Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell

Berry
Katey Castellano

SubStance, Volume 40, Number 2, 2011 (Issue 125), pp. 73-91 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2011.0013

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Romantic Conservatism
in Burke, Wordsworth,
and Wendell Berry

Katey Castellano
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look
backward to their ancestors. — Edmund Burke

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by

what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place
while they lived in it . . . And every day I am confronted by
the question of what inheritance I will leave. — Wendell Berry

Romantic literature manifests a nascent ecological consciousness,

according to Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, “through its questioning of
economic and technological progress and through its utopian aspiration
to restore the lost harmony between humans and nature” (229). Foresee-
ing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly
erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature
questions humanistic, technological progressivism while emphasizing
the interdependence between humans and the non-human world. The
Romantics’ proto-ecological awareness is often considered a natural
outgrowth of the liberal revolutionary fervor of the period. Jonathan Bate
argues, for example, that the Romantic view explores “the relationship
between the Love of Nature and the Love of Mankind and, conversely,
between the Rights of Man and the Rights of Nature” (Romantic Ecol-
ogy 33). While Bate claims that this position “transcends the politics of
both Paine and Burke,” by adopting the liberal, individualistic “Rights
of Man” as his basis for understanding the Romantic view of nature, he
affirms a connection between liberal progressivism and environmental
conservation.1 In this essay, I return to the famous political debate that
Bate evokes—the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over
the legitimacy of liberal, individual rights—in order to explore the nascent
environmental ethics implicit in the debate. After analyzing the ecological
and social implications of Burke’s call for an organic society guided by a
sense of intergenerational responsibility, I evaluate the intergenerational
imagination of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Lyrical Ballads (1798). Finally,

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2011

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74 Katey Castellano

I examine the essays of contemporary American writer Wendell Berry,

who carries on the legacy of Romantic conservation.
The argument that Romantic conservatism and environmental
conservation emerge together may seem counter-intuitive, since in our
contemporary political landscape, environmentalism is usually affiliated
with liberalism. Although this reading goes against the grain of political
assumptions underlying the burgeoning field of Romanticism and ecocriti-
cism, I take my cue from Fredric Jameson’s observation that “the initial
critiques of the nascent world of capitalism emerge on the Right: in this
sense, Edmund Burke’s seminal assault on Jacobinism can be read, less
as a denunciation of social revolution, than as an anticipatory critique of
emergent bourgeois social life” (18). Romantic conservatism’s anticipatory
critique of modernity exposes the way liberalism’s discourse of individu-
alist rights enables the exploitation of both human and non-human life,
yet there has been little serious scholarly evaluation of conservatism. For
example, in David Pepper’s Modern Environmentalism, an explanatory table
outlining the spectrum of political philosophies claims “traditional conser-
vatives” occupy a radical environmental position since they recommend
that “human societies should model themselves on natural ecosystems”
(42); however, less than two pages are given to analyzing this position,
while other positions such as a green socialism and anarchism are given
extensive analysis.2 To address this gap, in what follows I will examine
a specifically Romantic conservatism, which as part of its more general
effort to conserve tradition, was imbued with a nascent environmentalist
ethos that sought to conserve wilderness, wastelands, and commons from
capitalist-intensive agriculture and industrial exploitation.
Although Romanticism most often links conservatism with the
repression of Jacobin activities in England or as a forerunner to today’s
free-market neo-conservatism, I will examine instead the conservative
warning that “improving” land tied to indigenous and local cultures
might have irreversible social and ecological consequences. Burke was
the first to voice the fear that the people involved in the modern com-
mercial economy were “destroying at their pleasure the whole original
fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them,
a ruin instead of an habitation” (95). Burke’s advocacy for the inheritance
of land, while embedded in a hierarchical structure, at least ensured that
the land and cultural traditions would be a carefully conserved habitation
for the next generation. The traditionalist-conservationist position may
then be far more radical (in that it opposes the hegemony of the capitalist
economy and ethos) than the liberal position of the 1790s, whose interests
in “equality” and “leveling the playing field” paved the way for free-
market competition.3 Romantic, Burkean conservatism thus bears little

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 75

resemblance to today’s free-market neo-conservatism, which would best

be understood as an outgrowth of Disraeli’s Victorian-era combination
of nationalism, imperialism, and free-market liberalism.4 Rather than
understanding conservatives as either unthinkingly defending the status
quo or as staunch proponents of industrial capitalism, I would argue that
Romantic conservatives view modernity as a threatening break with the
past, and that they advocate an imaginative attachment to past and future
generations.

Intergenerational Responsibility in Burke’s Reflections (1790)

Many scholars have discussed Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution
in France in terms of its counterrevolutionary argument in favor of the
aristocracy and church, but few have explored how his conservative,
organic view is also associated with a concern for the value and health
of the non-human environment. The preservation of land through inheri-
tance becomes a cornerstone of the Burkean political position: he writes,
“the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and
a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of
improvement” (33). Admittedly this statement intends to reinforce social
hierarchies; however, it also articulates a tension in the debates about land
use during this time—that is, a debate about the virtues of inheritance,
which is a conservative valuation of land as an estate, versus that of im-
provement, which is a liberal, free-market approach that views land as a
commodity, or as real estate. Raymond Williams argues that in the eigh-
teenth century, “An estate passed from being regarded as an inheritance,
carrying such and such income, to being calculated as an opportunity
for investment, carrying greatly increased returns” (Country 61-2). The
principle of improvement sought progressively to make the land more
profitable, and thus precipitated the enclosure and privatization of the
commons in England. Political arguments about land use debated between
an ethos of conservation and the desire for conquest, according to Keith
Thomas (269-287), and Burke insists that the telos of land should be one
of inheritance and conservation rather than conquest, investment, and
improvement.
Following Burke, Romantic nature poetry and landscape painting
challenge the social ethics of improvement: according to Nigel Everett,
“arguments about the aesthetics of landscape were almost always argu-
ments about politics. […] In the Tory view, those who abandoned the
landscape to the market were also abandoning the order of civil society
to fragmentation” (7). The fear of environmental and social fragmenta-
tion led to the Romantic aspiration to conserve locality and place, and the
concept of place, according to Lawrence Buell, is an essential ecocritical

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76 Katey Castellano

concept because place “gestures in at least three directions at once—to-

ward environmental materiality, toward social perception or construction,
and toward individual affect or bond” (63). The concept of place, then,
resonates with a Romantic view that aspires toward a full, organic integra-
tion of the individual with his or her environment and local community.
Romantic conservatism asserted that land should be protected
from unregulated privatization and industrial expansion, and inheri-
tance became a means by which the ideology of “improvement” could
be countered. Inheritance counteracts both spatial and social mobility,
advocating instead for an intergenerational obligation between past,
present, and future generations. While this view is problematically hi-
erarchical, at the same time the conservative ethical conception of the
telos of property was more complex than just the production of wealth;
this aspect of conservatism foreshadows an ecological view that the land
has intrinsic value as a habitat for all life. Most scholars understandably
focus on the ways in which inheritance perpetuates structures of social
hierarchy, yet Burke’s Reflections also clearly argues for a consideration
of intergenerational responsibility in land use:
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the common-
wealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors
and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their
ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were
the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to
cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at
their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to
leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation—
and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as
they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. (95)

When Burke describes the people who own land as “life-renters” and
“temporary possessors,” he advocates for a conception of inheritance
tinged with the humility of a worldview that imagines the individual
life span within the broader continuity of generations. He recognizes,
prophetically, that liberal individualism, which posits the individual is
the “entire master” of a piece of land, allows us to forget our obligation to
maintain the health of the land for future generations. By calling the aris-
tocracy “life-renters,” Burke flattens the social hierarchy, comparing those
who are wealthy to the tenant farmers who only rent and work the land.
By reducing the landed class to “life-renters” while promoting a
hierarchical system of familial land ownership, Burke introduces a para-
doxical structure not unlike the priestly asceticism in which one gains
power through negating it; his warning that liberal individualism and
unfettered economic growth might well leave the land “a ruin instead of
an habitation” today seems uncannily prophetic. Burke’s tirade against

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 77

the French Revolution takes place within the context of financial and
industrial revolutions; he fears that the evolution of a capitalist economy
with its paper-money despotism would force all Englishmen to bow to the
“idol of public credit” that destabilized not only fiscal, but moral values
(39). While the liberal model of land ownership is more democratic than
Burke’s, he accurately predicted that in a democracy based on liberal indi-
vidualism, humans would fail to recognize that they are the beneficiaries
of a “gift” of land from past generations, engendering little consideration
for later generations who will use the land.
Much of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, his response to Burke’s
Reflections, is built on the idea that humans are discrete individuals who
have no obligation to the past or future. He argues:
Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived
at it, are as remote from each other, as the utmost stretch of mortal
imagination can conceive: What possible obligation, then, can exist
between them; what rule or principle can be laid down, that of the
two non-entities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and
who never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to
the end of time? (204-5)
The liberal individual comes into being through a negative conception
of freedom, a freedom from the moral obligations or political principles
that might extend from one generation to the next. Although Paine is
most interested in arguing that the present generation be freed from the
“dead hand” of the past, its logic of autonomy further reasons against any
sense of obligation to future generations, since we cannot have tangible
intercourse with them. While Paine disregards an imaginary relation to
future generations, Romantic conservatives understand an imaginary con-
nectedness to both past and future generations as a necessary prerequisite
to right action and right relation to the environment.
Although the full environmental implications of these two different
schools of thought were not made apparent when the debate took place in
the 1790s, we can now note that Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were
debating opposing environmental ethics. Burke’s principle of conserva-
tion argues that the current generation of human beings must not think
of themselves alone because to do so would lead to the “ruin” of the en-
vironment; rather, humans must understand their relationship to the land
in terms of “habitation”—something they own only within the continu-
ity of generations. By contrast, Paine argues that the current generation
has no responsibility to the generations to come. Paine’s view signals a
change in the way humans understand their relationship to land under
free-market liberalism—as something to be put to use without regard to
past or future. Burke’s Reflections, according to Terence Ball, argues for
the imagination of “intergenerational symmetry; [the idea that] the living

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78 Katey Castellano

have obligations both to the dead and the unborn” (73). Thus there is a
largely unexplored connection, to which Ball gestures, between Romantic
political conservatism and environmental conservation. A specifically
Romantic conservatism insists on the absolute structural necessity, both
imaginatively and socially, of considering both past and future genera-
tions when making decisions about land use.
My argument about the connection between conservatism and en-
vironmental conservation is not without antecedents. In his discussion
of the history of forest conservation in England, Robert Pogue Harrison
concludes, “An ecologist today cannot help but be a monarchist of sorts,”
since pre-modern hunter-kings were the first to preserve areas of land from
extensive development (69). Raymond Williams has also pointed out that
in the 19th century, socialist and conservative thinking converges in their
advocacy for an organic society in opposition to bourgeois individualism:
“It is perhaps true that the ideas of an ‘organic’ society are an essential
preparation for socialist theory, and for the more general attention to the
‘whole way of life,’ in opposition to theories which consistently reduce
social to individual questions, and which support legislation of an indi-
vidualist as opposed to a collectivist kind” (Culture 139). The Romantic,
conservative, organic view counters liberal individualism’s erosion of the
intergenerational bond between people and their sense of place with a
collective, holistic intergenerational imagination. This imagined organic
connectedness to past and future generations is also cultivated in Word-
sworth’s poetry and in the contemporary agrarian views of Wendell Berry.

Romantic Intergenerational Imagination in the Lyrical Ballads (1798)

The burgeoning field of “green” Romanticism has repeatedly ex-
plored the proto-ecological perspective that emerges in the poetry and
prose of William Wordsworth. Jonathan Bate describes Wordsworth’s
project for the Lyrical Ballads (1798) as “ecopoetic,” since it proposes that
“when we commune with those forms [of nature] we live with a particular
intensity, and conversely that our lives are diminished when technology
and industrialization alienate us from those forms” (Song 245). More
recently, Robert Pogue Harrison characterizes Wordsworth’s poetry as
espousing a nostalgia that aspires “to run as the great countercurrent of
history back towards the sources of simplicity and happiness,” which,
beyond its escapism, “keeps open the vision of historical alternatives”
(156-7). Kate Rigby further suggests that Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
“sought to renovate both the language of poetry and the vision of the land
in light of indigenous traditions” (55). The various characterizations of the
ecological dimensions of Wordsworth’s poetry—as a critique of technol-
ogy and industrialization, as a countercurrent towards an older vision

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 79

of simplicity, or as a preservation of indigenous traditions—can all be

interpreted as emerging from a conservative, conservationist point of view.
My argument, then, runs counter to the widely-held critical view that
Wordsworth began his career as a liberal and then become increasingly
conservative as he aged. This view has previously been challenged by
James Chandler, who cogently argues, “if we understand ‘conservative’
to mean ideological proximity to Burke, then the visionary and experi-
mental writing for which Wordsworth is revered, his program for poetry,
is from its very inception impelled by powerfully conservative motives”
(32).5 My reading of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) is indebted to,
but also complicates, Chandler’s argument; I argue that Wordsworth’s
conservationist view echoes Burke’s fear that modernity might leave the
land as “a ruin instead of an habitation.” Wordsworth’s poetry assesses the
social and environmental impact of liberal individualism, social mobility,
and land development on traditional, agrarian England. Detached from
their homes and forbears, disoriented, ghost-like figures haunt the Lyrical
Ballads; the Ancient Mariner, Simon Lee, Martha Ray, Goody Blake, and
the Female Vagrant are all bewildered by the changes wrought by progres-
sive modern society. In what follows, I discuss a poem that dramatizes
this traumatic disorientation, “The Female Vagrant,” and then proceed to
analyze “We are Seven,” a poem that suggests such disorientation might
be avoided by cultivating an imaginative connection to previous genera-
tions and localized place.
“The Female Vagrant” tells the story of a woman’s departure from
Great Britain and her return home. The first twenty years of the woman’s
life were spent in her father’s rural cottage, but their way of life is sud-
denly disrupted by the “improvement” of the common that had been her
family’s home:
Then rose a mansion proud our woods among,
And cottage after cottage owned its sway,
No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray
Through pastures not his own, the master took;
My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay;
He loved his old hereditary nook,
And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook. (lines 39-45)

A mansion new and “proud,” this ostentatious sign of new money, is built
by an aggressive parvenu devoid of the older values of common right, in
which common land can be a “hereditary nook.” The eighteenth-century
phenomenon of the new country house, Nigel Everett notes, was ac-
companied by the “determination of miserly, overgrown, and rapacious
farmers to tear down cottages near their farms and beat down the price
of labour to below the level of subsistence. . .” (76). Similarly, the vagrant
woman’s new neighbor is not satisfied with his mansion; he needs to ex-

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80 Katey Castellano

pand continually his wealth and power; this characterization recalls the
Burkean fear of this class as the insatiable “new monied interest.” The
poem thus dramatizes the debate between improvement and inheritance
as the guiding principle in land use. While Burkean conservatism has been
charged with merely defending aristocratic wealth, “The Female Vagrant”
suggests that inheritance, as an ethos for land use, extends beyond the
aristocratic estate to the practice of subsistence farming on a common.
The poem critiques the ideology of improvement by insisting on the
inseparability of environmental health from generational stability. After
the loss of land for subsistence farming, the family’s “substance fell into
decay” (line 50), and the vagrant woman inherits, instead of her father’s
land, the bitter consequences of improvement. The woman’s cottage-
industry, moreover, will no longer fetch adequate prices, and the poem
notes her “empty loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel” (line 89). This
list—loom, hearth, and spinning wheel—of former home employment
now left idle functions metonymically to represent a larger phenomenon
of work transferred from the home into the urban factories and from
quasi-independent production to wage labor.6 Having no other option
than watching the rest of his family die of starvation, the vagrant woman’s
husband is persuaded to join the military to fight in the American Revo-
lutionary war. The ideology of improvement and enclosure at home, in
short, displaces a group of agrarian poor who will then, in desperation, be
willing to fight in British colonial wars, thus being drawn into supporting
the economy that displaced them.
After her husband and children die in America, the female vagrant
returns to England, but her homecoming seems only to reinforce her sense
of alienation: “And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, / And near
a thousand tables pined, and wanted food” (lines 179-80). The burgeoning
wealth of Great Britain that built the thousand homes filled with food does
not extend to the class of agrarian workers who were displaced by the new
economy. Without home or family, the former agricultural worker is forced
to find a new community in other displaced vagrants—the “earth’s rude
tenants”—yet this new community bears very little resemblance to the
past (line 218). The environment has been transformed into a Malthusian
world of scarcity and biopolitical consequences; the “mercy” of nature
does not yield generosity, but rather a parsimonious allocation of food.
In spite of her obvious physical suffering, the vagrant woman insists
that it is the psychological, not physical or economic, consequences of this
shift that are most difficult: she laments that she has “Foregone the home
delight of constant truth” (line 260). The vagrant woman mourns her lost
identity that was bound up with the constancy of her childhood home,
and the origins of the vagrant woman’s psychological instability can be

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 81

traced back to the moment when her father for the last time climbed his
hill-top to survey the land, where he had vainly hoped that “his bones
might there be laid, / Close by my mother in their native bowers” (59-
60). As her father prays, the woman declares that she can no longer pray
because her connection to her kin and to her childhood home is lost.
Edmund Burke warned, “When the antient opinions and rules of life are
taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we
have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port
we steer” (78). Likewise, in this poem and in “We Are Seven,” individual
and social stability is found in preserving a sense of continuity with the
ancestral past, which, in the case of Wordsworth’s poetry, involves contact
with a local graveyard that incorporates the remnants of the dead with
the experience of the living.
The central character of “We are Seven” is a little girl who insists on
the importance of home and native place through her combined physical
and emotional attachment to a local graveyard. The dialogic structure of
this poem pits the little girl against an adult figure who attempts to sever
her attachment to her dead kin. The encounter begins as the traveler notes
the girl’s “rustic, woodland air” (line 9), and asks the girl how many
brothers and sisters she has. She replies that there are seven in all. Seeing
no other children with her, the traveler asks of the whereabouts of her
siblings. She replies that two siblings lie under a tree in the church yard,
two are in Conway, two are gone to sea, and she lives with her mother.
The traveler immediately corrects the child’s reckoning, “If two are in the
church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five” (35-6), thus taking for granted
that the only family members who should be calculated or considered are
those whose “limbs they are alive” (line 34). As the traveler repeatedly
attempts to persuade the little girl to sever what he sees as her unreason-
able attachment to the dead, she unequivocally replies, “Their graves are
green, they may be seen” (line 37), and describes how she sits, sings, eats,
and plays on their graves. While no brother or sister is alive with her,
she nevertheless continues to live with her kin and the past through her
imagination, which is literally grounded in a localized environment that
is “Twelve steps or more from my Mother’s door” (line 39).
In the dialogue between the traveler and the little girl, the traveler
exhibits a rational, enlightened perspective that attempts to dispel the
myths of childhood and facilitate the child’s mastery over her world,
yet such mastery is revealed as both imaginatively and socially impov-
erished, as a “disenchantment of the world,” to borrow a phrase from
Horkheimer and Adorno (1). Countering this disenchantment, the little
girl’s worldview resonates with the views of the “Romantic poets of
nature,” who “became topographers of the sacred, tracking the trace of

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82 Katey Castellano

the holy in landscapes, which were, perhaps, cocreated by the mind but
also, more importantly, felt in the flesh,” according to Rigby (53). The
child recognizes the sacred, communal space of the graveyard as a topos
of intergenerational connection, and her Romantic view exemplifies
Wordsworth’s later epigram: “The Child is Father of the Man,” because
she demonstrates an irrational, but wise and mystical relationship with
the land. The Romantic idealization of childhood, according to Judith
Plotz, emerges from the way that children are “framed as figures of ex-
treme antiquity” (8). If the child is a figure of the past, the dialogue “We
Are Seven” further manifests the tensions in the Burke-Paine debate: the
child becomes the conservative figure of the older, pre-capitalist way of
thinking, and the traveler is a figure of modern liberal individualism. The
Romantic idealization of childhood then may serve as a synecdoche that
connects modernity to the pre-modern order of human development. The
trajectory of maturation, the move from childhood to adulthood, in both
the individual and society appears to be one of cultural disintegration
effected through detachment from home.
After questioning the girl three times about the way she “counts”
her siblings, the traveler becomes frustrated by her irrational fidelity to
her kin and her environment. He finally demands, “But they are dead;
those two are dead!,” thus insisting that the little girl comply with an
empirical method and agree that there are only five children in her family
(line 65). The exclamation point punctuates the traveler’s zeal for impos-
ing his modern views onto the rustic child. The traveler iterates a liberal,
rational calculation similar to Tom Paine, who insists that there can be no
connection or obligation between the living and the dead: “Those who
have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived at it, are as
remote from each other, as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can
conceive” (205). In “enlightening” her, the traveler wants to sever this
child’s attachment to her family and the past, thus exposing the strictly
computational, Benthamite rationality of the nation-state in contrast to the
local, affective, and fluid communitarian model of an organic community.
In spite of increasing physical and social mobility, evidenced in
the physical absence of all her other living siblings, this child clings
tenaciously to a life among the dead in a local graveyard. In his reading
of Wordsworth’s “politics of nature,” Nicholas Roe argues, that “By de-
liberately affronting the adult’s—and the reader’s—preoccupations, the
poem leads to a new understanding of life in relation to death, perhaps
to a restored sense of human community that can transcend loss” (Roe
193). This “restored sense of human community” is linked to the way
that the child metaphorically echoes the Burkean view of communal life
as grounded in and pledged to a notion of imaginative, intergenerational

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 83

responsibility, or, in Burke’s terms, as a “partnership not only between

those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are
dead, and those who are to be born” (96). Although it may seem that the
traveler is simply insensitive to the child’s emotional, imaginary attach-
ments, when reading his pedagogical insistence through Paine’s thought,
it appears that the traveler insists that the child imaginatively sever herself
from the past because this is what is politically demanded by progres-
sive, liberal individualism. In turn, the girl’s reaction to the traveler’s
view defends her communal outlook on life; rather than understanding
herself as an individual, she will continue to “Dwell near them” (line 24)
and her sense of self will continue to develop through interaction with
the dead in a localized place.
Recently Timothy Morton has warned ecocritics against an “environ-
mental romanticism” that futilely “aims to conserve a piece of the world
or subjectivity from the ravages of industrial capitalism and its ideolo-
gies” (84). Instead, Morton suggests a post-modern “dark ecology” that
is “a politicized version of deconstructive hesitation or aporia. [...] Dark
ecology is a melancholic ethics. Unable fully to introject or digest the idea
of the other, we are caught in its headlights, suspended in the possibility
of acting without being able to act” (186). Despite Morton’s desire to root
out all that he deems conservative in ecocriticism and Romanticism, his
dark ecology may hold striking similarities to the Romantic conserva-
tive view. For example, a dark ecology emerges when, upon returning
from the long journey, the female vagrant discovers that she is “homeless
near a thousand homes” (line 179). Her return home, rather than simply
indulging in nostalgic ambience, evokes feelings of uncanny alienation.
In other words, the conservative desire to “feel” embedded in a native
place is prompted by the distance from it, and the desire to return and to
root current life in the past faces the impossibility of that desire.
In “We Are Seven,” even though the traveler’s aesthetic appreciation
for the girl’s rustic beauty motivates his encounter, when attempting to
dialogue with her, he finds that her background is traumatic: her brothers
and sisters are lost to the cities and the sea, and to poverty and disease.
Thus the poem dramatizes how an encounter with the rustic past defuses
the traveler’s fantasy of a return to it: the little girl’s odd refusal to accept
the death of her siblings profoundly disturbs him, and brings his under-
standing of the girl to a screeching halt. Instead of learning something
about the pre-modern lifestyle, the traveler realizes that he is epistemologi-
cally and emotionally severed from the very thing that he desires to return
to and to know again. Instead of merely providing an escapist nostalgia
for the past, then, these poems present an agrarian dystopia that exhibits
the enormous ecological and cultural sacrifices demanded by a voracious

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84 Katey Castellano

economy, thereby offering a sustained political argument that the rampant

destruction of local communities by modernity and urbanization leads to
perplexity, homelessness, even madness.

Romantic Conservatism’s 20th-Century Legacy: Wendell Berry

Kate Rigby argues that “contemporary ecological discourses rep-
resenting life on earth as a unified whole […] have a genealogy that can
be traced back to the Romantic period” (28); the Romantic conservative,
organic view is one of the discourses that anticipates contemporary ecol-
ogy. The conservative longing for the past, beyond mere nostalgia, means
restoring the sense of intergenerational responsibility and dependence
that is severed by liberal individualism, and this reading of Romantic con-
servatism suggests the need for a reassessment of the Romantic agrarian
social ideal, which has been the subject of much literary critique. David
Simpson, for example, has argued that Wordsworth’s agrarian idealism
“is more coherent when seen as a negative critique of urbanization, than it
becomes when we try to see it as a positive alternative” (62).7 At the end of
his seminal The Country and the City, Raymond Williams similarly warns
that agrarianism “can easily be diverted into another rural threnody”
that focuses on the imagination instead of political action. (301). These
are good questions to consider, especially when evaluating the legacy of
Romantic conservatism in contemporary environmentalist thought: does
the Romantic conservative perspective effectively accomplish anything
besides tabulating and mourning the costs of modernity?
Wendell Berry, a writer and advocate of the agrarian movement in
the United States, like Burke and Wordsworth before him, views progress
and improvement with a critical eye: his most important book, The Unset-
tling of America, makes the counterintuitive argument that the settlement
of the American frontier should be understood as an “unsettling” of
both environment and human identity. The colonizers, he argues, were
uprooted from their homes and sent out to conquer new lands, so they
“belonged to no place, [and] it was almost inevitable that they should
behave violently toward the places they came to.” (11). By making explicit
connections between detachment from place and degradation of the envi-
ronment, Berry questions assumptions embedded in a liberal, progressive
view: that new ideas, technologies, and discoveries are desirable and
progressively improve life. Berry insists that this “unsettling”—the desire
to technologically change and control the world around us—remains
the source of modern social and political problems; he declares, “We still
have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America” (11). But this again
is counterintuitive; what would it entail to meaningfully “arrive” in the
place where we already live?

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 85

Like Romantic conservatives before him, Berry’s warning that we

have not yet “arrived” in our homes or communities stresses the impor-
tance of the imaginative relationship to past and future generations, yet
unlike Burke and Wordsworth, Berry attempts to make his imaginative
attachment to place effective through the practice of agrarianism. Criti-
cizing the “Nature-romanticism of the nineteenth century [that] ignores
economic facts and relationships,” Berry’s agrarian vision transforms the
Romantic intergenerational imagination into “a practice of responsibil-
ity and fidelity” that accounts for and lives with economic relationships
(238). In spite of Berry’s desire to move beyond the Romantic ideal to
agrarian practice, the Romantic conservative idea of place-based intergen-
erational identity remains central to Berry’s thought. As Wordsworth’s
poetry ranges over the rural countryside of England in order to tally the
consequences of improvement, industrialization, and urbanization, his
focus repeatedly returns to the way that individual identity becomes
fragmented when humans are detached from place and history. Similarly,
Wendell Berry criticizes the American phenomenon of the “so-called iden-
tity crisis,” in which young people are admonished to “find themselves”
through detachment from their families and histories as well as from any
consideration of future familial responsibilities. Instead of embracing this
crisis of instability through extended travel and refusal of all personal
commitment, Berry recommends that “the lost identity would find itself
by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to
practical circumstances; it would learn to stay put in the body to which
it belongs in the first place to which preference or history or accident has
brought it; it would, in short, find itself in finding its work” (106). By
faithfully and repetitively developing both an imaginative and a physi-
cal relationship with a singular place and its history, one cultivates an
identity that emerges from accepting the organic interdependence of the
individual human body with the community of human and non-human
life around it.
The concept of “arrival” further implies cultivating a sense of gen-
erational continuity, especially if we look at Berry’s autobiographical ac-
count of solving his own youthful identify crisis. As a young man living
in New York City and establishing himself as a writer, Berry felt drawn
back to Kentucky through memories of his grandfather and his grandfa-
ther’s farm. Well-meaning friends warned him that moving away from
the cosmopolitan, intellectual environment of New York would end his
writing career because going “home” is an impossible venture prompted
by nostalgia. Berry responded:
there is a certain metaphorical sense in which you can’t go home again—
that is, the past is lost to the extent that it cannot be lived in again. I
knew perfectly well that I would not return home and be a child, or

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86 Katey Castellano

recover the secure pleasures of childhood. [. . .] Home—the place, the

countryside—was still there, still pretty much as I had left it, and there
was no reason I could not go back to it if I wanted to. (6)
Berry insists that the backwards look to a previous, less mechanized,
simpler time (the primary characteristic of Romantic thought, according
to Löwy and Sayre) leads not just to an impossible desire for childhood,
but to an intellectually fecund, organic connection with the earth.8 While
he attempts to make the Romantic ideal pragmatic, Berry’s desire to
conserve tradition and environment, like Burke’s, is open to charges of
being hierarchical. Clearly, the vast majority of Americans do not have a
family farm to which they might return, and in this way Berry’s agrar-
ian practice is rooted in white privilege, which further manifests itself
in some of the more controversial aspects of Berry’s thought, such as his
emphasis on traditional, heteronormative marriage and his unapologetic
Christian views. Yet even if we disagree with those aspects of Wendell
Berry’s thought, it is nonetheless precisely his abandonment of liberal
secularism and the cosmopolitan city that awakens his own understand-
ing of the problems of white privilege.
Wendell Berry’s return home, rather than a narrowing his knowledge
and reinforcing a sense of privilege, paradoxically opens up the disturb-
ing legacy of injustice in the American South. During his repeated walks
over the land, he becomes familiar with and learns to read the scars of
the landscape. He writes,
I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization
that my people established themselves here by killing or driving
out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once
bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence that
they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth,
by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or
their own community in it. (8)
Attachment to an inherited place facilitates a greater understanding of
both social and environmental injustice, not only in the abstract sense,
but in a deeply personal one. The scars of the landscape reveal that Berry
is already implicated in his ancestors’ injustice, and as such bears the
responsibility to remedy it.
In an unanticipated way, Berry’s return to his grandfather’s farm in
Kentucky facilitates the intergenerational understanding and responsibil-
ity that is so often severed in a mobile, cosmopolitan lifestyle. Berry admits,
“What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my
forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it
[. . .] And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance
I will leave” (8). This declaration of intergenerational responsibility reso-
nates with Burke’s vision of an organic society as a partnership between

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 87

the living, the dead, and those who are yet to be born. Imagining this
partnership, Berry affirms that whether we take responsibility for it or not,
we are attached to previous and future generations through our treatment
of the environment. In other words, although we are largely unaware of
it, we all inherit the benefits and injustices of past environmental use and
abuse, and all have a part in determining what we will leave for the future.
This intergenerational understanding, facilitated through intense
attachment to the past, leads Berry to a conclusion that lies radically
outside of liberal, individualist subjectivity: “There is, in practice, no
such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between
responsible and irresponsible dependence” (107). Giving up Paine’s
idea of individual autonomy is at odds with our consumer culture, yet it
demonstrates how the conservative, conservationist vision can become,
however counterintuitively, a radical resistance to capitalism. A tradi-
tionalist, organic community refuses the alienation found in what Niklas
Luhmann has called modernity’s system differentiation, which means
that systems that were formerly entwined—the political, domestic, moral,
and economic—become increasingly separated, and “increasing system
differentiation correlates with an increasing disassociation between the
past and the future” (276). If modernity is characterized by the disassocia-
tion between past and future, which includes the elimination of local and
indigenous traditions, then Romantic conservatism is indebted to notions
of community, marked by both place and imagination.
Since Berry believes that local communities can be recovered through
“thinking little” and local rather than thinking globally, he argues for more
community sustainable agriculture, which employs small farmers with
“their established connection to their land—which was often hereditary
and traditional as well as economic” (86). Berry reasons:
The corporations and machines that replace them [small farmers] will
never be bound to the land by the sense of birthright and community,
or by the love that enforces care. They will be bound by the rule of ef-
ficiency, which takes thought only of the volume of the year’s produce,
and takes no thought of the slow increment of life of the land, not
measurable in pounds or dollars, which will assure the livelihood and
the health of coming generations. (86)
Being bound to land through both imaginative and practical circumstances
promotes an environmental ethics of “care” that resists a utilitarian, cal-
culative approach to value that views environmental ethics through “the
rule of efficiency.” Stanley Hauerwas suggests that Wendell Berry’s ethics
of care amounts to a politics of “tending” as opposed to a politics of “in-
tending,” which operates from “a system of power [that] seeks to ensure
a future by bringing all life under a single rational order.” In opposition,
Berry’s politics of tending attempts “to care for objects whose very be-

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88 Katey Castellano

ing requires that they be treated as historical and biographical beings”

(Hauerwas xi). Berry’s distinction between the ethos of efficiency and an
ethos of care further corresponds, roughly at least, with Burke’s advocacy
for inheritance or multi-generational habitation as the guiding principle
in land use. An ethos of care that extends from one generation to the next
counters the modern temptation to view the environment solely through
the lens of rational improvement, efficiency, and profit.
Romantic conservatism proposes an “ethics of tending” that imag-
ines human life and activity through the Burkean humility of a “life-renter”
within the continuity of many generations. Timothy Morton cautions
against a “the touchy-feely organicism derived from Burkean ideologies
of class and tradition” (18), and as an alternative to Romantic organi-
cism, he promotes a melancholic ethics that “sticks with” poisoned and
ruined nature instead of fantasizing that it is otherwise. His example of
this from the Romantic period is the novel Frankenstein: “If a poisoned
rainforest could speak, it would sound like Frankenstein’s creature”
(195). An ethical response, according to Morton, would be to do what the
characters in Frankenstein could not do: love altered, ugly nature. Such
melancholic environmental ethics then involves radical responsibility, and
his contemporary example is the Nuclear Guardianship project, which
campaigns for keeping radioactive waste above ground for the public
to monitor. While Morton disparages both organicism and place-based
ecocriticism, how does one “stick with” the damage unless one “arrives”
to understand and know intimately a particular place? Berry points out
that we often fail to recognize environmental damage unless we become
attached to place through repetitive, mindful encounters. On one of his
daily walks, he notices a former natural water source that was drained
and filled in with earth by his forebears: “And now it is only a lost sou-
venir, archaic and useless, except for the bitter intelligence there is in it.
It is one of the monuments to what is lost” (16). The suggestion that we
should see environmental damage as a “monument” that conveys a “bitter
intelligence” resonates (however strangely) with Morton’s melancholic,
dark ecology, yet Berry’s conservatism asserts that it is only through an
intimate and intergenerational understanding of place that we can ever
begin to recognize and responsibly respond to environmental damage.
The Romantic conservative critique further highlights the need for
an alternative to the environmental progressivism that allies us through
green-washed capitalism and technological innovation with the same
economic system that has eroded both local communities and environ-
ments. According to Kimberly Smith, the Greek virtue of sophrosyne—the
sense of humility and moderation that is the antithesis of hubris—char-
acterizes Wendell Berry’s writing; she argues that sophrosyne “is perhaps

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Romantic Conservatism: Burke, Wordsworth, & Wendell Berry 89

the paramount civic virtue, the virtue needed to counter the arrogance
and hubristic overreaching represented by both modern industrialism
and American foreign policy” (53). This particular characteristic of Ro-
mantic conservatism—sophrosyne—might be a necessary supplement to
our thinking about environmental ethics today. Edmund Burke, William
Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry all write from the heart of a growing
empire with a message of cautionary humility, pleading that develop-
ment and modernization slow down long enough to tally the unexpected
social and environmental consequences of progress. In this way, Romantic
conservatism emerges as a radically oppositional politics, attempting to
conserve deeply rooted historical connections that are being threatened
or annihilated by modernity. Even if Burke, Wordsworth, and Berry can-
not provide a complete guide of how to proceed, their warning against
championing an unthinking progressivism invites us to consider how
an intergenerational imagination within local, religious, or indigenous
communities might persist within or even resist the globalized, capital-
ist world.
James Madison University

Notes
1. James McKusick goes even further in linking this ecological interest to the influence of
liberal rights discourses: “If humans are truly related to all living things, then all living
things must be entitled to a share in the ‘natural rights’ that will surely be vindicated
in the progress of human liberation. The Rights of Man are only a staging-point along
the road to the Rights of Animals, and this road in turn will lead eventually to the total
liberation of all living things” (Introduction).
2. David Pepper admits, “It cannot be denied that despite the emphasis on left-liberalism
in ecologism there is also a persistent strand of conservatism.” (44) Pepper devotes ap-
proximately one page to evaluating this conservative ecologism (44-45).
3. My argument is indebted to Isaac Kramnick’s suggestion that 1790s radicalism should be
more accurately called “bourgeois radicalism” because of its inherently capitalist ethos:
“On the one hand, it sought to liberate men and women from all forms of restraint, politi-
cal, economic, and religious. On the other hand, bourgeois radicalism preached order,
discipline, and subordination, whether in the workhouse, factory, prison or hospital”
(34). Furthermore, Saree Makdisi, in investigating the “impossible history” of the 1790s,
sees the radical liberal political stance, as espoused by Tom Paine, as “hegemonic radical-
ism.” He explains that the dominant culture of radicalism “emphasized highly regulated
consumer and political choice against both the despotism of the ancien régime . . . and
the potentially catastrophic excess of the ‘swinish multitude’” (207).
4. The American conservative Weekly Standard openly declares that Disraeli, not Burke,
should be considered the inventor of neoconservatism, since Disraeli began to attach
sentiment and tradition to the abstracted British nation and empire rather than local
communities (Gelernter 16).
5. Chandler goes on to argue, “Wordsworth proves to be even more of a thoroughgoing
traditionalist than Burke in some ways, since, unlike Burke, he embraces ‘tradition’ with
an explicit awareness of its roots in illiterate forms of cultural life” (160).

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90 Katey Castellano

6. Enclosure altered the day-to-day circumstances for the agrarian poor, who, as K.D.M.
Snell argues, “lost more than their livestock through enclosure. They lost also the rights
to collect fuel or furze from the commons, wastes, and nearby woods” (179).
7. For example, comparing Wordsworth to William Cobbett, Simpson observes, “Word-
sworth does not ever seem to be engaged in urging the return to small farms as an active
policy for the present; his affiliation to the ideal takes instead the form of lamenting a
vanished past” (88).
8. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre argue that Romanticism should be characterized as a
backward-looking project; they define Romanticism as “a critique of modernity, that is,
of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past
(the precapitalist, premodern past)” (17).

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