THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT IN THE SELECTED POEMS OF JOHN KEATS AND NIYI OSUNDARE: AN ECO-CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

📄 Project Abstract

The natural environment has progressively been endangered by the activities of man over the past decades. Attention was first drawn to this by the romantic poets who were alarmed by the obvious danger posed to nature by the dynamics of the Industrial Revolution. Several poets of succeeding epochs have sustained this concern in different ways. Previous studies explored the ways different poets engaged this concern with the natural environment. However, no study that we are aware of has taken into account the time-space divide between the nature-poets by which their works were nuanced. This study, therefore, underlined this time-space factor as it compared the nature poems of John Keats and Niyi Osundare. The aim was to show how the poets' spacio-temporal realities undergird their delineations of the natural environment in their poetry. The study used eco-criticism, an aspect of literary criticism, as its theory, and interfaced this with the comparative literary approach. Eco-criticism i...