Taking Animals Seriously: William Wordsworth and the Claims of Ecological Romanticism

Abstract

Critics have long been aware that William Wordsworth borrowed from the German balladist Gottfried August Bürger in composing Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800). Wordsworth was both attracted and repulsed by Bürger's sensational and sensationally popular verse, yet the reason for this ambiguity has continued to baffle scholars. In this essay I turn to ecological criticism to cast a new light on the intertextual and cross‐cultural exchange between Bürger's “Der Wilde Jäger” and Wordsworth's “Hart‐Leap Well”. Wordsworth, I claim, was intrigued by Bürger's attempt to write a poem about hunting, yet in rewriting the German ballad Wordsworth also seeks to shift the emphasis somewhat, in such a way as to focus more explicitly on what he believed to be the main issue at stake: man's shockingly cruel treatment of animals. In thus reconceptualising Bürger's poem, Wordsworth inaugurates a new kind of Romantic nature poetry, which brings animals into the foreground and takes their suffering seriously. In the essay's final section, I defend Wordsworth's proto‐ecological vision against critics who believe that Wordsworth's love of nature caused him to lose interest in mankind. Far from leading necessarily to misanthropy or disillusionment, I argue, the vision propounded in ‘Hart‐Leap Well’ invites us to speculate how we can combine concern for the environment with a concern for our fellow men.

Tolstoy's Animals

“…4 Notes 1. Th e major works that chart this new direction include Adams (1991), Baker (2001), Donovan (2004), Fudge (2000Fudge ( , 2002, Kowalski (1991), Malamud (1998), Mortensen (2000), Murphy (1995), Norris (1985), Perkins (2003), Scholtmeijer (1993Scholtmeijer ( , 2000, Shapiro and Copeland (2005), Simons (2002), and Vance (1995). For a further discussion of animal-standpoint theory, see Donovan (2006).…”

“…Contrary to these earlier critics who ignored or minimized the animal's suff ering, critic Mortensen (2000) notes of the poem that "for Wordsworth the hart's suff ering is a subject of ethical interest in itself, not merely a fi gure for other, more noteworthy forms of human suff ering" (p. 303). Indeed, Mortensen insists that Wordsworth intended for the poem to point up "man's shockingly cruel treatment of animals," thus "inaugurat[ing] a new kind of Romantic nature poetry, which brings animals into the foreground and takes their suff ering seriously" (p. 296).…”

Mesto kmetijskih živali v »večvrstni etnografiji«

“…Tudi gibanje za osvoboditev živali najdeva svoje korenine v romantiki. Izviri animalistike oziroma diskurza o pravicah živali so romantični (Mortensen 2000;Perkins 2003). Prakse in institucije varovanja živali so bile tedaj še rudimentarne; razvile so se šele pozneje, desetletja zatem ali celo stoletje zatem, ko se je čas romantike v ožjem pomenu kot literarno--umetniške smeri že iztekel.…”