Weak Environmentalism: William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop in the Anthropocene

Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Sandpiper” along with William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” I make a case for the “weak environmentalism” of two authors who, writing before climate change was an available term, nonetheless spoke to the vulnerabilities of the planet — of humans and nonhumans — in a way newly meaningful in the climate-endangered twenty-first century.