Postmodern Ecocritical Poetics: Contemporary Responses to Romantic Aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which contemporary poets critique and reappropriate the Romantic aesthetics of the sublime and the picturesque in nature poetry. I examine how contemporary poets use craft to expose suppressed histories of violence situated in a particular landscape while retaining, transforming, or disavowing the pleasure of sublime awe. I examine the ways contemporary poets Ed Roberson and Brian Teare transform the Romantic aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque into a postmodern sublime which is collective, mediated, and intersectional. I give an overview of Romantic versus contemporary definitions of the Sublime and the Picturesque and discuss some of the transformations that contemporary poets are making to Romantic aesthetics by doing close readings of Roberson’s “be careful” and Teare’s Companion Grasses.