Underground Poetics: Geology, Literature and Criticism in the Nineteenth Century

Why do we value a poem for its depth?

This project seeks a new answer in the connections between poetry, geology and literary criticism in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

Earlier studies map literature/geology interplay in the Romantic and Victorian literary canon , but none have examined how geological aesthetics influenced literature as a category .

This project aims to 1) identify the qualities of a new underground poetics that emerged in the 1840s-60s as poets, geologists and fossil-fuel industrialists turned attention to the world beneath our feet; and 2) ascertain how this poetics cultivated esteem for depth in literary interpretation.Drawing insights from ecocriticism and geographies of science, in three case studies I will analyze how poets used geological imagery – caves, graves, fossils, strata – to forge a poetics that addressed ecological questions about worldly creation, species extinction, and deep time.

I hypothesize that they cast the underground as a physical site and figurative space – a depth beneath the image – that demanded its readers extractthe poem´s meaning, echoing patterns of geological exploration and mining.

The resulting monograph and collaborations will reveal new influences on the history of literary criticism, will nuance literature´s complicity in anthropogenic activity and, by exposing a human/earth configuration particular to that era, will open new possibilities for poetry today as a site of ecological contact and action.