Ecology, Nature and the Human in Edwin Thumboo’s Poetry

Abstract

In recent decades a growing concern for the environment and humans’ relationship to it has prompted a group of literary critics, who have since been labelled ecocritics, to foreground place in literature as a new critical category. All ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artefacts of language and literature.

    This study attempts to make a case for Thumboo as an ecological poet. It discusses why Thumboo’s treatment of the historical theme is distinctive, subversive, and even at times anathematic to progress-oriented national discourses. It will then examine ways in which his poems forge an “organic†synthesis with nature and conclude by discussing Thumboo’s eco-critical leanings.