Abstract
As a contribution to the current debate on poetry in the Anthropocene, this article examines the metaphysically oriented nature poetics of Christian Lehnert and argues for the importance of his poetry against the backdrop of contemporary environmental crisis. Lehnert is both a theologian and a distinguished German poet. The exploration of the non-human world in his poetry often appears to be infused with religious semantics, while it is closely intertwined with reflection on the linguistic constitution of nature as well as on human perception. The article examines Lehnert’s theological as well as poetological positions and delves into a close analysis of one of his poems showing how his poetry creatively retrieves premodern religious traditions, sacred texts and liturgical forms to develop new literary forms of nature perception that navigate a space of simultaneous ecological awareness and religious belief, while exposing the deep fractures in the relationships between the human and nonhuman and deconstructing anthropocentric patterns of thought. (HB-J, in German)
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