Romantic Ecology - some notes.

Bates, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology, Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, (London: Routledge, 1991).

Unusually, perhaps, in a work of literary criticism the introduction opens with a description of the author reflecting on the evening TV news on a 'typical day' in early 1990. The date is significant, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bate speculates if an item about the renunciation by the Soviet Parliament of the Communist Party's sole right to rule, would in future years result in 1989 being seen if not as a new 1789, then at least as significant as 1848. It is unsurprising that against  a backdrop of changing ideological paradigms that the author prefaces his discussion of Wordsworth's place within the environmental tradition with a more general consideration of how late Twentieth Century scholarship positioned the poet ideologically.

Bate's starting point may seem blindingly obvious, but only after he has made it! The use of terms such as 'Prague Spring' or the more recent 'Arab Spring' to denote moments of revolution seem distinctly Wordsworthian. The author reminds us that in the Eleventh Book of the 1850 Prelude Wordsworth writes of the aftermath of of Robespierre of "the hopeful blossoms of a a second spring" and Authority "putting on a milder face. Nature and politics are woven together inexorably within fabric of Wordsworthian poetic diction.

Bates asserts that whereas for nineteenth century critics Wordsworth was foremost a Nature poet, more recent scholarship concentrated on ideological issues. Broadly speaking two broad trends are discerned. Alan Lui's A Sense of History (1989) and J. J. Mcgann's Romantic Ideology (1983) are both situated within Marxist scholarship; Bates characterises this as a more sophisticated re-iteration of  Shelley's lament that Wordsworth abandoned his revolutionary impulses to find "a paradise within". The second tendency is the tacit agreement amongst post-modern academics is that the the study of literature involves consideration of what 'it is not about' - to reveal the voices it suppresses - women or history for example, or, alternatively to assert that literary criticism cannot be about anything, since to decode a text is to re-code it. These interests of 'the professional reader' are contrasted with the non-specialist, who maintains a naive notion that books should be about something. It is this 'naive' position that Romantic Ecology explores by re-assessing the nineteenth century idea that Wordsworth's poetry was about Nature, and the subject matter and central ideas are of pressing interest to emerging concerns regarding the imminent degradation of the environment. The author concludes the introduction with the hope that 'the book itself might be described as a preliminary sketch towards a literary ecocriticism.

This ecocritical project is developed over four lengthy chapters. The first affirms the importance of the Lake District in particular and nature more generally as central to Wordworth's poetry and argues that in his particular approach to the pastoral there is continuity, not opposition between a love of nature and radical politics. Bate examines the relationship between human life and "the silent, overgrowing" objects of nature found in the final lines of  The Ruined Cottage' , then re-considers the heroic depiction of shepherds, who unlike the alienated proletariat of Marx, are free and independent. A crucial connection is made between the this poetry of the radical pastroral and the section in Wordworth's prose Guide to the Lakes where he speaks of  "the perfect Republic af Shepherds and Agriculturalists. The chapter concludes with the observation that "humanity only survives in nature" reflecting upon how the dead woman in  A slumber did my spirit seal is rolled around within the earth '"like rocks and stones and trees".

Chapter two continues the quest to recover the nineteenth century reading of Wordsworth. Firstly Bate traces the etymology of the word 'ecology'. He links the first use of the term, coined by the German zoologist, Ernst Haekel in 1866, to it's definition 'the economy of nature'. This latter phrase has a longer history within ideas of natural religion dating back to the seventeenth century. Discussion of the historical development of natural religion towards secular science enables Bate to weave a narrative that places Wordsworth within an intellectual tradition which includes the work of both Erasmus and Charles Darwin and the American Romanticism of Thoreau. Critical to each of these developments was an interest in the systematic observation of natural phenomena - "Scientists made it their business to describe the intricate economy of nature; "Romantics made it theirs to teach human beings to live as part of it." In Wordsworth, the connection between science and romanticism is felt to be most overt in his prose Guide to the Lakes. Bate points out that  this work, which ran to five editions in the poet's lifetime, was Wordsworth's the most widely read book during the mid nineteenth century. This is shown to be of considerable significance in the context of later scholarship. The author points out the paradox that the 'new historicist' literary critics, keen to assert that "poems like all texts are not free-floating aesthetic objects [...]that carry ideological freight", base their response to Wordsworth on such key, canonical  texts as Tintern Abbey, and The Prelude, but overlook his most read text - The Guide. "If we are historicise Romanticism we must bring The Guide from the periphery to the centre.", Bate asserts. In doing so he build the case, not only to begin to recover the nineteenth century view of Wordworth but to discover the essentially ecological nature of Wordsworth's ideas and understand his position in relation to current debates regarding environmentalism and green politics.

The book then moves from a consideration of political and scientific ideas within the Wordsworthian view of Nature and Man into the domain of ethics. Bate looks in some detail at how the first four books of The Excursion were received and interpreted by key intellectual figures of the High Victorian era such as Arnold and Ruskin. His in-depth analysis of Wordsworthian influences within Modern Painters demonstrates that Ruskin's conviction that economic and science were inseparable from ethics can be traced directly to his response to debates within The Excursion. For the most part Romantic Ecology is a persuasive, scholarly appeal for Wordsworth to be re-read as a poet and philosopher of Nature. Though it  demands that we re-discover the textual history of Wordsworth, the project is far from being backward looking. Bate's point is that his suggested re-reading of Wordsworth connects the poet to contemporary debates within environmentalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final chapter of the book which is centred around a close analysis of Wordsworth's poems on 'The Naming of Places, which, for Bate, have hitherto been given insufficient attention. He approaches these works from the following standpoint:

"History has dominated much recent discussion of literature, but geography also has its claims; we live and die as part of the body politic, but we also live and die in place. The poet is as much a geographer as historian" (p85)

In looking again at such poems as It was an April morning or To Joanna, Bate connects these poems of place to a broader tradition which invites the reader to 'reflect on the idea of England'. Whilst acknowledging  'problematic' aspects inherent in the notion of 'englishness,' a tradition of  'poems of locality' sprung from Wordsworth's sense of connection between the poet and particular named features of landscape. This genre is traced through Hardy and Houseman,  then on into the twentieth century in Edward Thomas's 'Household Poems'. Though Bate himself pursues these Wordsworthian descendants no further than the Edwardian era, it is difficult to refute that it continues even yet, through Spender in the 1930's, Larkin and Norman Nicholson in the post-war decades, Hughes through the 1980's and beyond. More recently Duffy, in Stafford Afternoons and the incantation of the shipping forecast in Prayer all evoke a national spirit of place, rooted in landscape, yet devoid of "that dangerous religion called chauvinism".

"....for Wordsworth, pastoral was not a myth but a psychological necessity, an underpinning of the self, a way of connecting the self to the environment. In literature as in life, connection with the external world is dependent on what Clare called 'The Eternity of Nature', dependent on the survival of the daisy and return of the swallow." (p.115)