Apocalyptic Poetics: Reading Ecologically Across Media After 1945 argues that global literary techniques of imagination respond to the end of World War II as a time when it became imaginable for humans to cause the extinction of our own species. Tracing the development and production of new methods for imagining impossible futures, Apocalyptic Poetics makes the case that a robust attention to the formal and aesthetic limits of media gives the best insights into what it means for a world to end. To that end, I examine three media forms—novels, film, and poetry—to investigate the workings of apocalyptic poetics in their shifting sites and modalities. This dissertation connects the threads of environmental studies, nuclear criticism, and media theory to study the poetics—the artistic techniques of making—that are specific to certain media, such as the cinematics of risk, the interface of novelistic realism, and the spectrality of the lyric voice. By reading widely, with less regard for national borders than for the sociopolitical contexts that produce them, Apocalyptic Poetics highlights four sites where apocalyptic logics are at work, and in so doing offers four case studies on what we stand to gain when we take the end of the world as a starting point. Each chapter intervenes in its own micro-debate about temporality, locality, and apocalypse, demonstrating the richness of possibilities afforded by my method and sketching a loose portrait of the post-1945 literary imaginative landscape as attuned to concerns of “the end.” Among the texts in the project’s varied, multi-national archive are poems from the height of the AIDS crisis, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and a spy novel by Salman Rushdie. By refocusing the lens of apocalypse from “what” to “how,” I argue that accurate representation of crisis or the end of the world is less interesting than the methods of expression themselves.