Abstract

Poetry in the Age of Climate Change: Ecological Anxiety and Human–Nature Relationships in Contemporary Indian Poetry

Dr.N. Lakshmi

Volume: 16 Issue: 4 2026

Abstract:

Climate change is emerging as an issue of the ecological and cultural imagination that fuels fears of environmental loss, cultural loss, and the alterity of the human-nonhuman nexus. In this paper, examination of images of trees, rivers, mountains, forests, landscapes, etc., found in Indian poetry is done to demonstrate how the cited poets (a group of Indian poets) shared their representations of environmental crisis, away from questions of memory, cultural belonging, genealogies, and indigenous epistemologies. The position is a qualitative, interpretive one. Theoretically, the perspective finds support in the reality that, the interdependence of the human and other-than-human is significant for existence. While evidence shows that the cited poets' concern for ecological loss; it winds up being connected to cultural and emotional loss, This necessitates dehumanizing perspectives on the other-than-human while engendering regional, reciprocal relations between human and non-human planetary communities in the Anthropocene.

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