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
tourism promotion; Hinet “net the world” (with colorful
animals 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 //
daughter
• 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
Jilting 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
between the air, land, water, animals, plants, etc.,
usually of a particular area, or the scientific study
of this.
• Environmentalism: protecting the earth from
human pollution and destruction.
• Ecocriticism: Not just the studies of nature in
literature; “ecocriticism has distinguished itself,
debates notwithstanding, first by the ethical
stand it takes, its commitment to the natural
world as an important thing rather than simply as
an object of thematic study, and, secondly, by its
commitment to making connections ” (source).
Ecocriticism: Starting Questions
• Which of the above examples have ecological
consciousness?
• 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
‘Nature’ or ‘the natural’ mean? Is anything ‘natural’ the
best?
• Derrida argues that there is nothing outside of text; but
another philosopher Kate Soper warns, "it is not
language which has a hole in the ozone layer.” Which
do you agree 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
endangered 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
lifestyle, and
– to remind us of non-human perspectives (of animals,
trees, rivers, mountains) towards an "environmental
literacy".
Ecocriticism: General Introduction (2)
• Major claims:
2. To regain a sense of the inextricability of nature
and culture, physis and techne, earth and
artifact-consumption and destruction.“  Does
ecology include Internet & the flows of capital?
3. Critique of Current Critical Schools as 'Cold
War criticism'  'Global Warming
criticism'
–
with their focus on human creativity, human agency
and human social relations,
– perpetuate that binary opposition of the human to
the non-human, culture to nature.
Ecocriticism: Methodologies
1. Critiquing the Canon
1.
the Hebrew creation in Genesis I - "not only
established a dualism of man and nature but also
insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature
for his proper 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
mankind,”
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
context 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
aborigines 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
the population involved in tillage and the rapid growth
of industrialization, the old sense died and the new one
was further developed;
20th century: applied to the ‘aesthetic sphere.’ ‘refinement
of mind, tastes, and manners’ => ‘artistic and
intellectual side of human civilization’  culture vs.
nature
Issue II: the picturesque =
aestheticization 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 =
aestheticization 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’.
Environmentalists are people who care about the
world around us: anthropocentrism, the valuation of
nature only 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 mastery.”  How do we avoid being
anthropocentric?
Examples I: Wordsworth &
the Picturesque
• Bate draws upon Wordsworth as an
exemplar of ecocritical thinking, for
Wordsworth did not view nature in
Enlightenment terms - as that which must
be tamed, ordered, and 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
and a tablet, and note what struck him, thus: ‘an
old tower,’ ‘a dashing stream,’ ‘a green slope,’
and make a picture out of it . . .But Nature does
not allow an inventory to be made of her charms!
He should have left his pencil behind, and gone
forth in a meditative spirit; and, on a later day, he
should have embodied in verse not all that he
had noted, but what he best remembered of the
scene, . . . “ (qtd in Bate 148)
“Tinturn Abbey”
• The
picturesque
“Tinturn Abbey”
• Wordsworth’s omission of the abbey: to avoid
the picturesque or to avoid the implied social
relations of the landscape
• Describes the interaction of nature and self (e.g.
“Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty
cliffs. . .”)
• Self cliff; cottage  larger landscape;
• ll 94-102. “refuses to carve the world into object
and subject; the same force animates both
consciousness and ‘all things.’
Note: Romanticism from Different
Perspectives
• Deconstruction & Feminism
- what Romanticism really valorizes is not
nature/female, but the human/male imagination,
human language and male quest;
• New Historicism– the ideological function of romantic imagination and
pastoral was to disguise the exploitative nature of
contemporary social relations;
• Bate –
– Wordsworth repositioned in a tradition of
environmental consciousness, according to which
human well-being 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
autumn’s sensual beauty and
acknowledgement of its closeness to
death.
“
T
O
A
U
T
U
M
N”
Outline:
1. the sensual beauties of autumn in its very
moments--early, mid and late autumn with their
specific kinds of beauty.
A. fruition
B. storage
C. music
2. Transience vs. prolonging the effects
A. examples of transience + prolongment:
1. From “never cease” to last oozing, bloom the
soft-dying day, stubble-plains, gnats
2. Actions gets smaller and smaller, but
accumulated to show autumn’s richness
B. effects prolonged by the mellifluous sounds and
long vowels.
C. Long sentences throughout the whole poem.
(personification+ action, alliteration; sensual images )
“
TO
A
U
T
U
M
N”
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
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;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Blue– images of death and disappearance
“
TO
A
U
T
U
M
N”
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
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
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
“
TO
A
U
T
U
M
N”
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-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
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
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)
reactionary book was not to enlist poetry in the
service of social and political causes. . .but to
dissolve 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 have muttered after his forced
recantation to the Inquisition: “And yet it moves.”
(Hawthorn 1996: 176, 179)  desperate 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
importance 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
effect lasted for three years, straining the growth
capacity of life across the planet.(Bate 97)
Examples III --“To Autumn”:
Weather and Time
• A poem of networks, links, bonds and
correspondences. Linguistically it achieves its
most characteristic effects by making metaphors
seem like metonymies. (e.g. mist and
fruitfulness, bosom-friend and sun, load and
bless – not naturally linked, 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-livingthings
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.