Chapter Two examines the various discourses of nature in early Romantic-period scientific, philosophical, religious, and poetic texts, showing how these have contributed to the emergence of the biological sciences and of ecological consciousness. Highlighting interchanges between Germany and Britain, it first looks at definitions of nature in both languages, arguing that the term underwent a semantic explosion between 1750 and 1850. Informed by recent ecocritical theory, it then bases itself on an anonymously published 1783 essay co-authored by G.C. Tobler and Goethe to revise the commonplace idea of Romantic nature as something wild, pure and distinct from culture. Drawing on the ideas of Spinoza and Leibniz via Herder and Schelling, the text imagines nature as an active, self-organising process of becoming in which humans participate. This Naturphilosophie informed an ethos of contemplation often cast in opposition to industrial capitalism. The chapter then discusses Romantic language theories and their relation with the non-human world. It closes with an overview of nature’s spiritual dimension in the theology of Schleiermacher and poetry of William Wordsworth, John Clare, and, again, Blake.

The georgic in English is often said to have receded after the 1770s. This chapter argues that in the Romantic period the georgic does not disappear, but assumes a new form: the ‘rural complaint’, a lyrical lamentation on social conditions in the countryside. Georgics in a more conventional didactic and descriptive form continued to be written, such as Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy and James Grahame’s British Georgics, but these incorporated rural complaint interludes. At the same time, standalone rural complaint poems, following Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, consistently alluded to, and situated themselves within, a classical and neoclassical georgic tradition. Understanding the Romantic rural complaint as a form of georgic (rather than, or in addition to, pastoral) sheds light on the generic choices of poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Chapter 4 takes personification as its point of departure in the wake of Wordsworth’s well-known dismissal of it. From this perspective, Coleridge’s early conversation poems – where a tenuous reciprocity with the natural world is with difficulty achieved through the unfolding artifice of the poem – and Clare’s recreations in verse of remembered conversations with self-personifying natural things are inventive extensions of eighteenth-century methods for putting human beings into social converse with the natural world. Both, the chapter argues, are instances of what Jonathan Culler calls “projects of animation”: poems where more subtle practices of personification support a poetry that reaches out to a chattering world of non-human beings and things to make them talk not only to each other but also, at least in poetry, to us. Such tactics seemed altogether more possible, however, early in the century than toward its close – as the poetry of Swinburne’s French correspondents, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes clear.

Chapter 1 reveals the complexity and self-consciousness of Romantic nature writing, bringing together authors who share an interest in nonhuman nature as a dynamic process. It also addresses the porousness of Romantic nature writing as a mode of engagement across different kinds of texts. A key claim is that, while Gilbert White’s localism and close field observations were influential on later nature writing, so was the strand of confessional autobiography pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Romantic nature writing is often represented as a self-aggrandising masculine mode. But women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith were significant, particularly in their portrayals of nonhuman nature as entangled with everyday human life. The chapter also addresses labouring-class writers, bringing John Clare’s natural history prose into dialogue with the work of the artist Thomas Bewick and the novelist and poet James Hogg. All three resisted and lamented the forces of modernisation, but did so through developing innovative modes of representation. Even at its most backward-looking, Romantic nature writing engaged with the contradictions and conflicts of modernity. And, while influenced by natural theology, it also dared to speculate about deep time and the transience of human species.

In his social context, ‘peasant poet’ John Clare was not odd in being a constant reader of the ‘aristocrat poet’ Lord Byron. Even after the latter’s attacks in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers on ‘cobbler’ poets, along with all ‘sons of needless trade’ who might rhyme (‘weavers’, ‘taylors’, labourers with ‘plough’ or ‘spade’), Byron remained a leading influence on labouring-class poets’ work.1 Introducing his volume of labouring-class poetry of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, Scott McEathron argues that along with Burns and Bloomfield, Byron loomed large for poor poets, including Clare: