The Nature of Modernism

This is the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, it argues that within British modernist poetry there is a clear interest in the natural world. Readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. This book shows how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole.