Wordsworth, Ecocriticism, and Natural Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Wordsworth reinvents the Enlightenment’s concept of natural education in ways that resonate with theories of ecology in a time of global warming. In book 5 of The Prelude, Wordsworth launches a scathing satire against the modern educator, whose scheme of natural education resembles rationalist interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wordsworth questions the naturalism of Enlightenment educational theory, arguing that modern education is rooted in a desire to control the course of both nature and human development. He reimagines natural education as a process that entails unpredictable and irreversible change. For Wordsworth, natural education is not a highway that leads directly towards a better future but is instead a broken and winding passage from one stage of life to another. Ecocritical scholars have embraced Wordsworth’s attack on rationalistic, anthropocentric conceptions of nature, but his ecological sensibility continues to be defined in relation to an outdated vision of pastoral renewal. This essay maintains that the sense of discontinuity that characterizes Wordsworth’s lyric narration of natural education approaches much more closely to twenty-first-century experiences of ecological chaos, estrangement, and loss.