Here I think carefully about how we might read Romantic-period poems from within our own moment of ecological precarity. Looking at John Clare’s ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, William Cowper’s The Task, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ I track these poems’ moments of uncertainty about the ‘natural’ world, and their moments of confusion and obscurity. I am interested in how these poems move above and below their objects of attention, how they forge and falter in their means of building relationship, and how they register the agency of the non-human.
Rhian Williams, ‘Close-reading the ecology of Romantic poems’, in: Chaplin, S. and Faflak, J. (eds.) The Romanticism Handbook. Series: Literature and culture handbooks. Continuum (2010), pp. 52-71.
Rhian Williams 