Anthropocene anxiety is regarded as a form of distress caused by the Anthropocene, the geological age in which we now live, following human activities which have caused a significant impact on the planet. The Anthropocene has caused many literary works to express concern over these environmental changes, including Cecil Rajendra's poetry, which is charged with such concerns, offering a critical view of the environmental changes brought about during the Anthropocene. It is crucial to explore these concerns as people have generally become desensitised today, and their emotional responses are inadequate to respond to the vast environmental destruction, a psychological phenomenon that Paul and Scott Slovic refer to as “the Arithmetic of Compassion.” To analyse Anthropocene anxiety in Rajendra's poetry, this study utilises Affective Ecocriticism based on the premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from Affect Theory, which focuses on the study of affect and emotion. The analysis reveals that selected poems in Rajendra's Rags and Ragas: Selected Environmental Poems (Rajendra, 2000d) evoke Anthropocene anxiety through figures of speech, diction, tone, and poetic metre and form. By highlighting the poignancy of the Anthropocene anxiety in Rajendra’s poetry, we can raise awareness of the Arithmetic of Compassion, as Slovic (2023) suggests, encouraging empathy for current environmental issues.

Keywords: Affect theory; Anthropocene; anxiety; ecocriticism; Cecil Rajendra

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