Introduction

The Introduction lays out the historical framework of the Great Acceleration. Rather than aligning the Great Acceleration with the discourse of the Anthropocene, this introduction argues that the particular historical model of the Great Acceleration is more attentive to the explosive economic growth in this period and its ecological ramifications. Postwar American poetry’s interest in leftovers, residual matter and life, and unredeemable goods makes it a particularly keen chronicler of the larger ecohistorical changes of this era. At the same time, this interest in remainders rather than natural externality becomes a measure of the increasing inaccessibility of the master-concept of nature as an imaginative resource and a cultural concept in this time. It also reveals the changing self-conceptions of the cultural work and status of poetry after modernism.