Happiness in the Age of Disaster:Eco-mourning and Climate Melancholia in Danish 2010's Ecopoetry

Taking its point of departure in two contemporary Danish poets, Victor Boy Lindholm (Lindholm 2015) and Theis Ørntoft (Ørntoft 2014), the article discusses affective poetic responses to the climate crisis. The concepts of ‘eco-mourning’ and ‘climate-melancholia’ are examined in order to deliberate the possibility for human happiness in late modernism. Poems by the writers are analysed with Sara Ahmed’s theories on happiness (Ahmed 2010), perspectives from posthumanist theory (Wolfe 2010) and Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology (Morton 2011). It is argued that the teleology, autonomy and futurism that, according to Ahmed, is inherent to the promise of happiness, is rendered impossible by the climate crisis and accordingly problematized stylistically in some works of climate poetry. This leads to a discussion of the poetry of Lindholm and Ørntoft in relation to Freud’s theory on mourning and melancholia (Freud 1999), which ends by concluding that Lindholm’s poetry can be seen as representative of a mourning that reproduces dynamics of desire in a dialectical oscillation between optimism and pessimism. In contrast, Ørntoft’s poetry marks a melancholy dispensation of the structures that this desire works within.