Eighteenth century travel writing as proto-ecocritical literary efforts: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an ecocritical travel writing example

Abstract

Today, ecocritical theory challenges the logic which damages and exploits nature in the sake of technological developments, and which draws human beings to a more mechanised and alienated life. However, when ecocriticism had not arrived at the scene of literary history, there had been some poets who tried to do what today’s ecocritical theory did through their accounts of travels in nature that they transfused into their poetry, by expressing their desires to become one with nature again, thus, moving away from the anthropocentric point of view which ecocriticism aims to undermine today. One of these poets was the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who lived between 1770 and 1850, and dealt with human-nature relationship in his poetry with a proto-eco-centric point of view as early as the eighteenth century. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate his poem titled “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, which was written during a walking tour in nature that he had attended with his sister, with an ecocritical perspective so as to demonstrate the fact that Wordsworth realised what today’s ecocritical theory tries to do more than two centuries earlier, which makes it possible to classify him as a proto-ecocritical poet.