Romantic ecology

Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology of 1991 forms a leading example of a significant early step in the evolution of ecocriticism, especially in Britain. Bate revived the dominant nineteenth-century perception of the crucial Romantic poet William Wordsworth as a ‘poet of nature’ whose work forms a coherent protest against the dominant ideologies of ‘political economy’ and industrialism. Bate's book is subtitled Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition.

A particular target of Bate's was the growing consensus in literary criticism of the 1980s that ‘nature’ was only a spurious topic in literature, that any account of the natural world in poetry embodied a mode of false consciousness, an evasion of real political issues. He argued that what the Romantic poets called ‘the bond with nature’ need not be ‘forged in a retreat from social commitment … a symptom of middle-class escapism, disillusioned apostasy or false consciousness’ (164). Bate sensed in such critical views both a blinkered dismissal of the importance of the natural world and an unspoken denigration of poetry itself as not really serious, always in need of justification through relation to a (leftish) politics.

Bate wrote Romantic Ecology at an evident turning point in world history, 1989–90, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when a politics based on polarities of Left and Right could begin to seem dated compared to new challenges such as the environment.