Eighteenth century travel writing as proto-ecocritical literary efforts: Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an ecocritical travel writing example

Abstract

Today, ecocritical theory challenges the logic which damages and exploits nature in the sake of technological developments, and which draws human beings to a more mechanised and alienated life. However, when ecocriticism had not arrived at the scene of literary history, there had been some poets who tried to do what today’s ecocritical theory did through their accounts of travels in nature that they transfused into their poetry, by expressing their desires to become one with nature again, thus, moving away from the anthropocentric point of view which ecocriticism aims to undermine today. One of these poets was the prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who lived between 1770 and 1850, and dealt with human-nature relationship in his poetry with a proto-eco-centric point of view as early as the eighteenth century. Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate his poem titled “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, which was written during a walking tour in nature that he had attended with his sister, with an ecocritical perspective so as to demonstrate the fact that Wordsworth realised what today’s ecocritical theory tries to do more than two centuries earlier, which makes it possible to classify him as a proto-ecocritical poet.

Keywords

• Travel writing
• ecocriticism
• William Wordsworth

Kaynakça

1. Ayan,M, Yılmaz, Ö. (2022). Travelling between the lines in T.S. Eliot’s the love song of Alfred Prufrock. Writing While Traveling Around. İstanbul: Kriter,
2. Byerly, A. (1996). The Uses of Landscape. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology Georgia: University of Georgia Press 41-68.
3. Coupe, L. (2000). The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge.
4. Glotfelty, Cheryll. “What is Ecocriticism?”. 6 November 2010. Asle. 30 March 2014. http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/glotfelty/ . Web.
5. Hess, Scott. “William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 63(3), 283-320.
6. Hitt, C. (2004). Ecocriticism and the long eighteenth century. College Literature. 31(3), 123-147.
7. Horne, W. (2001). Samuel Johnson discovers the arctic: a reading of Greenland Tale as arctic literature. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 75-90.
8. Howarth, W. (1996). Some principles of ecocriticism. The ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 69-82.

9. Köseman, Z. (2022). Writing While Traveling Around. İstanbul: Kriter,
10. Scott, A. (1957). The poet’s craft: a course in the critical appreciation of poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Schwarz, H, William P. (1985) Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences Olympic Marketing Corp.
12. Slovic, S. (2000). Ecocriticism containing multitudes, practicing doctrine. The green studies reader: from romanticism to ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 160-163.
13. Sucksmith, P. (1974). Ochestra and the golden flower: a critical interpretation of the two versions of Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud. The yearbook of english studies 4, 149-158.
14. William Wordsworth-Biography. 31 September 2011 Egs.
15. http://www.egs.edu/library/william-wordsworth/biography. 5 April 2014. Web.