Romantic Ecology

by Jonathan Bate

Published 23 May 1991
In identifying Wordsworth's interest in nature as a vital, ecological interest, and linking it with the ecological debate in political history, this study attempts to define the politics of poetry. Wordsworth is shown as a wisdom figure and the guide to a pastoral consciousness we cannot afford to neglect. The author displays the fundamentals in Wordsworth's poetry of place, including that peculiar emphasis on locality inherited by, amongst others, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Seamus Heaney.