Nature and Ecological Consciousness in Wordsworth’s Poetry: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

Existing studies tend to describe Wordsworth’s ecological imagination either through ecocritical exegesis or by quantifying the frequency of nature-related lexicon, rather than by closely analysing ecological constructions in language. Drawing on Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework of “stories we live by,” this paper qualitatively explores how Wordsworth’s poetry constructs, supports, questions, or complicates the cultural stories humans tell about our relationship to nature, and whether and how these patterns support ecological flourishing. Four poems were chosen to represent a range of Wordsworth’s ecological “positions” (The Tables Turned, The World Is Too Much With Us, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) and closely analyzed via a transparent coding process identifying recurrence across lines of evaluation, agency, metaphor/frame, identity/relationship, and salience/erasure. Results show that Wordsworth habitually constructs productive re-storying through endowing nonhumans with agency and aliveness, praising receptive modes of engagement with the more-than-human world over exploitation, and connecting material reality to ethics and affect. Conversely, the poems are also suggestive of an underlying tension: Nature is often legitimised through anthropocentric comforts of consolation and psychological well-being, indicating the reach of an anthropocentric boundary in what would otherwise be ecocentric language. The analysis above showed how ecolinguistics may offer a testable approach to literary interpretation and clarify Wordsworth's ecological vision at the discursive level.