12 - Untidying the Landscape: Romantic Poetics, Class and Non-Human Nature

Summary

This essay revisits the contested relationship between Romantic envi-ronmental aesthetics and the development of the modern environmental movement to focus on the wild non- human animals that have often been marginalised in the various turns taken in the debate since the publica-tion of Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology (1991). Under examination here are two significant writers in this context: William Wordsworth and John Clare. The former arguably contributed most to the aesthetics of wilderness management during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (although, as will become clear, the extent to which Britain's upland landscapes were wild even in Wordsworth's day is questionable), while the latter is increasingly seen as the most important British poet of natural history. The point of departure for my intervention is to return to the actual places that formed the nature aesthetics of Wordsworth and Clare to consider how they had been and continue to be shaped by history. More information on these places through time is gradually becoming available within the disciplines of historical environmental-ism and historical ecology. The perspective from which the two poets viewed the landscape, in terms of their respective social position or class, is also important because this impacted on how they interacted with the landscape and what they saw in the landscape. These are not insignificant comparisons because today Romantic nature aesthetics continues to influence the way many British people look at rural spaces around them, and how they think about questions of environmental preservation or restoration. For many people, expansive green spaces, particularly national parks like the Lake District, constitute nature at its best and most abundant, despite the 2016 State of Nature report finding that in terms of biodiversity and wildlife decline Britain is now ‘among the most nature- depleted countries in the world.’ To say at the time of writing that Britain's natural heritage has been all but destroyed gener-ally provokes an incredulous response when so much of the landscape is still green (as of 2011 only 7 per cent of the British landscape was urban, and there are many green spaces within most urban environments too2), even amongst academic colleagues.

The continuing influence of Romantic nature aesthetics is illustrated by a somewhat fraught conversation I recently had with a friend about plans for a solar farm on a greenfield site near the village where we both live.