Poetic Birds and Material Forms in the Long Nineteenth Century

The Victorian poems here are haunted by industrialism’s alienation of the human from the more-than-human and they offer three case studies of poems that engage with birds in an entangled world, using concepts from environmental humanities: multispecies assemblage, agency, time in the Anthropocene, and slow violence. Reading Rossetti, Hardy, and Thomas, the article illuminates how nineteenth and early twentieth century poetry recognizes the impoverishment caused by industrialization and imperialism, but also seeks to enrich and restore by bringing to the fore the unsettling entanglements of both human and more-than-human.