A CONTRASTON ECOCRITICAL ELEMENTSIN CERTAIN MAJOR POEMS WITH “THE WASTE LAND”

Abstract

Early writers on nature suggested different ways of looking at the environment. Their texts have become the inspirational moments of ecocriticism. It is a fact that ecocriticism as a ‘theory’ arrived much after the emergence of the activists and legal cases about environmental issues and development all over the world. Raymond Williams in his much celebrated work, The Country and the City (1973) explained how English literature contributed to specific notions of nature , the countryside, poverty, seasons and the city. According to CheryllGlotfelty, ‘Ecocriticism’ is ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’. It is an interdisciplinary project which analyses how the environment is represented in literature and examines how the human treats the non-human and tries to find out possible solutions for the environmental crisis. The article tries to find out how writers of different ages pictured the environment and makes to bring out the changes which happened in nature over centuries.