An Ecocritical Reading of William Wordsworth’s Selected Poems


  •  Abolfazl Ramazani    
  •  Elmira Bazregarzadeh    

Abstract

With the publication of Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995) and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s joint collection, The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s and the critics changed their angles of vision and examined the works of art by focusing on the relationship between man and Nature. Hence, Romantic poetry, in general, and William Wordsworth, in particular, became the key icons of ecocritical studies. Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who has been considered as a forerunner of English Romanticism. His views towards Nature and man’s treatment of Nature have supported his position as an important icon of ecocritical studies. His fame lies in the general belief that he has been viewed as a Nature poet who viewed Nature superior to humans. In other words, his views about Nature and his poems seek to heal the long-forgotten wounds of Nature in the hope of reaching unification between man and Nature. Therefore, this study is an attempt to focus on Wordsworth’s selected poems in the light of Ecocriticism in order to shed light on the poet’s cautious views about the interdependence of man and Nature and purge Wordsworth of the unjust labels tagged to him as a self-centered poet. Accordingly, this research takes into account the importance of the reciprocal relationship between man and Nature as the major constituents of a vast ecosystem and helps the readers grow ecologically and achieve tranquility in an era suffocated by technological pollution.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
  • ISSN(Print): 1925-4768
  • ISSN(Online): 1925-4776
  • Started: 2011
  • Frequency: quarterly

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