Chapter 7 - Eco-consciousness

Summary

This chapter aims to locate an emergent eco-consciousness in the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that in Life Studies and beyond, Lowell’s poetry explores the political production of uncertainty, and considers how anxiety was employed as a political tool used to enforce vigilance and compliance. In poems addressing the prospect of nuclear war, Lowell positions this production of anxiety as a biopolitical process aimed at both managing resistance to nuclear politics and normalizing the fallout – both literal and figurative – from US political, military, and industrial interests in atomic technologies. From an ecocritical perspective, Lowell’s poems demonstrate how, in the nuclear age, the Cold War state renders the natural environment an object of government control. Both the real and the psychological fallout of the atomic age are a prescient ecological threat predicated upon a cruel optimism that conditions Cold War subjects to be complicit in their own ecological ruin.