
The Criterion: An International Journal in English
British Literature
Pre-Industrial Climate Anxiety: Environmental Uncertainty in British Romantic Poetry
Abstract
British Romantic poetry has been studied through the lens of natural beauty, artistic creation and rural harmony. And such readings imply that nature is the source of consolation, aesthetic pleasure, and moral principles. But this paper encapsulates fear, storm, decay, environmental instability, anxiety about nature and the pre-industrial climate anxiety which remain unexplored. This study also recaps romantic poetry exploring how poets of the age responded to unusual weather, rural environmental changes, and uncertainties and all are experienced through a sense of ecological discomfort or unease. The present paper also employs climate anxiety theory, cultural materialism as the core to exposure. It goes beyond the conventional pastoral studies and rejuvenating dispraised ecological voices, and how atmospheric disorder, silence, decay and fear function as the expressions of proto-form of climate anxiety.
Keywords
Climate anxiety, Romantic poetry, Romantic ecocriticism, Weather trauma, Ecological melancholy.
How to Cite
Ujjal Mandal. “Pre-Industrial Climate Anxiety: Environmental Uncertainty in British Romantic Poetry.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 2026, pp. 736-752. ISSN: 0976-8165.
