Taking Animals Seriously: William Wordsworth and the Claims of Ecological Romanticism

Abstract

Critics have long been aware that William Wordsworth borrowed from the German balladist Gottfried August Bürger in composing Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800). Wordsworth was both attracted and repulsed by Bürger's sensational and sensationally popular verse, yet the reason for this ambiguity has continued to baffle scholars. In this essay I turn to ecological criticism to cast a new light on the intertextual and cross‐cultural exchange between Bürger's “Der Wilde Jäger” and Wordsworth's “Hart‐Leap Well”. Wordsworth, I claim, was intrigued by Bürger's attempt to write a poem about hunting, yet in rewriting the German ballad Wordsworth also seeks to shift the emphasis somewhat, in such a way as to focus more explicitly on what he believed to be the main issue at stake: man's shockingly cruel treatment of animals. In thus reconceptualising Bürger's poem, Wordsworth inaugurates a new kind of Romantic nature poetry, which brings animals into the foreground and takes their suffering seriously. In the essay's final section, I defend Wordsworth's proto‐ecological vision against critics who believe that Wordsworth's love of nature caused him to lose interest in mankind. Far from leading necessarily to misanthropy or disillusionment, I argue, the vision propounded in ‘Hart‐Leap Well’ invites us to speculate how we can combine concern for the environment with a concern for our fellow men.