Poetry, ecocriticism and the concepts of the global south

Abstract

The manifold implications of globalisation in all its varied fonns have long been fonning part of the central theme of poetic inspiration. Since the ancient Greek poets the environment has featured both as a physical context within which they could construct their own imaginative and experiential project, and as an ethereal background against which writers could set their own interior landscape. The human persona of the Renaissance and then Illuminism is already a being of global pretensions, an offshoot of the ideal figure which classical sculptors and poets had already defined as cosmopolitan, namely global, a citizen whose patria is the whole planet, not just a restricted stretch ofland known as a nation. This conception far predates Ernest Renan's assumption that national states are perhaps not necessarily meant to exist forever. Poetically, such a belief stemmed from one simple assumption, much aloof from any shade ofcontroversy: humans are inhabitants ofone wholesome, single planet.