Can Poetry Save the World? : Creating a Sustainable Future by Reading Green

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to examine how ecocritical readings of poems and song lyrics can work as a catalyst for discussing questions regarding sustainable development in the subject of English. The poems “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth and “Andrew”by Andrea Gibson, but also the song lyrics for the song “Every Age”by José Gonzalez were selected for the analyze, since they can represent the varying types of texts that are used by teachers in upper secondary school.   The essay leans heavily on different terms associated with ecocriticism and other closely related fields such as ecofeminism and environmental pedagogy since it can help to create an understanding for the complexity of sustainability and how it can be taught in the classroom.   The analyses showed that it is possible to address sustainable development through ecocritical readings of poems and song lyrics. There are two obvious ways forward that could be taken where the first would be to analyze even more texts in order to see if the methods used in the analyses are applicable to any other number of texts that are available to use in the classroom. The other way would be to apply the methods in a classroom situation and see if the methods would be suited for upper secondary school students.