ABSTRACT
This chapter traces what The Earthly Paradise— William Morris's sustained poem— can teach us about sustainability. It argues that the sustainability of social and environmental relations is a major theme within Morris's poem. If a change of outlook is the fundamental precondition for sustainability, the reproducible and shareable art of narrative and poetry is at once a means to that change and a rich form of sustainable pleasure. Morris offers people the prospect of a sustainable society through his poem's framing narrative, its structure and the experience of reading it. The chapter shows how Morris uses what is in effect an iterative structure to explore what might make for a sustainable society. As the tales are themselves retellings of ancient or medieval legends, many of the polities within which they take place are monarchical, and a question that recurs is what constitutes a sustainable model of kingship.
