![]() ![]() Indeed, in Somersetshire, his sense of the organic wholeness of nature appears to have grown out of his sense of a need for personal wholeness (whole=hale=health). There, according to one traditional account, Wordsworth recovered, in his growing sense of a personal relationship to the natural rhythms and agency of the pastoral Somersetshire landscape, his sense of purpose.ĭonald Worster writes, 'The Romantic approach to nature was fundamentally ecological that is, it was concerned with relation, interdependence and holism.'3 For Wordsworth, these three concepts are as much psychological as ecological, a key correspondence in Wordsworth's most significant contribution to environmental thought: his steps to an ecology of mind and feeling. He grew up in the Lake District in Hawkshead near Esthwaite Lake attended St John's College, Cambridge (1787-91) spent time in France during the early part of the French Revolution came back to England and endured an emotional crisis of some five years' duration, precipitated by severed personal relationships, confused national loyalties, and a growing disillusionment with the progress of the French Revolution lived in Racedown, Dorsetshire with his sister Dorothy, whose own mind and writing reveal a startlingly original though usually neglected contribution to environmental thought and then moved with Dorothy to Alfoxden, Somersetshire (1797), to be near their new friend S.T.Coleridge. Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in West Cumberland, just outside the English Lake District. His reinvention of ancient nature worship or pantheism, for example, was both a challenge to and easily reconcilable with Christian humanism, Enlightenment individualism, the heady power and energy of the industrial age, and rural Toryism. Wordsworth's external and internal 'natures', while literally as old as the hills (and the Lakes of his native District), were startlingly new and paradoxical ones too. ![]() Indeed, when Wordsworth writes, 'Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her', we see him draw together his sense of external nature both as a ministering agent, one ministering 'to' the self, and as a patient recipient of the responses of the 'heart', receiving 'from' the inner landscape of the 'self' the promise of both their futures.2 Here is not the science but the experience of ecology. Wordsworth is also the 'poet of the self' (of the inner landscape). The name William Wordsworth is almost synonymous with 'nature poet' (and with the landscape of the English Lake District) paradoxically, Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her.1
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