Faculty Advisor

Erving, George

Area of Study

Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Publication Date

Summer 2017

Abstract

This is a study in Romantic Poetry through an ecocritical lenses. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in their joint collection Lyrical Ballads, a foundational text of the Romantic period. The impending environmental crisis has motivated many Romantic scholars to reconsider the Romantic’s love of nature. Though it has often been mischaracterized as escapist, many writers argue that Romantic nature poetry is actually the first instance of western proto-ecological literature. This paper seeks to define the Romantic ontology of nature and how it may contribute to contemporary discourse regarding environmental ethics, specifically Arne Naess' theory of Deep Ecology.

Publisher

University of Puget Sound

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