Relations of Scarcity: Ecology and Eschatology in The Ruined Cottage

Abstract

“[O]ne of the most beautiful poems of the language” is how Coleridge in 1832 remembered Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as he had first known it, long before The Excursion (TT I 306). Modern readers agree, and a number of ecocritics find Wordsworth’s 1798 poem of striking relevance. It remains unclear, however, whether romanticism is a local strain within ecocriticism, or whether the former is the inevitable, if problematic, kernel of the latter. It is possible to see romantic ecology as pivotal, able either to affirm how proto-ecological the romantic poets were, or to recognize contemporary ecology as a uniquely romantic offspring.1 British romantic nature poetry does not simply claim kinship with ecotheory, however: here is a poetics liable to probe the resilience of contemporary ecological insights, even while confirming their general stance. Romantic poetry may yet prove a difficult ally when it comes to any modern turn toward self-sufficient naturality, one shorn of eschatological horizons.