A LESS THAN GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND; OR, THE YOUNG WORDSWORTH’S ENVIRONMENTALISM
The insistence upon the benefit of pastoral living is a familiar theme in English Romantic expression. In 1795, Coleridge wrote a letter to George Dyer claiming “we … become … the best possible [in] the country [when] all around us smile Good and Beauty” (154). It is a perception that has led Jonathan Bate to insist in Romantic Ecology: “If the French Revolution was one great root of Romanticism, then what used to be called ‘the return to nature’ … was surely the other” (7). Yet, knowing what we do of the industrialization that is currently working its way across China and other developing countries, just how good or beautiful could the “country” really have been during the 1790s? Kenneth Johnston argues in his controversial biography on Wordsworth that “Tintern Abbey” was triggered by the poet’s shock at the scores of beggars he saw about the ruins, as well as at the “wreathes of smoke” that were spewing out from the iron works along the Wye valley (590-4).