A Poet Propelled the Notion of National Parks
- Mal Cole
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
William Wordsworth's Love of Nature Sparked the Soul of Environmentalism
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote William Wordsworth in 1804. This line has become one of nature writing’s most famous similes and synonymous with the emotional sensibility of the Romantic poets.
It’s hard to realize today, but such similes—and such poetry—were not common at the time.
Wordsworth (1770–1850) wanted to break away from the stuffy, heroic couplets of the day and move into a new realm of poetry rooted in love of nature—soulful and bursting with passion but still with verses carefully ordered, rhymed, and metered.
Wordsworth wanted to test his ideas about nature as a source of spiritual solace and as a moral force. So, when he and his good friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their first collection of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, in 1798, it indeed set a sharp new precedent in style. It was so potent that it has carried into modern thinking and even propelled today’s conservation and environmental movements.
Wordsworth wanted to test his ideas about nature as a source of spiritual solace and as a moral force.
Lyrical Ballads is the work that most scholars agree was the jumping-off point for Romantic poetry.
Romanticism, an intellectual period that lasted into the mid-19th century, encompassed many areas of thought, including science, the visual arts, and music.
Reaction against Materialist Intellectualism
When Lyrical Ballads was published, Wordsworth and Coleridge were bringing their ideas to an interesting debate that went beyond the language of poetry. Erasmus Darwin, an acquaintance of theirs (and grandfather of Charles Darwin), had published a book in verse, The Botanic Garden, about some of the minutiae of the sexual reproduction of plants, and Lyrical Ballads was partly a response to Darwin’s treatise.
What was important to Wordsworth was not the mechanical specifics of how nature worked but what moral principles and metaphorical parallels human beings could draw from it to guide their lives. This idea is reflected in Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned”:
Sweet is the lore that nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous form of things—
We murder to dissect.
In the book Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, Renée Bergland writes that Wordsworth’s poem “offered sharp critique of Erasmus Darwin’s materialist approach to studying the natural world, arguing that unmediated experience was more spiritually and psychologically meaningful than methodical study that focused on specific plants and animals” (Bergland, p. 33).
To Wordsworth, if the scientific value of dissection was obvious, its spiritual value was not as evident.
It would be a mistake to say that Wordsworth found no poetry in science, but Wordsworth found more meaning in nature as a system. The word ecology did not exist in Wordsworth’s time (it wasn’t coined until 1866), but he was an ecological thinker.
In Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, author Jonathan Bate notes that Wordsworth had a sense of himself as an element of the natural world and was curious about himself as part of that world.
This was an idea that later inspired American Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau. Bate writes that writers/thinkers like Wordsworth and Thoreau were unique in their “emphasis on a symbiosis between the economies of nature and the activities of humankind” (Bate, p. 39).
Wordsworth the Environmentalist
This concern for nature in the context of “the activities of humankind” is evident in Wordsworth’s writing about his beloved Lake District in England.
Wordsworth was fond of rambling in the countryside with his sister Dorothy, and he became concerned about the effects, even in the early 19th century, of increased human activity in the area. The poet wanted to preserve the Lake District and its natural beauty and writes about it in his traveler’s handbook for the region, Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England. As Bate notes, part of Wordsworth’s aim in writing the guide was to care for the area’s ecosystem (Bate, p. 47).
Wordsworth even suggested in his 1810 Guide that the Lake District become a “national property” that could be accessible to anyone with an “eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”
This idea of a “national property” eventually contributed to the modern idea of a national park. The world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872 in the United States, with many others being designated thereafter. The English Lake District became a national park in 1951 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.
Even without a modern understanding of environmental science, preserving the Lake District became a compulsion for Wordsworth. He believed that spiritual and physical wholesomeness could be found in one’s specific environment. Part of what Bate calls Romantic ecology is that nature is essential to human survival. As Bate notes, “The ‘Romantic Ecology’ reverences the green earth because it recognizes that neither physically nor psychologically can we live without green things; it proclaims that there is ‘one life’ within us and abroad, that the earth is a single vast ecosystem which we destabilize at our peril” (Bate, p. 40).
Beyond the physical and mental health benefits of green spaces, Wordsworth saw profound spiritual benefits to connection with the natural world.
But beyond the physical and mental health benefits of green spaces, Wordsworth saw profound spiritual benefits to connection with the natural world and, though he lived in a profoundly Christian society, he sought to separate that spirituality from expressly Christian beliefs. Richard Holmes writes in The Age of Wonder that Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to avoid alluding to God while still exploring ideas of the spiritual and sublime. “[Wordsworth and Coleridge], at this most radical point in their lives, were trying to avoid an explicit reference to God, while retaining their intuitions of a ‘spiritual’ power—whatever that might be—both within man and within the natural universe” (Holmes, p. 316).
Wordsworth the Contemplative
Wordsworth explores this idea of spirituality beyond Christianity further in his poem “Expostulation and Reply.” There, the poet speaks about his preference for contemplating nature over reading books or scripture. He talks about cultivating “wise passiveness,” and says:
Think you, ’mid this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking.
Wise passiveness, to the poet, constituted cultivating a state of receptivity to the natural world. The poem is a foundational text of Romanticism, contrasting the Romantic emphasis on intuition, emotion, and direct experience of nature with the Neoclassical focus on reason, formal education, and the authority of books.
Professor and eco-critic Kate Rigby notes in her book, Reclaiming Romanticism, that in Wordsworth’s “Expostulation” poem, he is “arguing that the cultivation of wise passiveness provides a different kind of mental nourishment: namely, one that is afforded by a heightened receptivity to those other-than-human utterances that arrive unbidden from ‘the mighty sum / of things forever speaking’” (Rigby, p. 25). In other words, if one is receptive, the “things” of nature convey a knowledge and wisdom every bit as valuable as what one can derive from books.
Wordsworth’s ideas about contemplation have more in common with Eastern meditational traditions, such as Taoism and Buddhism, than Christianity.
Rigby also notes that Wordsworth’s ideas about contemplation have more in common with Eastern meditational traditions, such as Taoism and Buddhism, than Christianity.
The poet’s connection to place is also reminiscent of Indigenous spirituality. Potawatomi environmental scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer describes a process of connecting with land and place in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. In the chapter “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho Becoming Indigenous to Place,” Kimmerer imagines the journey of Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe cultural hero and First Man. She describes, through Nanabozho’s journey, the process of becoming indigenous to a place, a process she sees as essential if human beings want to learn to protect the Earth.
But, as Kimmerer emphasizes, not everyone can be an indigenous person. In this case, Kimmerer describes how a person might become “naturalized”: “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and feed your spirit” (Kimmerer, p. 208). Wordsworth was born in the Lake District, and his poetry suggests that he was connected to that place in the way Kimmerer describes. He looked to the land to replenish not just his body but his spirit.
Dorothy’s Inspiration for William
Wordsworth considers nature his guide in a spiritual life. He studied it closely, and he shared this fascination for nature with his sister Dorothy. She was his close friend and confidante, joining with him on his jaunts through the countryside. Her journals often served as inspiration for William’s poetry.
So, Wordsworth’s famous cloud was not quite as lonely as the poet suggests. His sister was with him for his encounter with “A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, Beneath the trees / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Both brother and sister were keen observers of nature, and in the modern era this sort of environmental “noticing” has become a kind of activism. Author Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy that noticing nature is a way to wrestle one’s inner world away from the social media and advertising that vie to consume one’s attention. Odell’s own experiments in attention led to a “complete re-rendering” of her reality.
“As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and the rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing,” she writes (Odell, p. 122). Odell sees the reorienting of her attention to nature as a radical act and a kind of protest--much as Wordsworth defends his practice of wise passiveness toward “the mighty sum / of things forever speaking.”
In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth is so moved by his encounter with wild daffodils that their beauty stays with him. As he sits quietly at home remembering the beauteous scene, “… then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” This moment with nature became a symbol of true joy and peace for Wordsworth that he could call upon in a quiet moment like a prayer or meditation.
He looked to his environment to inspire his spirituality, and that impulse can be seen yet today in efforts to reconnect with the natural world.
*Mal Cole is a freelance science and nature writer based in Massachusetts.
Bibliography
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Routledge, 1991.
Bergland, Renée. Natural Magic. Princeton University Press, 2024.
Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Pantheon Books, 2008.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019.
Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.