The poetic production involved is what resulted from the Year Without a Summer in 1816 – caused by the Tambora Mount eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The huge concentration of sulphuric acid released in the atmosphere influenced the climate patterns throughout the globe, leading to a global cooling between one and two Celsius degrees.
The young Romantics knew nothing about Tambora but the perceptive experience of the sublime landscapes, of the darkened sun and the cold and wet weather during the summer around Geneva (for the Shelleys and Lord Byron), or the view in spring of the unbloomed plants in the fields in the neighbourhoods of London (for J. Keats), led them to write about Nature and to contemplate the world that was changing around them, expressing ideas and concerns extremely connected to our contemporary environmental issues.
The wealth of their reflections on climate change culminates in the fear of the possible extinction of humankind. Exactly as is reiterated today by the climate activists.
The risk of the planet collapsing, or of human life or nonhuman life – or all of them – which in our present represents a potential threat for our future, is actually the continuation of a debate that began more than two centuries ago. And yesterday as today, young souls had a close gaze on Nature.