Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry Since 1945: v.28 (Liverpool English Texts and Studies) - Hardcover

As environmental concerns increasingly command the attention of poets and their readers alike, and landscape poetry becomes once again an influential and much used sub-genre, this book draws attention to this aspect of modern literature. The central feature of this work is a re-evaluation, in terms of their contributions to the landscape genre, of five important post-war poets: Phillip Larkin, R.S. Thomas, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. The author examines the dominant images and myths of post-war British landscape poetry, and relates them to the modern environmental crisis. In particular, he considers the recurring myths of Eden and the Fall, which have been used to assert and explain the superiority of the countryside or the natural world (seen as Eden) to the urban environment (seen as the result of the Fall). This book also relates the landscape poetry of the post-war era to its literary-historical forbears, and attempts a prediction of the ways in which this tradition may be changed over the next few decades as the environmental crisis deepens.