Mourning Species

This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the poem’s treatment of extinction changes when it is read as an account of anthropogenic extinction, the decimation of species arising explicitly from human action and linked (both metaphorically and literally) to imperial conquest. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a new kind of human “species being,” that is, the human as geophysical force within the Earth system, which appears in the poem through extended metaphors linking human evolution to industrial processes and imperial conquest thus speaking to one of the most difficult (and controversial) challenges that the Anthropocene lays before the humanities: thinking the human in species terms. In the process, the chapter makes a case for elegy as both an ethical and political stance complement to conservation.