American Short Verse and Micro-Ecologies, 1860 to the Present

In both academic and popular discourses, climate change is often imagined at proportions so large it challenges conceptualisation. This project attempts to refocus debates in the environmental humanities away from the large-scale by exploring how poetry, especially very short verse, helps document environmental destruction at the level of the microhabitat--from backyards to municipal parks. The history of short verse in America--ranging from the monostich (a one-line poem) to the sonnet (14 lines)--can be traced back to the 1860s, its rising appeal paralleling the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change. The genre's wide use amongst American poets from Emily Dickinson to Rae Armantrout has created an important yet unexplored repository of ecological knowledge. Drawing together the fields of poetics and the environmental humanities, my project will endeavour to synthesise archival, literary critical, and digital methods in order to investigate this vital poetic corpus.