Ideas of Dwelling: Residence and Transport in Scottish Geography, German Folk Culture and the American post-Romantic Hinterland of John Burnside's 'Epithalamium'

Abstract

John Burnside won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2012. His work is renowned for its interest in ecology and yet it is not distracted from a post-industrial landscape that informs a philosophical lyrical mode. Such lyricism is the bedrock for an inquiry into the question of history alongside both the spiritually inflected depiction of nature, and an interest in relationships on various scales between various agents over time. Humans, flora and fauna are consolidated into ideas of change and the making of home (or temporary residency on a changing earth), which draw from may sources, particularly British mythology, American modernism and European culture and philosophy with peculiar ecological resonance.