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Genres: Lyric
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This genre of poetry uses the medium of verse to explore grim and oppressive future societies. This genre takes societal issues and projects them into bleak future scenarios as a form of social critique.
Topics can range from authoritarian governments, environmental disaster, technological control, to societal collapse. Through evocative imagery and stark themes, dystopia poetry serves as a warning about potential future consequences of present actions, provoking thought and discussion about societal norms and values.
William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ delves into the hopeless atmosphere of post-World War I Europe through apocalyptic imagery.
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Auden’s ‘Consider This and in Our Time’ captures a society poised on the brink, blending serene imagery with ominous undertones of political upheaval.
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly - look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
‘The Unknown Citizen,’ a popular work by W.H. Auden, satirically depicts a dystopian report on a man’s life, exploring individuality and government power.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Explore Bukowski’s raw style in ‘I Live Too Near the Slaughterhouse,’ where life’s brutal realities and fleeting moments clash.
I live too near the slaugherhouse.
What do you expect? Silver blood
like Chatterton's? The dankness of my hours
allows no practiced foresight.
‘The Museum of Obsolescence’ reflects on the passage of time, showing how once-important objects, ideas, and even people become outdated, left behind like relics in a forgotten museum.
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,
Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence
‘The Climate’ by Annelyse Gelman is a powerful piece about the climate crisis. It is seen through an approaching wave and metaphorical beachgoers’ negligence.
It was like watching a wave approach
from a great distance, so great
that at first it is not a wave at all, but
a mere horizon, static and singular,
‘Mass Transit Buses’ by Gabriel Okara is a short poem that uses the example of a mass transit system to show how promises by politicians are rarely kept and how corruption derails plans.
The governor's exhortations
Were their launching pad!
Away they careered!
The masses cheered!
‘Night Shift’ by Edward Dyson is a poem that examines the harsh living conditions of Australian miners in the nineteenth century.
‘Hello! that's the whistle, be moving.
Wake up! don't lie muttering there.
What language! your style is improving -
It's pleasant to hear you at prayer.
‘Contractors’ by Gabriel Okara is a poem that explores the ideas of corruption within large organisations, suggesting that everyone is trying to find profit for themselves.
Men and women
Wearing grim, ingratiating faces,
Moving with money-steps; and receptionists
With pothole-faces of money importance
‘A Brief History of Hostility’ is written by the modern African American poet Jamaal May. This poem explores the themes of oppression and war with an implied reference to slavery.
The beast that roared
or bleated when brought down
was silent when skinned
but loud after the skin
‘The Pylons’ is a foreboding poem that explores the collision between two worlds and the devastating consequences for the innocent.
The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages
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