Victor LaValle dedicated his 2016 horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom, a work that reimagines a racially-charged Lovecraftian universe by centering it around the Black experience, “To H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings”. LaValle’s ambiguous feelings as both a reader and author are shared by many students of the Gothic as they adjust recognizable and occasionally exclusive generic boundaries to better encompass varied, eclectic, and sometimes invisible or problematically visible identities.

The planetary event characterised as Anthropocene in our times shares a particular relationship with the Modernist milieu which sought to represent the conflicts that extend to the non-human and the more-than-human world. Scattered through Eliot’s poetic oeuvre is the speculation of how to think seriously about the planet. Every street lamp that Eliot’s lyric persona passes from beats like a “fatalistic drum” with Bergsonian élan vital (the creative force) which informs both the human and the non-human world. This roundtable invites contributions which will explore the non-human aspects in Eliot’s poems.