Background
Literary Context
“Dear Future Generations: Sorry” is a poem working within the literary context of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson’s renowned book Silent Spring (1962) is credited with launching the environmental movement. However, the book begins with an epigraph from a poem by John Keats, a prominent English poet who wrote in the period of the Romantics (1800-1850). The Romantic poets often wrote about nature as an ideal; however, today, Prince Ea reflects that nature is no longer a beautiful, idyllic scene. While nature and the environment remain a muse and a source of poetic inspiration for the poet, the poem also shares an urgent warning and touches on the deep political quandary of 21st century Environmentalism. In “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” Prince Ea invokes nature to sound an alarm for his readers that if humanity does not change, nature will cease to exist and so will all the organisms that depend on nature to live–including humans.
Many poets have come before Prince Ea and sounded similar alarms. For example, W. S. Merwin published “For a Coming Extinction” (1967) just a mere five years after Carson’s Silent Spring. The poem follows the subject of an extinct whale, but comments more largely on the changing earth (due to humans) and those effects.
