Ecocriticism &

Some Romantic Poems

Does Nature Exist
beyond Human Languages?
 Outline
• Different Usages of Nature
• Ecocriticism: Starting Questions
• Ecocriticism:
– General Introduction; Methodologies; Issues;
• Examples:
– the picturesque and “Tinturn Abbey”
– “Immortality Ode”: Nature & Childhood Romanticized?
– “To Autumn”: Weather and Time
• References
 Different Usages of Nature
• Commodification:
– “ 我愛大自然“ commercial; uses of signs of nature
(e.g. picaresque landscape) in tea commercials and to
urism promotion; Hinet “net the world” (with colorful ani
mals in cage); “Fifteen-Dollar Eagle”
• Symbolic/narrative Treatments:
– Romantic poems “Ode on Melancholy” –transience;
– 19th century landscape paintings
– Pre-Raphaelite poem “The Blessed Damozel” –3 lilies
– "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" –the animals // father // d
aughter
• Background images with symbolic meanings:
– “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; “Mariana”; “The Lady of
Shalott”; “When I am Dead, My Dearest” “The Bourne”
 Different Usages of Nature (2)
• ‘Realistic’ Description or hardship:
– the painting Cabbage, melon and cucumber by Juan
Cotán 1602, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal; “The Jiltin
g of Granny Weatherall”
• ‘Natural’ Existence:
– “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal”
• From a Literal Journey to a Symbolic Quest:
– “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Tinturn Abbey”
– “The Blind Man”
– 〈安卓珍妮〉 ; Surfacing; Into the Woods
Different Usages of Nature (3):
landscape and symbols
Different Usages of Nature (4):
frames and symbols
 Ecocriticism: Basic Definitions
• Ecology (Cambridge Dic.): the relationships betw
een the air, land, water, animals, plants, etc., us
ually of a particular area, or the scientific study o
f this.
• Environmentalism: protecting the earth from hum
an pollution and destruction.
• Ecocriticism: Not just the studies of nature in liter
ature; “ecocriticism has distinguished itself, deba
tes notwithstanding, first by the ethical stand it ta
kes, its commitment to the natural world as an i
mportant thing rather than simply as an object of
thematic study, and, secondly, by its commitmen
t to making connections ” (source).
Ecocriticism: Starting Questions
• Which of the above examples have ecological conscious
ness?
• Which of the following is hurting the environment or the
Earth?
– meat eating;
– wearing fake leather jacket, leather jacket, mink fur coat, amber
earrings, leather boots,
– overuse of plastic bags, paper bags and plastic packaging;
• What does ‘to protect the Earth’ mean? What does ‘Nat
ure’ or ‘the natural’ mean? Is anything ‘natural’ the best?
• Derrida argues that there is nothing outside of text; but a
nother philosopher Kate Soper warns, "it is not language
which has a hole in the ozone layer.” Which do you agre
e with?
 Ecocriticism & Environmentalism
• Damages we have done to the Earth: the
degradation of soil, air and water, the loss of
biodiversity, global warming, the depletion of the
ozone layer, rising human population and
consumption levels,
• Exploitation: Consumption -- Eating animals;
Production - subordinate humans, natural beings
and the earth to commodity productions
(Literature is not exempt from i
 Ecocriticism: General Introduction
• Premise:
Our embeddedness within an increasingly enda
ngered earth.
• Major claims:
1. Affirms nature writings (of Thoreau, Hawthorn,
Romantic Poets & the contemporary ones): the
ecocritics rigorously defend literature's capacity
– to refer to a natural reality,
– to realize the relations between landscape and lifest
yle, and
– to remind us of non-human perspectives (of animals,
trees, rivers, mountains) towards an "environmental l
iteracy".
Ecocriticism: General Introduction (2)
• Major claims:
2. To regain a sense of the inextricability of nature
and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifa
ct-consumption and destruction.“  Does ecolo
gy include Internet & the flows of capital?
3. Critique of Current Critical Schools as 'Cold Wa
r criticism'  'Global Warming criticism'
– with their focus on human creativity, human agency
and human social relations,
– perpetuate that binary opposition of the human to th
e non-human, culture to nature.
 Ecocriticism: Methodologies
1. Critiquing the Canon
1. the Hebrew creation in Genesis I - "not only esta
blished a dualism of man and nature but also insiste
d that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his p
roper ends' (Lyn White Jr. 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological
Crisis': 10).
2. classical tragedy -- reinforces the anthropocentric
'assumption that nature exist for the benefit of man
kind,”
3. the pastoral tradition - a form of escapist fantasy,
valorizing a tamed and idealized nature over wild no
less than urban environments.
 Ecocriticism: Methodologies
2. Reframing the text – e.g. “The Blind Man” in the c
ontext of the natural world;
3. Revaluing Nature Writing –e.g. Alfred Leopold’s
Sand Country Almanac;
4. Return to Romanticism’s “neopastoral”;
5. Reconnecting the social and the ecological e.g.
Feminization of Nature; exploitation of the aborigi
nes and their lands;
6. Regrounding (and reshaping) language.
 Issue I: culture and nature
• How is culture related to nature? (or City and
Country?)
• Different definitions of culture – (Ref. Bate 3-5)
1. Cultivation
– Earliest definition (middle English to 18th century): ‘a cultivated
field or piece of land’
– Late middle English: from cultivated land to the action of
cultivation;
– Early 17th century: extended to other forms of farming (of fish,
oysters, bees, silk)
– 19th century: organic growth in the scientific sense (a culture of
cholera germs)
2. Improvement of mind and manners by education and
training, since early 16th century
 Issue I: culture and nature
Different definitions of culture –

In the 19th century, with the dimunition of the proportion of t

he population involved in tillage and the rapid growth of
industrialization, the old sense died and the new one w
as further developed;

20th century: applied to the ‘aesthetic sphere.’ ‘refinement o

f mind, tastes, and manners’ => ‘artistic and intellectual
side of human civilization’  culture vs. nature
Issue II: the picturesque = aesthetic
ization of nature
• The problematic (Ref. Bate 136-) : “The
picturesque was among the first artistic
movements in history to throw out the
Classical premise that art should imitate
nature and to propose instead that nature
should imitate art. It sought to treat entire
landscapes in the manner in which earlier
cultures designed gardens. . . . Garden 
landscaped park – ‘seemingly natural, but
in fact highly artful.’
 Issue II: the picturesque = aesthetic
ization of nature
• The word “landscape” –land-scape “land as shaped,
as arranged, by a viewer. The point of view is that of
the human observer, not the land itself.” (Bate 132)
• “Environmentalism” – environ means ‘around’. Envir
onmentalists are people who care about the world ar
ound us: anthropocentrism, the valuation of nature o
nly in so far it radiates out from humankind, remains
a given (Bate 138).  deep ecology: “at the center of
the deep ecological project is a critique of Cartesian
dualism [of mind and matter, self and Other] and ma
stery.”  How do we avoid being anthropocentric?
 Examples I: Wordsworth &
the Picturesque
• Bate draws upon Wordsworth as an exem
plar of ecocritical thinking, for Wordsworth
did not view nature in Enlightenment terms
- as that which must be tamed, ordered, a
nd utilised - but as an area to be inhabited
and reflected upon.
Parody of the Picturesque
• Dr. Syntax
• In Search of the
PICturesque
 Parody of the Picturesque
• Dr. Syntax In Search of the PICturesque

The aesthete bemuses the locals

 The Picturesque
• Gilpin’s “Northern Tour”

No image.

Harmoniously arranged cows

 Parody of the Picturesque
• Dr. Syntax In Search of the PICturesque

Not so harmoniously arranged cows, drawn ‘after nature’

 A Parody of the Picturesque
•

The perils of the picturesque

Wordsworth on the Picturesque
• “He [another poet] used to go out with a pencil a
nd a tablet, and note what struck him, thus: ‘an o
ld tower,’ ‘a dashing stream,’ ‘a green slope,’ an
d make a picture out of it . . .But Nature does no
t allow an inventory to be made of her charms!
He should have left his pencil behind, and gone f
orth in a meditative spirit; and, on a later day, he
should have embodied in verse not all that he ha
d noted, but what he best remembered of the sc
ene, . . . “ (qtd in Bate 148)
 “Tinturn Abbey”
• The
picturesque
 “Tinturn Abbey”
• Wordsworth’s omission of the abbey: to avoid th
e picturesque or to avoid the implied social relati
ons of the landscape
• Describes the interaction of nature and self (e.g.
“Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty cli
ffs. . .”)
• Self cliff; cottage  larger landscape;
• ll 94-102. “refuses to carve the world into object
and subject; the same force animates both cons
ciousness and ‘all things.’
 Note: Romanticism from Different
Perspectives
• Deconstruction & Feminism
- what Romanticism really valorizes is not nature/femal
e, but the human/male imagination, human language
and male quest;
• New Historicism-
– the ideological function of romantic imagination and p
astoral was to disguise the exploitative nature of cont
emporary social relations;
• Bate –
– Wordsworth repositioned in a tradition of environment
al consciousness, according to which human well-bei
ng is understood to be coordinate with the ecological
health of the land. (p. 162)
 Examples II: Nature & Childhood
Romanticized?
• Immortality Ode: Structure –
• Stanzas I-II: past glory vs. his present sense of
loss;
• Stanzas III – IV: his confirmation of the present
beings while missing the visionary gleam
bespoken by a tree, a field and the pansy;
• Stanzas V-VII – the process of human (our)
growth and learning of different ‘arts,’ lies and
imitation in the lap of ‘Earth’
• Stanza VIII – XI – reconfirmation of both past
affections, recollections and truths and the
present natural beings and child (child --we)
 Examples II: Nature & Childhood
Romanticized?
• Immortality Ode:
• Do you agree that the child is father of the
man?
• How is nature presented in this poem?
• How does Wordsworth resolve the issue of
inevitable aging, forgetting and death?
 Examples III --“To Autumn”:
Weather and Time
• A New Critical Reading of the poem: as a
simultaneous confirmation, prolonging of a
utumn’s sensual beauty and acknowledge
ment of its closeness to death.
 Outline:
“ 1. the sensual beauties of autumn in its very moment
s--early, mid and late autumn with their specific kinds
T of beauty.
O A. fruition
B. storage
C. music
A 2. Transience vs. prolonging the effects
U A. examples of transience + prolongment:
1. From “never cease” to last oozing, bloom the
T soft-dying day, stubble-plains, gnats
U 2. Actions gets smaller and smaller, but accu
mulated to show autumn’s richness
M B. effects prolonged by the mellifluous sounds and l
N” ong vowels.
C. Long sentences throughout the whole poem.
 (personification+ action, alliteration; sensual
images )
“ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

TO Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
A To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
U With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
T And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
U For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
M
N”
 Blue– images of death and disappearance

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

“ Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
TO Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
A Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
U Steady thy laden head across a brook;
T Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
U Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

M
N”
 “ Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
TO While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
A Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
U And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
T The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
U And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

M
N”
Keats’ Life and world around the
time of composing the poem, 1819
• Restoration of the monarchy in France in
1815.
• His brother Tom's death in December, 1818
• Keats wrote a large amount of poems from
1819 to 1820; his second volume of poems
appeared in July 1820.
• Soon afterwards, by now very ill with
tuberculosis, he set off with a friend to Italy,
where he died the following February (1821).
 Other Views of “To Autumn”
• “The whole point of Keats’ great and (politically) r
eactionary book was not to enlist poetry in the se
rvice of social and political causes. . .but to disso
lve social and political conflicts in the mediations
of art and beauty.(J. MacGann, 1985: 53)
• “What Keats said to his readers—and his rulers
—is comparable to what Galileo is reputed to hav
e muttered after his forced recantation to the Inqu
isition: “And yet it moves.” (Hawthorn 1996: 176, 179)  de
sperate confirmation of his belief in life and its contraries
• A feminist reading of the presentation of autumn
as a woman.
 Examples III --“To Autumn”:
Weather and Time
• (Bate 105) Air quality is of the highest importanc
e for those whose lungs have been invaded by
Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Keats was hurried
to death . . . by the weather.
• Bad weather with humid fog in 1816-1818, but a
beautiful autumn in 1819. cause –the eruption of
Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815. The effe
ct lasted for three years, straining the growth cap
acity of life across the planet.(Bate 97)
 Examples III --“To Autumn”:
Weather and Time
• A poem of networks, links, bonds and correspon
dences. Linguistically it achieves its most chara
cteristic effects by making metaphors seem like
metonymies. (e.g. mist and fruitfulness, bosom-f
riend and sun, load and bless – not naturally link
ed, but Keats makes the links seem natural.)
• Also, syntactial, metrical and aural interlinking.
• Human center? They are suspended, immobile.
• The last stanza – at-homeness-with-all-living-thi
ngs
 References:
• Websites:
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticis
m/ecocriticism/

• ASAL Introduction to Ecocriticism:

http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/intro
.html

• Bate, Johnathan. The Song of the Earth.