Taking animals seriously: William Wordsworth and the claims of ecological romanticism

Critics have long been aware that William Wordsworth borrowed from the Germ an balladist Gottfried August Burger in composing Lyrical Ballads (1798-180 0). Wordsworth was both attracted and repulsed by Burger's sensational and sensationally popular verse, yet the reason for this ambiguity has continue d to baffle scholars. In this essay I turn to ecological criticism to cast a new light on the intertextual and cross-cultural exchange between Burger' s "Der wilde Jager" and Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well". Wordsworth, I claim, was intrigued by Burger's attempt to write a poem about hunting, yet in re writing the German ballad Wordsworth also seeks to shift the emphasis somew hat, in such a way as to focus more explicitly on what he believed to be th e main issue at stake: man's shockingly cruel treatment of animals. In thus reconceptualising Burger's poem, Wordsworth inaugurates a new kind of Roma ntic nature poetry, which brings animals into the foreground and takes thei r 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 necessar ily 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.