Wordsworth as Scatterbrain: Deconstructing the ‘Nature’ of William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes

Abstract

In his Guide to the Lakes (1810, 1835), the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth used the word ‘nature’ in two senses. Sometimes it denoted a holistic ideal, in the manner of metaphysicians, and sometimes a concrete landscape of discrete things, in the manner of natural scientists. The Guide to the Lakes thus marks a watershed in Western philosophy of nature. Although chronologically the ideal preceded the concrete landscape, conceptually the concrete landscape precedes the ideal, much as in Nietzsche's ‘fiction of causation’.

Notes

Notes

1 Recent green readings include Bate (1991), Kroeber (1994), Buell (1995) and McKusick (2000), scores of individual articles, and special issues of the journals Studies in Romanticism (1996) and New Literary History (1999) on ecocriticism/environmental approaches to nature writing.

2 The New Historicist choir-boy quoted here is the renowned Wordsworth-scholar Alan Liu, who claims that ‘There is no nature … “nature” I have never set axe to. To believe that nature “is” in the way a tree “is” is to abstract the notion of essence while concealing the abstraction. Nature is an idea validating as rightful existence the reservoir, brook, field, forest … nature is the name under which we use the nonhuman to validate the human, to interpose a mediation able to make humanity more easy with itself’ (Liu, 1989, p. 38). While Liu's premises and argument may seem akin to mine, I reject his historicized and through-and-through culturally constructivist conception of ‘nature’.