radical romanticism: democracy, religion, and the environmental imagination

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Mark S. Cladis

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 97, Number 1, 2014,pp. 21-49 (Article)

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Radical RomanticismDemocracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination

mArk S. ClAdiS

AbstractWorking at the juncture of religious studies, political theory, and environmental studies, I interrogate and construct a radical Romantic tradition that supports a normative vision of an environmentally responsive democracy that is deeply embodied by its citizens and embedded in its lands. Having investigated the religious, democratic, and environmental dispositions and ideologies that informed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Romantic literature and subse-quent legacies in America, I now show how this multifarious Romantic legacy, which has already shaped our identity and many of our sensibilities, can assist in the ongoing project of cultivating interrelated democratic and environmental theory, belief, and practice.

In this article, I ask fundamental questions about intellectual and normative identity. Throughout, I assume that memory and redemption are inextricable. Following this assumption, I propose that we consider radical Romanticism as a central, dynamic inheri-tance that informs our identity as citizens of what I call spiritual democracy—a robust democratic culture and creed, a source of life, both real and ideal, that promotes commitment to the natural world. I have investigated the religious, democratic, and environmental dispo-sitions and ideologies that informed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Romantic literature and

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their subsequent, sustained legacies in America. This investigation employs what may be called a triscopic approach: a methodology that involves care-ful attention to the three-way intersection of religion, democracy, and the environment. I wish to show how a multifarious Romantic legacy, which has already contributed much to our cultural identity and sensibilities, can assist in the ongoing project of cultivating democratic and environmental theory, belief, and practice. This legacy has the potential, I believe, to enhance the art of daily living and the construction of a democratic, moral psychology suit-able for our age.

I. “The Child Is the Father of the Man”: Identity and Memory

Wordsworth understood the need to study the past in order to prepare answers to basic questions about our moral location in time and place. His claim “The child is the father of the man” is a declaration of dependence (2000a, 246). The past is the source of profound hope and deep sorrow, of nurturing vision and debilitating bias. Our present wellsprings of life are fed by our history. The Prelude, Wordsworth’s epic poem, is a meditation on the interrelation of things past and present, public and private. Here, he considers his history to better understand his route forward: toward a life in a salutary spiritual community, rich with traditions that link the living to the dead. Wordsworth understood the great spiritual work of discovering and fashioning, receiving and offering, sources of life. Discovering and fashioning, because he understood that exploring the past requires a dynamic, moral imagination, and not simply a passive, Lockean memory. Receiving and offering, because he understood that being nourished by the past requires not only the development of receptiveness—cultivating attention and openness to life-giving grace—but also the practice of giving. As an expression of gratitude for past gifts, he offers to the community “lasting inspi-ration” and becomes one of the “joint-labourers in the work of . . . redemption” (Wordsworth 1979, 482).

Wordsworth turned to memory and history to help him navigate a time of great public and personal crises: the promise and disillusionment of the French Revolution; the chaos and oppression of the British response to it; the increase in poverty, homelessness, environmental degradation following the rise of industrialization, laissez-faire capitalism, and enclosure (theft) of common lands. These public crises intermingled with his own personal ones,


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including the loss of his parents at an early age, estrangement from his child in France during the war, and trenchant questions about vocation and about faith in radical republican ideals. In the face of social and spiritual crises, Wordsworth asked, What sources of life offer themselves? What paths lead out of the darkness to a more luminous future? What is the relation between the current and former self and between the present and past age?

Unless you are committed to philosophical narcissism, you probably hold the broadly Wittgensteinian position that each of us is necessarily part of a larger tribe or set of interrelated tribes. Identity questions are not only personal but also public—they pertain to a “we.” To ask, “Who am I?” is to implicitly ask of one’s tribe, “Who are we? What do we esteem and why? For what are we grateful? Toward what do we aim and move? What provides us a sense of history, tradition, meaning, and future?” These questions may sound quaint, Gnostic, or mystical, yet they are also deeply practical, even mundane. Immigrant families, for example, ask them daily. For though we may try to let go of the old world as we embrace the new, we soon learn that we can never leave everything behind. We eventually confront the task of navigating both worlds. We eventually ask basic questions about our past, present, and future.

In some sense, we are all potential immigrants, navigating multiple worlds—physical, cultural, and moral. And the immigrant challenge—of living between or within multiple worlds—may be as good a definition of modernity as any.1 One way we cope with this challenge is to tell personal and public stories that sustain and stay us amid the vast and chaotic flow of life. Films, novels, poetry, scholarly accounts, anecdotes told over dinner—these are efforts to tell and hear stories that might make sense of our lives. They are never, of course, just stories. We would not share them if they did not seem trustworthy, powerful, and deeply indicative. The stories we hear and tell shape us as decisively as any other social practice while simultaneously articulating our complex beliefs, ideals, and practices. Our narratives—plots imposed on and emerging from the flow of life—are mostly dynamic and plu-ral, subject to multiple interpretations. And these narratives are not unrelated to power; as the Navajo say, “Those who tell the stories rule the people.”

In this article I ask: To what extent has Romanticism shaped our cultural identities and stories? To what extent can it provide material for answering such fundamental questions as “Who are we? What do we esteem? Toward what do we move?”2


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II. “If You Wish to Converse with Me, Define Your Terms”—Voltaire

Working at the juncture of religious studies, political theory, and environmental studies, I wish to interrogate and construct a radical Romantic tradition that sup-ports a normative vision of an environmentally responsive democracy embodied by its citizens and embedded in its lands. I call this vision spiritual democracy.

Allow me to define my terms, at least provisionally. By tradition, I mean an evolving set of dynamic ideals, beliefs, prejudgments, practices, and institu-tions that guide and animate a people over time. By normative vision, I mean an ideal, consilient array of perspectives, arguments, and insights that inform the ethos and future of a people. By embodied and embedded, I mean the ways democratic practices, habits, and ideals are performed and reflected in the identities of individuals and the character of the land in which they dwell. Embodied democracy brings attention to the cultural dimensions of a democ-racy, including religious and aesthetic ones, highlighting the distinctive ways democratic citizens represent and fashion the world; embedded democracy brings attention to the physical dimensions of a democracy, including geologi-cal and geographical ones, highlighting the distinctive ways the physical world represents and fashions its inhabitants. By environmentally responsive, I refer to an evolving set of virtues that dispose members of a democratic culture to see, think, feel, and act in ways that sustinere: upholding “the integrity, stabil-ity, and beauty” of the planet’s interrelated natural and social communities.3

How shall I define radical Romanticism? Let us start with Romanticism, without the modifier. By Romanticism, I refer to the late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century artistic, literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement; I also refer to a current, implicit, and pervasive cultural framework that has its roots in the Romantic era. The signs and manners of Romanticism, of course, are legion. There are as many good and helpful portraits of Romanticism as there are authors wrestling honestly with the material broadly associated with it. In my case, I have interrogated a selection of this material and constructed my own portrait of Romanticism for the sake of advancing progressive democratic and environmental aims. I call this portrait radical Romanticism. I acknowledge that my selection of material is itself a construc-tive exercise, yet I also believe that I maintain fidelity to these sources. I seek to listen skillfully to what precedes me, particularly British Romantic authors Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and American Romantic


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authors Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau. Radical Romanticism, then, refers to my critical, constructive engagement with these voices of Romanticism.

I must now define spiritual democracy, to which I have only alluded. Think of spiritual democracy as a progressive democratic culture: its practices and insti-tutions, its laws and Constitution, its ideals and adaptations. Spiritual democ-racy is neither a mystical, nationalistic political body nor a democracy based on supposed transcendent or immutable ideals. Spiritual, here, connotes the thought, skills, practices, dispositions, and emotions of diverse citizens as they pursue a distinctively democratic relation between themselves and their politi-cal community. Spiritual, in this context, refers to the integrative complexity of the citizen—the synthesis of knowledge, emotions, and beliefs—when engaged in forms of democratic practice. A republic that places a premium on such virtues as self-reliance and such rights as freedom of speech and religion must be attentive to building and sustaining a culture that supports inclusion and self-governance—a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Shared practices and projects, mutual ideals and symbols, joint aspirations and work—these markers of a democratic culture normatively inform everyday life and work in communities big and small. Durkheim, the French social the-orist of democracy, employed the term “sacred” to describe the foremost and finest beliefs and practices of progressive democracy in his day. Durkheim did not mean that these shared beliefs and practices are beyond critique and scru-tiny (in fact, he counted critical social inquiry among the sacred democratic principles). Rather, these beliefs and practices are sacred insofar as they are the co-creation of past and present citizens, communities, and traditions, and they thereby carry an impersonal, sustained authority. This sacred inheritance inspires and motivates individuals to think and work beyond the dictates of self-interest; or, stated differently, this sacred inheritance inspires a self-interest that is broad, inclusive, and democratic.

Spiritual democracy, I should make clear, is not synonymous with the democratic nation. It is one among many possible stances within the nation. It is a cultural legacy of progressive movements, figures, practices, and ideals that extends into the present, as well as a cultural space from which to identify and critique the ways and workings of the nation (even as spiritual democracy is subject to its own self-critique). Spiritual democracy, then, is a particular national vision of the promise of democracy.


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My interest in Romanticism stems from the movement’s unprecedented integration of radical religious, democratic, and environmental traditions. While this three-way convergence appeared first in the work of Rousseau, it was developed more fully by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau. In these authors, and in the tradi-tions they have inspired, we discover such features of spiritual democracy as

• A commitment to the dignity of the individual, on the one hand, and to the ways and manners of the supportive community, on the other;

• A premium on both inward intuitions (“interiority”) and public tuitions (social cultivation and public institutions);

• An honoring of local practices, habits, and institutions—with the understanding that one needs to know and care about a place in order to reform it—as well as a commitment to more global notions such as individual rights and social justice;

• The promotion of social critique (including critique of religious institutions) and the protection of justified nonconformity;

• The forging of connections between political, economic, and environmental justice;

• The conceptualization of the everyday and the commonplace as a site for art, education, and reform.

Explorations of the legacy of radical Romanticism are served well by employing a triscopic approach, an investigation of the three-way intersection of religion, democracy and the environment. Today, there exists much fine scholarship on Romanticism and religion, Romanticism and democracy, and, more recently, Romanticism and ecology. These accounts, however, fail to examine the ways that religion, democracy, and the environment mutually inform each other. A triscopic approach yields fresh interpretations, reveal-ing sociopolitical environmental perspectives embedded within Romantic religious and poetic discourse.

In more conventional accounts, the religious aspects of Romanticism (Protestant and Catholic, orthodox and heterodox, deistic and panentheistic) are often neglected or, if included, are narrativized as precursors of contem-porary secularization. Romantic portrayals of religion are thereby belittled or privatized. Romantic poetry itself—the quintessential Romantic genre—has


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been similarly privatized. Moreover, Romanticism’s environmental perspectives are often reduced to nostalgic notions of the pastoral or as private gazes on the sublime. Without neglecting the Romantic valuation of “the individual,” a tri-scopic approach to Romanticism highlights its neglected social and political dimensions—its interest in community and tradition, in custom and practice, in social justice and environmental health. By employing a triscopic approach, we see more clearly radical Romantic efforts to establish a democratic and environ-mental culture—a spiritual democracy—replete with robust community, repub-lican traditions, and citizens who gracefully inhabit their second nature.

III. Romantic Contributions to Normative Inquiry

Romanticism, then, contributes normative features to spiritual democracy. It also contributes significantly to themes and issues that pervade a variety of schol-arly fields, most notably moral psychology and philosophical anthropology. In particular, Romantic traditions can inform a democratic and environmental moral psychology concerning (1) agency and social formation, (2) the language of inwardness and interiority, (3) the realism of everyday life and its relation to the imagination, and (4) the interrelation between the natural and social worlds and its impact on character development.

Agency and Social Formation

The Romantic concept of “second nature” refers to the cultivation of an identity through contact with cultural customs, habits, and traditions. Insofar as identity is informed by time and place, “the land” itself cultivates—even as it is culti-vated. Second nature acknowledges the roles of both social formation and moral autonomy, often depicting autonomy as the cultivated capacity to look critically on one’s culture and past. Human character and action, in this view, are under-stood to be as much a matter of social formation as of self-legislation.

The movements and ideals of the central characters in Wordsworth’s pastoral poem “Michael” are unmistakably shaped by the land and rural traditions of the Vale of Grasmere (2000a, 224–36). Michael and Isabel are frugal, hardworking, humble, and skillful. Their loves and habits emerge from family and vocation as well as from the fields, stones, and wind of “the Forest-side in Grasmere Vale.” Their actions and emotions, then, are largely


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predictable given what we know of their social and natural embeddedness. We are not surprised when we learn that Michael undertook to mentor his only child, Luke, in the ways of shepherding, presenting him with “a perfect Shepherd’s Staff” when the boy was only five years old. Nor are we surprised to learn that Isabel’s “heart was in her house,” where she spent her days spin-ning wool and flax. Yet a distinctive autonomy also marks their lives. And while much of these characters’ autonomy stems from social and natural envi-ronments that reward hard work and independence, their identities remain, to an extent, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. These individuals express their autonomy and human dignity in ways that cannot be entirely reduced to their social or natural environments. Michael, albeit stern like the other men in his environs, had often “done [the baby Luke] female service,” “with patient mind enforced / to acts of tenderness; and he had rocked / His cradle with a women’s gentle hand” (lines 164–68). This is hardly what we expect from the patriarchal caste of Grasmere. Similarly, his dutiful wife, Isabel, surprises us by attempting to countermine Michael, privately commanding Luke to reject his father’s plan for him to find a job in the city. She enjoins him, “Do not go away, / For if thou leave thy Father he will die” (lines 307–8).

It is perhaps not surprising that Wordsworth and other Romantic authors, given their intellectual environment, could offer complex, nonreductive accounts of embedded agency: depictions of human behavior that resist both social determinism and radical autonomy. They were, after all, living in the company of two great, opposing theorists of human behavior—Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Romantic authors found themselves often at the intersection of Burke’s organicism and Kant’s autonomy, where many of them developed nuanced depictions of human action as both free and wrought.

Burke had articulated and defended a robust view of human social for-mation, arguing that individuals are fashioned morally by their traditions and institutions. Individuals, in his view, could not simply choose the shape of their lives and institutions. These were givens. Thus, in his view, the pursuit of abstract theory was a willful attempt to escape concrete experience and history, to eschew the habits and manners of a people. This Burkean notion of organic embeddedness was a decisive feature of the intellectual atmosphere during Romanticism. It seemed fairly intuitive: humans are rooted in time and place, and human nature largely consists in collections of local habits and social


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practices. Although Burke tied his philosophical organicism to conservative political policy, it proved possible and appealing to the Romantics (most nota-bly, the young Wordsworth) to appropriate Burke’s concept of “second nature” while renouncing the conservative agenda.

Equally in the air, however, was the discourse of Rousseau and Kant, who championed radical autonomy as a central human trait. Rousseau’s “conscience as an inner voice” and Kant’s “inner moral law” supported the conviction that each individual has both access to moral truth and the capacity to pursue it autonomously. While Rousseau and even Kant acknowledged, to an extent, the probable role that moral and political environments play in individual develop-ment, democratic theorists became increasingly dismissive of and even hostile toward “second nature.” Soon, intellectual movements supporting autonomy would largely eclipse anything resembling the Burkean view. For many British Romantics, however, it seemed more natural to attempt to integrate these seem-ingly contradictory theories and traditions. One of these integrative strategies was to see autonomy itself as a feature of our second, socially formed nature.

Sometimes it seems as though we must choose between the way of tradi-tion, habits, and virtues and the way of the imagination, reformation, and autonomy. The Romantics help to show that this is a false dichotomy. During a time of tremendous upheaval and revolution, the Romantics frequently employed a Burkean language of traditions, habits, and virtues in service of a radical democratic vision. They self-consciously appropriated, for example, traditions of rebellion and liberation—including British, Italian, and Greek republican traditions.

The language of inwardness and interiority

From the Romantics, then, we can critically appropriate the languages of social formation and second nature, learning how to refer skillfully to a people’s virtues, practices, and traditions. Additionally, however, we can retrieve the Romantics’ notion of inwardness or interiority. And ultimately, we can forge a theoretical approach (a hybrid of philosophical anthropology and moral psy-chology) that interweaves three strands of identity formation and acquisition: (1) virtues, practices, and traditions; (2) interiority and autonomy; and (3) the claims and endowments of the natural world. Within this complex, integra-tive approach, we depict the self as fully embedded in the social and natural


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worlds but also as attentive to those worlds and capable of exploring them (as opposed being to subsumed or overwhelmed by them). Such attention and exploration suggests a practical distinction between self and world and the language of interiority captures that distinction. With sufficient practice, the self can listen to and critically engage with its natural and social environ-ments. The Romantics ascribe this process to the cultivation of an interiority that enables the self to encounter and reform itself and the world in which it is embedded.

The language of interiority offers ways to affirm an autonomous, if embedded, self. It is common for prisoners—who experience no privacy, for even the prison cell is vulnerable to public scrutiny and violence—to employ the language of interiority to preserve their humanity in an inhuman context. They experience some strength, comfort, and peace as they travel within a cultivated interior space. They understand that they are not reducible to their surroundings—not mere reflections of their grim environments. In a similar fashion, Romantic characters such as Wordsworth’s Michael are cushioned from some of life’s hardest blows by an interior strength that “twill make a thing endurable, which else / Would break the heart” (2000a, 236). Starting with Rousseau, Romantic authors furnished their characters with complex, detailed, inner subjectivities, ushering readers into these depths of strength and peace—though, as we will see, these interior spaces are never free of pain.

Interiority is itself a problematic concept. A critical retrieval of the language of interiority necessitates suspicion of such notions as: (1) an incorrigible private space, (2) a space radically sequestered from the social and natural worlds, and (3) an interior space as the home of the essential or authentic self. Given the troublesome connotations of interiority, why bother to reclaim it? As I have already suggested, the concept of interiority can enhance our account of the self’s irreducible agency and its dialogical relation to the world. Additionally, interiority captures

• A moral resistance to “outward” authorities and traditions (especially those impervious to critique or oppressive of the individual); or, stated positively, a moral confidence that follows Kant’s directive “Dare to know,” or Emerson’s “Trust thyself.”4

• A habitual interval for critical, moral reflection. Romantic authors frequently suggest that to enhance moral reflection, we should regularly


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remove ourselves from the crowd and “go into the closet and shut the door” (Emerson 1996, 399). An inward gaze is not the point, but rather periodic retreats from the public sphere for the sake of independent, critical reflection. The American social critic Thoreau exemplified this practice of private retreat for the benefit of public vision.

• A tutored or “heartfelt” engagement with life’s circumstances. When Word-sworth and Emerson wrote of the need for an inner/outer attunement, they were referring to the cultivated connection between the inner self and the situational environment. A tutored interiority is appropriately attentive and responsive to the situation at hand.

• An enduring self-possession or equanimity that persists in variable, even difficult circumstances. Interiority here suggests a form of abiding agency or character.

• An embodied, emotional intelligence and its ineluctable, dialectical relation to the social and natural worlds. Interiority, in this view, is not contained within the body, but is a part of it.

• A pragmatic notion of privacy: there are some things that we choose to hold or keep close to ourselves (though others may gain access to these, with or without our help).

• A legal and normative notion of intimacy: we are entitled to the legal right and normative privilege to choose with whom we share private matters.

My aim is not to isolate interiority as a sovereign character or disposition sui generis, but rather to articulate a nuanced, practical notion of interiority as inseparable from but not reducible to the social and natural environment.

This notion of embedded agency and engaged interiority challenges two prevalent, opposing contemporary positions: (1) that individuals are passive pawns or hostages in the hands of systems of power and (2) that individuals are radically autonomous beings capable of evading the reality of their environments. The Romantics’ challenge to these two positions sprang, in part, from their attempts to navigate the philosophical controversy of their own time, namely, that between the (roughly) Burkean position that individuals are determined by their traditions and the (roughly) French Rationalistic and Kantian position that individuals can essentially and rationally choose their destinies.

In reaction to these views, many Romantic thinkers offered complex interpretations of the human subject in relation to the world. Dorothy and,


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to a lesser extent, William Wordsworth dealt with the reality of bodies, both physical and social. The everyday presence of bodies, their vast strengths and vulnerabilities, and their intrinsic relation to broader natural and social bodies led to conceptions of agency and interiority, groundedness and enmeshment. In these portrayals, there is an acknowledged need for, and dependency on, those communities that nurture and protect, especially during times of great vulnerability.

British and American Romantic authors commonly made use of an aes-thetics that embraced ethical and political engagement. Encounters with beauty, ugliness, good, or evil are profoundly felt and, given my account of interiority, can be understood as interior experiences. These experiences can be precipitated by natural, moral, or political circumstances. Aesthetic, inward experiences can thereby provoke moral and political judgments. Beholding the beauty of the heron in flight over the pond can provoke love of, and inspire care for, wetlands. The sight of beggars in the cold street can provoke sympathy for, and inspire care for, the homeless and unemployed. In Romantic texts, aesthetic encounters often correlate with awareness of, and compassion for, the vulnerable and the oppressed. This broad Romantic notion of aesthetic “taste” and its attendant political and ethical perspectives relate to two central features of modernity: (1) the privileging of individual experience and interiority and (2) the belief that individuals in their private and public lives have the capacity and obligation to fashion their environments normatively, engaging in dynamic personal and political reform.

realism of the Everyday

This leads us to another of Romanticism’s contributions to moral psychology and philosophical anthropology: it can help us consider the normative implica-tions of a realism of the everyday. It is commonplace to juxtapose Romanticism with realism. After all, are not the Romantics interested more in imaginative than in realistic things? Is not Romanticism marked by the whimsical, the sub-jective, the abstract? What does Romanticism have to do with the practical, the objective, the concrete? Contrary to these conceptions, there exists a significant tradition of Romantic realism, or what I call a realism of the everyday.

Realism of the everyday becomes most apparent when we bring matters of religion, democracy, and the environment together to bear triscopically on our


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interpretations of Romanticism. We then stand to discover a less individualistic and sentimental Romanticism than we previously recognized; we stand to learn that Romantic authors wrestled with the practical, interwoven matters of reli-gion, politics, and the environment.

We can begin with that central Romantic concept, the imagination. In many accounts of Romanticism, the imagination is conceived as a form of sub-jective self-expression. In contrast, a triscopic interpretation of Romanticism brings attention to the connection between the imagination and everyday realities, including everyday sociopolitical conditions that stand in need of critique. The Romantic imagination sought to bring critical attention to the experiences of war, farming, displacement, urbanization, over- and under-employment, water and air pollution, and oppressive political and religious authorities and institutions. It manifested a realism of the everyday as it engaged in social criticism, bringing new sight to the social and natural worlds as well as the human approach to them.

The imagination can be thought of as a lens through which one might see the world more deeply, sharply, and richly. While reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth scrawled in the book’s margin, “The real excellence of Imagination consists in the capacity of exploring the world really existing” (Gill 2003, xiv; emphasis added). Whether we are attempting to solve a prob-lem in physics, farming, government, or private life, the imagination enables us to envision the world from various angles, including hypothetical ones, allowing us sight and insight into what is and what could be. In addition to contributing to propositional knowledge, the imagination can contribute to practical knowledge—knowledge about how and why we do the things we do. In either case, we can think of the imagination as involved in “the kind of dis-ciplined story-telling which illuminates reality and enables us in a novel way to come to terms with it.” The Romantic imagination, in this view, is hardly an “undisciplined flight from reality into worlds of sentimentality and make-believe” (Scruton 1999, 215).

The normative activity of the imagination calls our attention to the con-trast between the authentic and the inauthentic and between the honest and the dishonest without necessarily privileging the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Poetry, like all imaginative works, has the capacity to educate our hearts and minds, to tutor our emotions and generate new channels of


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knowledge of the world. An imaginative act can liberate us from the narrow world of subjective egoism, allowing us to empathically encounter the reality of others in time and space, near and far. We can return from this imaginative journey to our own lives and environments, endowed with a richer and more objective perspective. Understood in this way, the Romantic imagination is not opposed to the Enlightenment values of reason, logic, and objectivity. On the contrary, imagination is an ally and a complement to these concepts. And while imagination can manifest in extraordinary art as well as ordinary living, the normative act of bringing art to bear on the everyday is a mark of Romantic realism.

Romanticism relates to everyday life in still more ways. It is predicated on the belief that one of our jobs as humans is to name, feel, and explain the world around us to the best of our ability. Our knowledge of things social, natural, aesthetic, and moral is, of course, deeply flawed. But we know our knowledge is flawed, in part, because we also know the experience of correcting a belief or reforming a practice. Romantic realism, then, holds that our daily practices, including our discursive and artistic ones, are informed by our participation in and with the world. In this view, when we find ourselves doubting the truth of our beliefs, we are not distrusting our palpable, everyday connection to the world, but rather some aspect of our account of that connection, which, in many cases, we worry has been corrupted or distorted by our subjective fears and shortcomings.

This Romantic version of epistemological realism, as I am now describing it, is more concerned about egoism, pride, and obstinacy than about (supposed) chasms between “mind” and “nature.” Yet vivid, imaginative accounts of every-day suffering and oppression, as well as those of everyday beauty and dignity, may become sites of revelation and transformation.

Thus, a Romantic realism—with its revelatory and transformational aims—seeks to expose us to the reality of beauty and pain and to the pros-pects of change. What Auerbach said of Dante’s Inferno could be said of the Romantic oeuvre: “Never . . . has so much art and so much expressive power been employed to produce an almost painfully immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings” (1946, 199).

Storied landscapes of the Natural and Social World

Depictions of “the earthly reality of human beings” are hardly reliable if they consistently neglect our communal home, the natural world. What could be


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a more “earthly reality” than the ground below and around us, the air within and about us, the water in our veins, rivers, lakes, and seas? Yet attention to the natural world is frequently missing from our philosophical, theological, and moral investigations. The Romantics, in contrast, gave abundant thought to the natural world and its role in the development of human moral life. This attention and work mark still another distinctive contribution by radical Romantics to normative inquiry.

For radical Romantics, the natural world was understood as a basic source of life to which we must extend our gratitude and care. Insofar as it sustains our lives, materially and spiritually, it is an object of devotion that may even be deemed sacred. It nourishes our bodies, yes—but also our character. The natural world comprises rich and storied landscapes, and has been diversely por-trayed by various cultural imaginations. It is frequently understood as an agent in its own right. Whether we follow the works of Wordsworth (“While I was yet a Boy / Careless of books, yet having felt the power / Of Nature, by the gentle agency / Of natural objects, led me on to feel / For passions that were not my own, and think / . . . on man, the heart of man, and human life”), or of Bruno Latour (who employed hybrid, naturalistic language to communicate the intri-cate associations between the human and nonhuman), we can understand the natural world as having agency and the capacity to work on us—to educate us, fashion us, to speak back to us (Wordsworth 2000a, 225; Latour 2007, 63–86).

For such authors as William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Percy and Mary Shelley, the natural world is not a grandiloquent fiction created by poets, but an autonomous presence that defies our efforts to radically control it. Sensing our dependency on the natural world, we often respond with grati-tude and piety. Additionally, however, we may sense its otherness, its strange-ness, and even its transcendence. Barry Lopez, an American radical Romantic author, alludes to such transcendence in his book Arctic Dreams. After over two hundred pages of documenting in painstaking detail the varieties of Arctic light, soil, plants, animals, and human cultures, and after having reflected deeply on the complex relations between these, Lopez writes, “Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know” (2001, 228). These words may sound disheartening. Who wants to hear of our eternally inadequate vision and judgment? Yet here, Lopez names a transcendence and autonomy that


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can invoke our reverence. The land is transcendent, not necessarily because we find it mysteriously ineffable or ethereal, but because we can never entirely represent it in our latest vocabulary; it is autonomous, not because we cannot affect it, but because we cannot subject it to radical control. We stand—or in Lopez’s case, artlessly bow—in relation to the land, and in that relation the land maintains its identity and agency.

This identity is related to our own. The land shapes humans even as humans shape the land. Human ethical formation, in this view, is achieved not only by culture (including social practices) or by biology (including DNA and cognitive foundations) but by the land as well, or rather, by the land in relation to these other sources of human spiritual life. We are accustomed to the view that humans are shaped by culturally specific, sociolinguistic prac-tices. Who would doubt that? When we do debate this view, we speak in terms of nature-versus-nurture, asking, What is the greater influence on our lives, social environment or genetic constitution? But perhaps we can add a third influence, namely, the way external landscapes—be they rural or urban—shape character, interiority, and the emergent communities to which we belong. Are we not informed and reformed by the land that holds us?

When such Romantic authors as Dorothy and William Wordsworth ascribed agency or “autonomous presence” to the land—that is, to natural eco-systems variously delimited—they were not suggesting that the land possesses a Kantian, radically autonomous will. Rather, they were affirming a complex interconnection between human consciousness and the external world whose relative identity confronts and informs our own. By emphasizing this notion of the land as an influential agent, I am challenging the view that Romantic authors conceived of the natural world as a blank canvas on which to paint their own varied ideals and ideologies.5 This view is too dismissive of the care and effort that many Romantic authors brought to the task of producing detailed, accurate accounts of a natural world that is both familiar and unfa-miliar. Yet even in these accounts of the natural world, some authors—among them Wordsworth and Coleridge—perceived themselves as co-creators work-ing with and within the land’s agencies and identities. Ultimately, they present us a portrait of a dispersed or shared agency, as humans and the natural world transactionally engage and produce—or “co-create”—our lived experiences.

Storied landscapes exemplify this “co-creation.” By storied landscapes, I mean places that have been endowed transactionally by natural and cultural


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features.6 Wordsworth’s poems “Michael” and “The Cumberland Beggar” typify the process by which literature draws on and contributes to storied landscapes—landscapes whose appearance and character are infused with human history and culture. While some landscapes may be intrinsically exceptional (think of the Grand Canyon), others become significant by way of cultural stories and traditions. Once, I visited St. Catherine’s monastery on Jordan’s Sinai Peninsula. I knew that St. Catherine’s was built at the foot of Mount Sinai and I had expected to immediately recognize the mountain. Even if it were not shrouded mysteriously in clouds or illumined by numinous light, surely the height, breadth, or shape of Mount Sinai would distinguish it. Distinguished it wasn’t. I had to ask, “On which of these plain rocky crags did Moses meet God?” Tradition had anointed that indistinct mountaintop with infinite distinction.

Other landscapes, such as that of the Navajo Shiprock or the French Mont Saint-Michel, are intrinsically spectacular—by virtually any standard. To deny this would be to cling irrationally to the philosophical theory that all perception is nothing but subjective, cultural projection. These intrinsically impressive sites attract to them cultural production; they are magnets for the social filings of myths, songs, stories, and rituals. These cultural events infuse the physical features of the landscape with rich, interpretive traditions, mak-ing these places all the more significant. Storied landscapes, fashioned by some combination of geology and culture, inform their current inhabitants. These inhabitants, in turn, contribute to the landscape, adding their own stories, participating in the ancient echo between people and place.

While the Romantics paid attention to intrinsically impressive places (Mount Blanc, for example), they were especially attracted to humble, every-day sites that encompassed local communities—sites in which the Romantics found and placed extraordinary meaning. The Romantic traditions to which I am most committed honor the ordinary (mundane activity, characters, and language) by bringing to it thoughtful attention and creative imagination. Discovering and creating these storied, everyday landscapes was both an aes-thetic and a normative endeavor. In addition to providing pleasure, a storied place, it was held, could act as a powerful educator, contributing to our matu-ration as engaged and honorable humans. Given the proper attention, a place has the potential to tutor our emotions, develop our character, and expand our reasoning. It can furnish the path on which we would travel through life.


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Storied landscapes manifest a connection between realism, the imagination, and the land. In the production of storied landscapes, the imagination engages the land and creates something new—a new reality: a moral vision written into the land. This reality comprises embedded narratives of identity and character and, with these, a vivid sense of place, belonging, and meaning. In this encoun-ter, the physical and the normative are unified and transcendent of the indi-vidual, as cultural practice is manifested palpably by the landscape’s physical features. This realism, in turn, constitutes a moral authority that may serve as a powerful normative presence for individuals and their communities. This is not to say, however, that this moral authority exists as a hypostatized or reified reality outside culture and tradition. If the realism is to be felt, it must be known and interiorized by individuals. But once it is interiorized, the moral force of storied landscapes is not subject to facile control by individuals, even while individuals reform and participate in it. Moral realism, here, is rooted neither in universal intuitions (idealism) nor in the individual’s sense experience (empiricism), but is rather incarnate in the social and physical expressions of lived communities in time and place.

Such geographically embedded ways of life offered the Romantics an alternative perspective to the normative approaches of Godwinian abstract rationalism and to Benthamite leveling calculation. Although the early Wordsworth and Coleridge shared William Godwin’s commitment to social equality and radical political critique, they increasingly resisted his severe first-order impartiality: his view that individuals should not be motivated by local attachments or private considerations.7 Wordsworth’s storied landscapes, in contrast to Godwin’s “rational” philosophy, made an implicit argument for the moral importance of all those proper nouns that make claims on our lives—particular communities, people, places, and things.

In a similar fashion, many Romantic authors bristled at the coarse, level-ing effects that they associated with utilitarian moral calculation. Storied land-scapes revealed a rich diversity of human lifestyles, those homegrown customs rooted in local lands. Utilitarianism, in contrast, seemed to negate the rectitude of such diversity and local ways. Its generic assessments of pleasure and pain would pave the way, it was held, to a dehumanizing, fast-paced industrialism—a new way of life whose speed and efficiency seemed to relegate all proper nouns to the realm of common nouns, abstract and dispiritedly general. In Coleridge’s view, utilitarians were abstracting and severing humans from their


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life-giving environments—their natural, social milieus—with the dissecting blade of Understanding, an empirically useful but limited faculty.8

As I have mentioned, the expressions of Romanticism, past and present, are legion. Among these diverse expressions is Romantic nationalism, a subject central to any discussion of Romanticism’s conception of “the land.” Many campaigns for political independence from global, imperial powers appealed to notions of blood and soil—ancestry and geography. And many Romantics supported the concept that a people’s multigenerational relationship with a region entitled them to self-determined political control of it; Byron, for exam-ple, vocally supported the Greek War of Independence for this reason. Some forms of Romantic nationalism were benign and perhaps even laudable, while others were dangerously exclusionary; Nazi Germany, for example, can legiti-mately be viewed as a form of Romantic nationalism.

Nationalism, of course, need not be defined by regional exceptionalism, and inclusive, democratic national ideals can be associated with the land to good effect.9 In his social protest poem “Fears in Solitude,” Coleridge sternly censures his nation for its support of war, slavery, and religious intolerance. His critiques are especially remarkable given the fierce patriotism gripping his native Britain in anticipation of a bloody French invasion. After crying out, “Oh! My countrymen! We have offended grievously, and been most tyran-nous,” Coleridge declares that it is the warmongers, the supporters of slavery, and the religiously intolerant that are in fact the unpatriotic—the “enemies even of their country.” In contrast with his unpatriotic countrymen, Coleridge invokes “O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle!” whose “lakes and mountain-hills,” “clouds and dales,” “rocks and seas,” inspire “ennobling thoughts” and ado-ration of “all lovely and honourable things” (2000a, 93, 97). The land, then, becomes the moral compass that points to inclusion, peace, and justice.

IV. Socio-religious Environmental Imagination and Its Transatlantic Passage

The notion of an embodied and embedded moral life, especially one that com-bines democratic and ecological values and is richly informed by religious tra-ditions, is a salient feature of what I am calling our radical Romantic heritage. Works such as those of the early Wordsworth articulate the tenets of spiritual democracy, with a Burkean emphasis on social practice, a Rousseauean vision of democracy, and a distinctly Romantic esteem and respect for the natural world.


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Wordsworth was not alone in his work as a political and environmental poet. For the most part, Romantic authors were not the individualistic senti-mentalists that they are frequently assumed to have been. Rather, they engaged extensively with social, political, and environmental criticism. This engagement was often expressed in the language of practice, habit, and taste—and the juxta-position of one set of practices, habits, and tastes with another (one that required support and cultivation versus one that called for reformation or eradication). In any case, the Romantics did not generally conjure fanciful, subjective, or private visions. Rather, they crafted encompassing and authoritative social and norma-tive perspectives.

Religion contributed importantly to both the content and the expres-sion of their public visions. Most radical Romantic authors identified with dissenting, Christian traditions that put them at odds with the religious and political establishment of the day. Their radical religious views were understood as political stances, and hence they were frequently deemed enemies of the state and suffered accordingly. Theologically, they tended to advance a theology that was part panentheistic, part Christian ortho-doxy. Spirit, it was commonly held, is infused throughout nature to such an extent that it becomes practically impossible to know where Spirit ends and nature begins. Yet God and Christ also appear, judging the world but also breathing into it “the empyreal air of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love” (Coleridge 2000a, 23); social protest was understood as a religious activity.

Engaging in immanent criticism, radical Romantics routinely drew on Christian theology to claim that the churches and clergy were practic-ing “superstition” insofar as they supported slavery and unjust war efforts and neglected to pursue social and economic justice, especially for the most vulnerable populations—the poor and elderly, the sick and disabled, and children and widows. Their poetic, religious task was to offer vivid, detailed descriptions of the horrors of war, poverty, and various unjust social policies, thereby inspiring the appropriate human emotions and sympathy in otherwise prejudicial hearts. Coleridge, for example, in the face of fellow citizens who “have been clamorous / For war and bloodshed,” proclaimed that

all our dainty terms of fratricide,Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tonguesLike mere abstractions, empty sounds to which


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We join no feeling and attach no form!As if the solider died without a wound;As if the fibers of this godlike frameWere gored without a pang(2000a, 95, lines 113–18)

Prophetic censure, then, marked Romantic, religious social criticism, but so did love. According to Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others, as we fall in love with Spirit—which is embodied in human and natural communities, in the beauty and dignity of the incarnate “One Life”—we are prone to move from social apathy and excessive self-regard to a more sympathetic, expansive self who seeks fellowship with, and justice in, the social and natural worlds.

The socio-religious environmental imagination of authors such as Wordsworth and Coleridge traveled across the Atlantic and took root in an American culture rich with Puritanism, democratic notions of freedom and equality, and a vivid sense of expansive wilderness. This imagination was reshaped in distinctive ways by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, and Susan Fenimore Cooper, among others. If we keep in view the Romantic socio-religious environmental imagination, we see as more cohe-sive those works of American thought and literature, especially from 1830 to 1860, that often appear disparate and disconnected. In light of this Romantic legacy, for example, we might grasp the depth of Emerson’s commitments to Romantic religious sensibilities (in this case, panentheistic immanence), Romantic democratic sensibilities (the freedom and dignity of the self-reliant individual), and Romantic environmental sensibilities (the interdependence and “relatedness” that pervade nature, including human nature). Emerson’s “Nature,” Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, Thoreau’s Walden, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass all reflected and profoundly revised the Romantic socio-religious environmental inheritance.

A feature of this revision was a pervasive distrust of eastern influence. Thoreau wrote, “Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free . . . mankind progresses from east to west” (Thoreau 2007, 760). He was weary of Americans’ turning eastward toward Europe for hope and light. If the American task is to imitate the past, then we turn east. But if we seek “Wildness” and “Freedom,” Thoreau urges us to face Oregon, not Europe. Thoreau worried that the New World might be deemed immature because it lacked history—or worse, that


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it would, for the sake of legitimacy, import Old World opinion, custom, and tradition. As for the culture and history that preexisted European settlement in America, Thoreau usually romanticized all things Native American as wild and free.

My view—which is greatly informed by British Romantic thought—is that freedom and wildness are as likely to issue from the past as from the present, from the east as from the west. Heritage need not be a yoke of oppression, but an accustomed, serviceable plow for uplifting new soil. While I may live in a different America from that of Thoreau—my nation is now sufficiently old and powerful that it no longer looks over its shoulder to gauge its political progress (though I often wish it would)—I nevertheless have my own anxieties regarding history and tradition. Whereas Thoreau was fearful of America’s submission to European tradition and history, I worry about America’s historical absentmind-edness and denial of operative traditions. My worry is in fact related, causally, to Thoreau’s; he and his generation contributed to a form of American individual-ism that slights influence of all kinds, including the influence of history.10 The past, however, as Faulkner’s character Stevens says, “is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner 2011, 73). I worry, then, that we are not mindful of the past that follows us into the future, the past from which our choices and lives derive. I worry that we do not know who we are because we do not know from where we have traveled and with whom. Both the uncritical appropriation of tradition and the failure to acknowledge tradition can have the same alienating effects. Appropriating traditions without the courage to critique them is as hazardous as the refusal to acknowledge their presence and power.

And there is more. Again in the words of Faulkner’s Stevens, “You— everyone—must, or anyway may have to, pay for your past; that past is some-thing like a promissory note with a trick clause in it which, as long as nothing goes wrong, can be manumitted in an orderly manner, but which fate or luck or chance, can foreclose on you without warning” (128). This caution is as true of pri-vate lives as of public ones. The past is not past and its presence can exact a steep and even fatal quittance. While such American Romantic thinkers as Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau were clearly uncomfortable with the Burkean language of customs, traditions, and “second nature,” they nevertheless maintained that new democratic practices and institutions must arise from, and remain embed-ded in, citizens’ lives and even the land that holds them. They understood that the institution of slavery and the incarceration and murder of Native Americans


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would haunt and perhaps “foreclose without warning” America’s bid to achieve a democracy.

These thinkers’ suspicion of tradition and authority encouraged them to champion critique and individuality, but also to neglect the potentially benefi-cial role of traditions and social practice. Yet it was precisely their courage to break free from the bondage of the past that, in part, fostered their campaigns against slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the alienation of new market economies, as well as their campaigns for women’s rights and reforms of prison and education. When they asked themselves, “How are we to honor the lessons and wisdom of history while trusting our own judg-ments and virtues?” they (especially Emerson) usually placed greater weight on the self-reliant side of the scale. Nonetheless, they (especially Whitman) recognized the importance of establishing democratic traditions and customs for future generations. Ironically, self-reliance—the culture of self—would turn out to be their greatest contribution to America’s distinctive culture and democracy. In any case, Wordsworth and Coleridge can stand as a corrective to injurious distrust of tradition and authority, even as Emerson and Thoreau can stand as a corrective to blind faith in tradition and authority.

It would be a mistake, however, merely to juxtapose British and American Romanticism as mutual correctives. The Americans often intensified and radi-calized their British Romantic inheritance (thus eliciting further emendations from across the Atlantic). For example, when Emerson was a student a Harvard, Wordsworth was widely assigned and extolled. Professors such as Andrew Norton saw in Wordsworth’s writings some support for Harvard’s Unitarian vision of liberal Christianity. But this vision was not progressive enough for the young Emerson, who would then offer a more radical interpretation that would put him in direct conflict with Norton, the “Unitarian Pope.”11

Wordsworth’s influence on Emerson can be seen throughout his career, starting with such early works as “The Divinity School Address” and “Nature.”12 In the “Address,” for instance—which was greatly influenced by “Tintern Abbey” and quotes a line from “The world is too much with us”—Emerson announced to the Harvard graduates, “In one soul, in your soul, there are resources for the world. . . . Man is the wonderworker” (1971, 89). Influenced by Wordsworth’s early verse and voice, Emerson declared, Trust, cultivate, and offer yourself, for you are part of the One Life that rolls through all things. The good news that Emerson preached to the graduates rang with inspiration


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from the Wordsworthian Gospel: (1) you are a spiritual creature; (2) divine inspiration is dynamic and available; your present, intimate contact with the social and natural world can provide a source of revelation; and (3) miracles abound in the grace and splendor of the everyday and in the character of ordi-nary people—not in implausible, erstwhile biblical events and figures.

Early on, Wordsworth had connected his theological, panentheistic vision of “the One Life”—the divinity that permeates and potentially unites all humans and the natural world—with a radical democratic politics that opposed slavery and unjust war and advocated for the rights of the disen-franchised. As his political climate changed, Emerson increasingly made a similar connection. While the United States experienced rapid urbanization and industrialization, sought to expand its borders by way of invasion in the Mexican-American War, and prepared to enter a bloody civil war over the rights of slaves, Emerson’s theological and socio-critical views coalesced in the form of “lay sermons,” making use of a hybrid, religious-secular vocabu-lary. The aforementioned three principles continued to permeate his writ-ings, but now these principles were more developed, more deeply connected to the struggle against slavery and the extermination of Native Americans. Around this time, Emerson and other Americans visited the now more con-servative, elder Wordsworth. Their discussions with him about abolition in America reawakened in Wordsworth some of his earlier progressivism, and he lent his support to the American abolitionists.13 With the help of Emerson, Wordsworth recovered some of his earlier hope for a spiritual, progressive democracy sustained and nurtured by the One Life.

While it is beyond the scope of this article, it could be argued that nineteenth-century American Romanticism has been inherited and trans-formed still further by contemporary radical Romantics such as Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Berry Lopez, and Wendell Berry. Yet to this day, privatized, conventional accounts of Romanticism distort our inter-pretations of these American “nature writers.” With important exceptions such as Wendell Berry, these writers’ work is often considered sentimen-tal or spiritualized—that is, pertaining to an individual’s private, sublime encounter with the natural world. By placing American nature writers within a richer interpretive narrative of Romanticism, we make available the profound sociopolitical and religious dimensions of their work. And


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as our own cultural and scholarly understanding of the radical Romantic legacy is enriched, we better realize its dynamic and enduring promise. We stand to see how the palpable, sensuous literature of American nature writ-ers (which is richly informed by Romantic religious traditions) can foster a democratic and environmental imagination and practice, enhancing our vocation as citizens working for the common good of diverse, overlapping communities—big and small, local and international.

V. The Heavy and Diverse Baggage of Romanticism: What to Keep, What to

Leave Behind

To cross to safety—to cultivate and move toward a more hopeful future—we sometimes need to hazard risks and give up what is safest and dearest: the bag-gage of personal and communal history, in which we find sources of comfort, security, and identity. We receive from the past our dearest resources and our greatest burdens. So I ask, What to keep? What to leave behind?

Most of my readers, I suspect, carry the heavy and diverse baggage of Romanticism. For better or worse, it is one of our culture’s central plural encumbrances. It gives rise to many of our most important and pervasive stories—stories intimately tied to our identities, institutions, and practices. Yet our profound and complex involvement with Romantic traditions is often not well understood. This article, I hope, may offer an occasion for greater recogni-tion of the presence and influence of Romanticism in our lives. We must start from where we are. We may be members of a lost and motley tribe, but we belong to a tribe nonetheless.

In many ways, we are chosen by traditions. Yet if we become self- consciously chosen, we can in turn become critical choosers. We can learn to celebrate and be grateful for our inheritance; we can to attempt to travel its breadth and depth and thus tutor our hearts and minds; and we can critically appropriate, discerning what to keep and what to leave behind. The Romantic tradition, I have argued, has contributed to our aesthetic, environmental, and political sensibilities. Yet although we may belong to the Romantic tradition and count ourselves among its offspring, we don’t need to commemorate all our ancestors or attend all the reunions. We must insist on additions and sub-tractions to the family tree.


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Some additions and subtractions are really only reinterpretations of the family history. I can now see aspects of Romanticism that I was previously blind to, and my new sight derives largely from the Navajo instruction I have received in recent years. I have glimpsed many Navajos’ intimate, practical relations to the land on which they work and live. I have learned that, from their perspective, to be severed from intimate, practical contact with the land is to be alienated. This very type of alienation is commonly associated with Romanticism and its removed, hubristic, or “transcendent” gaze on the land-scape. Yet the Romanticism that I have viewed through a Navajo lens—and which I have presented in these pages—is a less “romantic” Romanticism. It does celebrate such modern European notions as individuality, interiority, and authenticity, but these are bound inextricably to practical action within the natural and social worlds. The Navajo have given me sight into practical environmental and political perspectives embedded in Romantic religious and poetic sensibilities.

Still, I understand that there is much work to be done—that my traditions need to be improved upon. The Navajo would say the same of their traditions. Their family tree is neither stagnant nor unproblematic. To fail to recognize this is to indulge in a different kind of romanticism. Everyone everywhere has much work to do, including looking to the past for the sake of the future. As Wordsworth said, “Life is divided into three terms—that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.”

Notes

Maggie Millner edited this article, and I am grateful for her expert help—for her keen heart and mind, her trained ear and eye.

1. By referring to “the immigrant challenge,” I do not mean to belittle the socio-economic challenges that often confront immigrants. Also, a fuller definition of modernity would include the rise of the nation-state; notions of individualism, liberty, and equality; the distinction between public and private; the invention of the social contract; and urbanization, industrialization, and public education; among other intellectual, cultural, and political developments that began roughly in the seventeenth century and that are still very much with us today.

2. This language of “we” carries promise but also problems. Do we all share the same history or work toward the same future? Which version of it? Who gets to tell it?


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Which victories, which losses, are recounted? These questions, to my mind, are not to be asked and answered once, but are part of an ongoing struggle and commit-ment to narrate a complex past and to work toward a more humane future. None of this is to suggest that a person’s or the nation’s identity is simple, homogeneous, or fixed. It is to suggest that our rich identities, fed by diverse streams, can also be fed by shared visions of who we can become as a people, a people capable of bringing diverse backgrounds and perspectives to enrich the most admirable democratic and environmental stories that we know and tell.

3. See Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” and his claim that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (1987, 224–25).

4. “Outward” here is meant to suggest potentially oppressive authorities and traditions, doctrines and opinions that resist critical appropriation and critique.

5. For an excellent account of the role of the nonhuman physical world in the work of the Romantics (especially Wordsworth, Shelley, and Claire), see Oerlemans 2002.

6. When I write of human culture, I assume it is informed in no small measure by human biology, including DNA and innate, cognitive structures. My notion of storied landscapes is informed by Silko 1999 and also by Basso 1996.

7. I am employing Brian Barry’s account of first-order impartiality (1995, 11).8. See, for example, Coleridge 1972, vol. 6, 28. It could be argued that John Stuart Mill

himself agreed with Coleridge on the limitations of the faculty of “understanding” (see Macleod 2011).

9. See Tamir 1993, especially 7–12, 140–67.10. This claim, while true enough, can be exaggerated. For example, in the chapter

from Walden “Reading,” Thoreau put forward a powerful argument that there are in fact traditions—at least literary traditions—that can be critically appropriated and that deeply nourish one’s character, that is, that contribute to a second nature. The kind of critical reading that Thoreau has in mind is not easy: “books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (2004, 99). But if one can cultivate the habit of judicious “morning” reading, one will discover that “books are the trea-sured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations” (100).

11. See Pace 2003, 236–37.12. See Packer 2012, 84–101.13. See Pace 2003, 238–39 and 242–43.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich. 1946. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Barry, Brian. 1995. Justice as Impartiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western

Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1972. “Lay Sermons.” In Collected Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, vol. 6, edited by R. J. White. Princeton: Princeton University Press.


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———. 2000a. “Fears in Solitude.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. Edited by H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2000b. “Religious Musings,” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. Edited by H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2000c. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. Edited by H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1971. “The Divinity School Address.” In The Collected Words of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Alfred R. Ferguson and Robert E. Spiller. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

———. 1996. “The Over-Soul.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Poems. Edited by Harold Bloom, Paul Kane, and Joel Porte. New York: Library of America.

Faulkner, William. 2011. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage.Gill, Stephen, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth. Cambridge,

U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Leopold, Aldo. 1987. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Lopez, Barry. 2001. Arctic Dreams. New York: Vintage.Macleod Christopher. 2011. “John Stuart Mill and Romanticism.” Ph.D. diss.,

University of St. Andrews.Oerlemans, Onno. 2002. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.Packer, Barbara L. 2012. “Romanticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism,

edited by Joel Myerson et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Pace, Joel. “Wordsworth and America.” 2003. In The Cambridge Companion to

Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Scruton, Roger. 1999. “Imagination.” In A Companion to Aesthetics, edited by David Cooper. Oxford: Blackwell.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1999. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” In At Home on the Earth, edited by David Landis Barnhill, 30–42. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. Walden. Edited by Jeffrey Cramer. New Haven: Yale

University Press.———. 2007. “Walking.” In Thoreau: Walden, The Maine Woods, and Collected Essays

and Poems. Edited by Robert Sayre and Elizabeth Witherell. New York: Library of America.

Wordsworth, William. 1979. The Prelude (1805). Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton.


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———. 2000a. “Michael.” In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 2000.

———. 2000b. “My Heart Leaps When I Behold.” In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 2000.

———. 2000c. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill.Oxford: Oxford University Press.


radical romanticism: democracy, religion, and the environmental imagination

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