Notes Introduction 1. The Works of Thoreau, ed. Henry S. Canby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 668. Subsequent citations of Thoreau’s essay “Nature” refer to this edition by page number. 2. Wordsworth’s poem “Stepping Westward” was well known to Thoreau, who cites it approvingly in his Journals. James McIntosh notes that “Thoreau refers admiringly to several poems of Wordsworth that contain submerged apocalyptic impulses: the Intimations Ode, ‘Stepping Westward,’ and ‘Peter Bell.’” Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance Toward Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 66. 3. “Stepping Westward,”lines 1–8. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49). Subsequent citations of Wordsworth’s poetry refer to this edition by line number. 4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973. 5. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground:Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York:Norton, 1995), 69–90. 6. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1:178–181. Subsequent cita- tions of Coleridge’s poetry refer to this edition by line number. 7. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Although this book could hardly be characterized as a work of ecocriticism, it does usefully examine “the infinite variety of natural appearances” in Wordsworth’s poetry,emphasizing “the way that the 230 Notes simplest event can enrich the mind” (4). Hartman argues that “Words- worth’s real danger was always the ‘sublime’—the public and preacherly dimension” (15). 8. Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” line 58. 9. William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriti- cism,” Iowa Review 9 (1978): 71–86; reprinted in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 105–123. The his- tory of the term “ecocriticism” is more fully described in Ecocriticism Reader, xviii-xx. 10. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image,Music,Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). The French terms langue and parole derive from Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916; English translation 1958). 11. Alan Liu, Wordsworth:The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 104. 12. Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994), 2. 13. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More- Than-Human World (New York:Vintage Books, 1996). 14. Abram develops these ideas in “Animism and the Alphabet,” Spell of the Sen- suous, 93–135. 15. M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York:Norton, 1984), 216–222. 16. For further discussion of semiotic exchange in predator-prey relationships, see John Coletta, “ ‘Writing Larks’: John Clare’s Semiosis of Nature,” The Wordsworth Circle 28 (Summer 1997): 192–200. 17. The copyright situation that prevailed in Britain and the United States dur- ing the nineteenth century actually worked to enhance the free exchange of ideas, since a book published on one side of the Atlantic could gener- ally be distributed on the other side without payment of royalties. Thus British books were often widely available in cheap American editions, and leading American writers such as Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson found a substantial readership in Britain. 18. On this topic see Lore Metzger, One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 19. Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism, pages 5 and 156, note 9. 20. The history of environmental ideas in Western science and culture is examined in magisterial detail by Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Another excellent historical overview is provided by Peter Marshall, Notes 231 Nature’s Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking (London: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 21. On the disastrous consequences of ancient Mediterranean deforestation, see Clive Pointing, A Green History of the World:The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 68–78. A more detailed historical narrative is provided by John Robert McNeill, The Moun- tains of the Mediterranean World:An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1992). 22. Raymond Williams rigorously demystifies the pastoral ideal in The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). The ideological determinants of the pastoral mode are further examined by Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology:Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 23. On the figuration of Nature as female (in Renaissance and post-industrial cultures), see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature:Women,Ecology,and the Scientific Revolution: A Feminist Reappraisal of the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 1–41. See also Robert Graves’s classic study, The White Goddess, and Riane Eisler, “The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto,” in Reweaving The Word:The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 23–34. 24. “Canticle of Brother Sun,”translated by Lawrence S. Cunningham, St. Fran- cis of Assisi (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 59. The Italian original reads:“. matre terra / la quale ne sustenta et governa / et produce diversi fructi con col- oriti fiori et herba.” 25. St. Francis of Assisi was recognized in 1979 by Pope John Paul II as the patron saint of ecology (according to the Encyclopedia of Religion). Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel St. Francis (1953; English translation, 1962), presents the major events of his life in a lively and provocative form. On St. Francis as a progenitor of modern ecological thought, see Lynn White,“The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207. 26. Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural His- tory of Selborne (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986), 11–12. 27. The early development of nature writing out of a more purely “scientific” approach to natural phenomena is discussed by Thomas J. Lyon, This Incom- perable Lande:A Book of American Nature Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). Lyon elucidates the convergence in ecological thought of Roman- tic transcendentalism (with its holism and organicism) and the scientific concepts of taxonomy, evolution, and symbiosis (20). 28. For further discussion of the voyages of Captain Cook and the profession- alization of natural history during the eighteenth century, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion,Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism,1600–1860(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 311–325. 232 Notes 29. William Cowper, The Task, Book 6, in Cowper: Poetry and Prose, ed. Brian Spiller (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), 530. For further information on the history of animal rights, see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature:A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 30. Cowper, The Task, Book 6 (530). “The economy of nature” was an expres- sion commonly used in the later eighteenth century to denote the interde- pendence of all living things. On the early development of this concept, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy:The Roots of Ecology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977) and Robert P.McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Con- cept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 31. The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 137–138. Hereafter cited as Letters. 32. Despite his best efforts to protect the Lake District from the encroachments of modern industrial society, Wordsworth probably did more than anyone to popularize it as a tourist destination through the publication of his poetry and A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (first published anonymously in 1810 and often reprinted). 33. Keats mentions the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818. Jonathan Bate sympathetically examines Wordsworth’s ecological awareness in Romantic Ecology:Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991). 34. Dorothy Wordsworth records this episode in her Grasmere Journal entry of April 15, 1802. William Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (composed 1804) was based on Dorothy’s account. 35. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182. 36. Gilbert White’s contribution to the development of natural history writing is examined by William J. Keith, The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Non- Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 39–59. 37. Mabey, Gilbert White, 213–214. 38. Clare possessed two different editions of White’s Natural History of Selborne; cited in The