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“The Present Obfuscation”: Cowper's Task and the Time of Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tobias Menely
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Extract

Climate change, I argue, is a catastrophe that resists the revelation promised by apocalyptic narrative. My case study is William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), which I situate in two climatic contexts: the year of its composition, which saw meteorological extremes caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and an era of geologic modernity, the Anthropocene, which commenced with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century. As volcanogenic haze migrates in Cowper's descriptions from the countryside to the greenhouse and the imperial city, the poet fails to identify a meteorology with which to distinguish nature's seasonal “revolvency” from eschatological presages or from the modernization process itself—the historical “revolution” embodied by worsening urban pollution. Climate change poses a crisis, in the dual etymological senses of a decision and a turning point, because it unsettles the duration of the present, what returns and endures and so measures alteration.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 477 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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