In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, aestheticians debated about whether the Divine Horticulturalist created a neat and geometrical or a wild and irregular Garden of Eden. The question was of crucial importance to them, because the nature of nature was regarded as the philosophical underpinning for the nature of everything that people should believe, feel and do. The nature of nature had ramifications as to whether people should live by intuition or by reason, whether artists should be rule-bound or spontaneous, whether art of all kinds should be rigid or free-form, whether the ideal human is a rationalist urbanite or a noble savage, whether society should be an orderly hierarchy or a diverse democracy, and whether standards of judgment should be objective or subjective.

Of course, the dual concept of nature implied by those opposites is an artificial dichotomy, and not everyone saw the issue in such an either-or way. Those protecting the status quo, however, had a vested interest in the formal garden view of ideal nature, with all its attendant symbolic overtones for the ideal form of society, person and art. People had looked to nature as a model many times throughout history. Plant and animal analogies had long been used to rationalize everything from the subordination of women to the supremacy of the monarchy.

The problem with using nature as a model, however, was that a case could be made for a wild, anarchistic (as opposed to orderly, hierarchical) nature of nature. In short, nature could be subversive – or renewing, depending on one’s point of view. As the formal garden surrendered to the wild landscape, something very similar happened in art and politics. The Romantic poets were caused by and caused this revolution (along with other artists and intellectuals of the age).

A related phenomenon had to do with something approaching the substitution of naturalism for religion. Various poets flirted with it to varying degrees, some embracing it, like Shelley and Wordsworth; others “straying and unfaithful”, but nevertheless remaining “married” to orthodox Christianity, like Coleridge. This naturalism was based on the conviction that nature was good and that the book of nature contains all truths necessary to humans. Avid observation of nature led to enthusiasm for the infinite variety of nature, which gradually spread to the political and moral realm and caused a shift from objective to subjective standards of conduct, along with growing individualism.

Nature taught her devotees other lessons as well, like the inevitable lesson of humility, due to her sublimity and eternity compared to small and transient humans. That kind of humility was the opposite of the hierarchical paradigm of the natural order, with man at the top of the pyramid. A paradigm in which people partake of the animating spirit of the web of life replaced the pyramid. Further, nature enthusiasts tended toward a strong belief that the ails of civilized humanity can be cured whenever people learn to be as happy and harmonious as the rest of the cosmic dance of nature. Finally, it is interesting to observe the almost feminist element threading through much of the Romantic poetry. That may have something to do with the traditional association of women with nature in Western culture. Perhaps as esteem for nature rose, esteem for women rose.

In virtually all of the ways outlined above, Wordsworth was the epitome of a nature poet. At one time or another, either explicitly or implicitly, Wordsworth expressed in his poetry all of the ideas and sentiments of a worshipper of wild, animistic, pantheistic nature. Many elements were so taken-for-granted and so un-self-conscious that they are sometimes unobtrusive in his poetry.

A good representative sample of the spirituality of naturalism, along with its lessons for humans, is the first two stanzas of “Lines Written in Early Spring”:

I heard a thousand notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad throughts to the mind

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

An expression of the belief that nature is the best guide and teacher, the best “book” to read, is the third and fourth stanzas of “The Tables Turned”:

Books! ‘tis dull and endless strife:
Come hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet the music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your Teacher.

He expresses encouragement to a young female free spirit in “To a Young Lady”:

Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!
– There is a nest in a green dale,
A harbour and a hold;
Where thou, a Wife and Friend, shalt see
Thy own heart – stirring days, and be
A light to young and old.

There, healthy as a shepherd boy,
And treading among flowers of joy,
Which at no season fade,
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A woman may be made…

Legions of examples of the primitivism for which Wordsworth is famous exist among his poetry. He includes children among his noble savages, as in the lines about his daughter at the end of “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”:

Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom in all the year;
And worshipp at the Temple’s inner shrine.
God being with thee when we know it not.

He expresses something more political in Book Thirteenth of “The Prelude,” lines 76-93:

And having thus discerned how dire a thing
Is worshipped in that idol, proudly named
‘The Wealth of Nations’ where alone that wealth
Is lodged, and how increased; and having gained
A more judicious knowledge of the worth
And dignity of individual man
Of whom we read, the man whom we behold
With our own eyes – I could not but enquire –
Not with less interest than heretofore,
But greater, though in spirit more subdued –
Why is this glorious creature to be found
One only in ten thousand? What one is,
Why may not millions be? What bars are thrown
By Nature in the way of such a hope?

An example of his ideas of intuition (or Imagination, as he called it) which he, curiously, links with Reason (but probably a Reason redefined by him) is in Book Fourteenth of “The Prelude,” lines 188-192:

This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist,
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.

Coleridge, of course, expresses many of those kinds of naturalism, too, like his line in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”:

…Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure…

He has ideas and twists of his own to add, too, like his sense of a forming spirit in nature which is also affecting humans. The Eolian Harp was a symbol of that spirit – that wind fanning harps into motion, fanning nature into motion, fanning the mind into motion. Thus, in his poem, “The Eolian Harp”, he wildly and enthusiastically speculates in lines 40-48:

And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,
That tremble into thought as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the soul of each, and God of all?

Another one of Coleridge’s characteristic ideas that he derived from nature is the dialectic of opposites forming a dynamic whole, which is analogous to the great artist or poet integrating the disparate in a creative process microcosmic of the creative forces of nature. That idea appears in “The Nightingale” and “Kubla Khan”. I will examine it in Kubla Khan in the last nine lines:

I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle around him thrice
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Incidentally, it is also a strong expression of the idea of the “lawless” artist (or the spontaneous and non-conforming artist).

Shelley was also a non-conforming artist, regarding himself as a “herd abandoned deer”. He regarded nature as a refuge from the cruel world, suggesting more alienation than Wordsworth or Coleridge experienced. He also differed from Wordsworth and Coleridge in that he used a series of nature-metaphors to describe elusive abstractions, rather than just describing nature. Forces and processes are emphasized more than objects. He is always more abstract, requiring readers to stretch their imaginations more. He wrote about a sky-lark without even seeing it.

Another difference is that the idea of Renewal was a much more prominent theme in his poetry. Wordsworth hinted at Renewal, but Shelley made Renewal into a full-blown cause, championing it boldly and epically in his poetry. A premise underlying his idea of Renewal is always the conviction that human society will only be redeemed and regenerated when people consent to be reunited with nature and work within her laws. These ideas are clearly expressed in his early poem “Queen Mab”:

How sweet a scene will earth become!
Of purest spirits, a pure dwelling place,
Symphonies with the planetary spheres;
When man, with changeless nature coalescing,
Will undertake regeneration’s work….

Shelley also carried Platonism further than Wordsworth did, believing literally that there are Platonic forms beyond the veil, which have correspondent (but less perfect) concretes in the world immediately available to our normal senses and our normal consciousness. This is expressed in “Lift Not the Painted Veil”:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colors idly spread, – behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear….

Love was also more emphasized in Shelley’s poetry – to Shelley, Love was part of the package deal of nature, as he expressed in “Love’s Philosophy”:

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit mix and mingle.
Why not I with thine?

A romantic and idealistic feminism appears in “Prometheus Unbound” in lines 153-158 of Scene IV:

And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,
From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
And changed to all which once they dared not be….

Even when Shelley was writing more about abstractions and forces, landscape details frequently inspired his poetry right on the spot; unlike Wordsworth, who was inspired by intense memories of nature recalled in tranquility. Both “Euganean Hills” and “Stanzas Written in Dejection” are landscape poems, and “Prometheus Unbound” was written among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, in the mountains, among flowers and blossoming trees.

Shelley introduced Byron to Wordsworth and naturalism, but Byron seldom waxed philosophical or religious about nature. Instead, nature is emphasized as the setting for his Byronic heroes. Nature is where they go to release themselves from the constraints of civilization. Nature is also where they find a match for their elemental passions. Then, too, nature is where there are no people – a big plus to the Byronic hero, who is too rebellious to meekly suffer social punishments for nonconformity. Thus Child Harold exiles himself to nature in proud desolation, a contrast to Shelley the “herd abandoned deer”. That Byronic spirit is captured in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto the Third:

XII

But soon he knew himself the most unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell’d
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell’d
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell’d;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

XIII

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, the forest, cavern, breaker’s foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land’s tongue, which he would oft forsake
For nature’s pages glass’d by sunbeams on the lake

Because of those last two lines, I disagree with those who claim that Byron did not think he could learn anything from the “book of nature”. All of the Romantic poets paid attention to nature as a teacher, including, too, Keats.

One gets the feeling with Keats that Shakespeare, Milton and other great writers were more of an influence on him than nature. Yet, even Keats wrote a poem called “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent”, with the title echoing Coleridge’s words in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament,
Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair….

Though the title echoes Coleridge, the emphasis in this poem is decidedly Keatsian – sensual contentment, gazing on beauty, all for the pleasure of it, not for any larger purpose. Unlike Shelley, for him the senses were not veils between people and reality; they were windows into reality. The indolent mood is also Keatsian, as is the static picture the poem paints. One gets the feeling with Keats that he would not care about the regularity or the irregularity, order or wildness of nature, as long as it was intense.

To Keats, nature seemed to be primarily a repository for the lush and the rich, although I don’t want to genearlize too much. After all, he sat underneath a tree listening to a nightingale and writing an ode to her. Once again, however, he emphasizes very different things than Wordsworth, Coleridge or Shelley would have emphasized. Death is more prominent than life in his “Ode to a Nightingale.” Death is seen as something akin to the ultimate indolence in a pleasurable sense – a sort of trancelike dream of passivity, very romanticized. The nightingale, by contrast, is seen as timeless and transcendent of such human feelings and concerns.

This completes my sampling of bouquets from the various gardens grown by the five major English Romantic poets. In different ways and in different degrees, all five poets participated in the poetry of nature. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron all partook in furthering the “rebellious” concept of the nature of nature. Keats was guided more by his own, unique aesthetics, but he was fanned by the intellectual breezes of his time. The five poets have left an inspiring legacy that will never go out of date unless nature goes out of date.