Katherine Spear Smith had no need to work for her living but, growing up in a liberal, academic household in the early twentieth century, she felt a need to find a vocation in life. Influenced by Wordsworth and Ruskin, she constructed a persona based on sensitivity and responsiveness to nature and sought to express this by becoming a painter. Art, however, proved fraught with anxiety and disappointment and she fell back on her identification with nature, shot through with religious promptings. The functions of ruralism in helping Spear Smith construct an identity, but also the potentially isolating and even illusory character of this identity in her case, are the principal themes of this chapter.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Chapter three explores how Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings responded to and engaged with larger questions surrounding birdsong, speech and poetry. While Coleridge throughout his life brooded over metaphysical arguments regarding ‘the one life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’, 1795), Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are filled with close, detailed descriptions of birds and their songs that are neither assimilated to nor inhibited by any overarching theory regarding the sentience of other creatures and our human relation to them. As he responded to his sister’s lively observations and the philosophical arguments in which he found his friend so deeply embroiled, William Wordsworth was led into larger discussions about what may be going on inside the heads of various human and non-human others. Drawing on his own experiences of composing and ‘muttering’ over his poems in daily walks with his sister, Wordsworth hints at a subvocal language of thought that is patterned and shaped, though not always or exactly worded. Out of a deep personal recognition of a grave disjuncture between thinking and saying, Wordsworth throughout his writing explores the inner lives of others in ways that would prove crucial to Clare, Hardy and other poets writing in the following centuries.

In “Romantic Nature,” Mark S. Cladis surveys nature’s role in French, German, British, and North American Romanticism, with particular attention to the ideas of Rousseau, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Addressing the concept’s ideological baggage, Cladis highlights how Romantic nature has been interpreted in Marxist, new historicist, and ecocritical theory. Analyzing the Romantic nature writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cladis demonstrates how Romantic representations of nature tend toward political engagement, challenging forms of institutional oppression such as colonialism and racism. Romantic nature, Cladis argues, isn’t particularly romantic (in a sentimental sense) and is conceptually and ideologically broader than many scholars have assumed.