Volume V Special Issue IV October 2025

Name of Author : Gh Mohiuddin

Title of the paper : Moral Imperative of Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions of Environmental Responsibility in English Poetry

Abstract: With growing ecological crises, sustainability has emerged not only as a scientific agenda but as a profoundly ethical imperative. This paper aims to explore that English poetry, from Romanticism to the contemporary era, has been a vital cultural site for articulating environmental ethics especially principles of intergenerational justice, the intrinsic value of nature, human nature reciprocity, equity, and stewardship. Through close readings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Alice Oswald, and with reference to ecocritical scholarship by Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Bate and other environmental scientists, the study demonstrates how poetic forms and figures represent moral attention, empathy for nonhuman beings, and a reparative imagination. Poetry does more than describe landscapes it trains ethical perception and motivates responsibility by binding aesthetic experience to moral judgment. The paper concludes that English poetry offers both historical depth and imaginative resources for reframing sustainability as a shared obligation across species and generations.

Keywords : Sustainability; Environmental Ethics; Ecocriticism; Intergenerational Justice; Eco poetry

DOI :

Page Number : 23-27