Chapter 12 - Ecological prospects and natural knowledge

Summary

The error of finding the literary origins of modern ecological consciousness in Romanticism dies hard. This chapter explores how we can find a literary precedent for our contemporary ecological perspective by looking harder at eighteenth-century poetry. If an ecological orientation questions anthropocentrism (seeing the world as revolving around humans) and the tendency to regard the natural world as merely the setting for human actions, it arguably shares more with James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper (and others) than with Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. This fact is usually overlooked because it does not fit the conventionally symbolic opposition of an artificial and mechanical Enlightenment to a natural and organic Romanticism. Thus prominent Romanticist and ecocritic Jonathan Bate credits “Romanticism and its afterlife” with overcoming the eighteenth century’s “objectification of the spirit” and undertaking the “imaginative reunification of mind and nature.”

But the idea that poetry might reunite mind and nature surfaced more than a century earlier. Milton wrote in Of Education (1644) that the purpose of education, in which poetry features prominently, is to “repair the ruin of our first parents,” and John Dennis picked up this Edenic vision in 1701 in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry:

Poetry seems to be a noble Attempt of Nature, by which it endeavours to exalt itself to its happy primitive State; and he who is entertained with an acomplish’d Poem, is, for a Time, at least, restored to Paradise. That happy Man converses boldly with Immortal Beings. Transported, he beholds the Gods ascending and descending, and every Passion, in its Turn, is charm’d, while his Reason is supremely satisfied. Perpetual Harmony attends his Ear, his Eye perpetual Pleasure. Ten thousand different Objects he surveys, and the most dreadful please him. Tygers and Lions he beholds, like the first Man, with Joy …