dark Satanic Mills”. The adjective ‘satanic’, coined for the first time only a few ...
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