Fearful Symmetry: How Two 18th-Century Poems Speak to a 21st-Century Apocalyptic Wasteland

The Walking Dead: World Beyond Gets Old School in the Best Way

PopPoetry is poetry and pop culture Substack written by Caitlin Cowan. You can learn more about it here. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, subscribe so you won’t miss a post! Time for a little light apocalypse reading. Let’s go!

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Things are bad, and they have been for a long time. That’s all you need to know in order to enter the world of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, the latest offering in the gory, incredibly successful Walking Dead franchise. Based on the comic book series created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, TWD (2010) has now spawned two spinoffs: Fear the Walking Dead (2015) and The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2020). All three shows are still currently airing on AMC and AMC+ at the time of this writing. If you’re a fan, it’s a fun time to be watching television. And if you’re a Walking Dead fan who likes poetry, it’s an even better time to be alive.

I’ve written about The Walking Dead before. In fact, that post was actually the very first thing I wrote that directly led to the creation of PopPoetry. I used to keep a personal blog, and during the early years of the original show’s run, I felt compelled to write about the ways that Kevin Prufer’s “Apocalypse” made me think about The Walking Dead and vice versa. I found that they were mutually informing, even though one was a poem and the other was a tv show about zombies. I’ve been attuned to instances of poetry that crop up in popular culture ever since, and I ended up reposting that piece, along with one about Call the Midwife’s engagement of Federico García Lorca and another about American Horror Story: Cult’s knowing nod to Shelley. This trio I first uploaded to Substack formed the core set of articles that exemplified what I hoped to do moving forward.

Here we are again, considering what poetry might be able to tell us about the apocalypse. But this time we have a whole new cast: