ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Romantic Ecocriticism and Birds The purpose of this paper is to examine the ecological criticism on romantic poetry. One of the major and influential ecocritical impulses on romantic poetry pays emphasis on the deep ecological aspects which explore more or less aesthetical and emotional responses towards between nature and the humans. However, this critical impulse seems to undermine what romantic poets dialogically exchange their views on how to understand natural objects without colonizing them cognitively. In particular, the poems on a nightingale which Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and John Clare compose respectively interestingly deal with the tension between the ecological fact and the poetic license which allows the manipulation of the fact to achieve the poetic effects. In “To the Nightingale" and "Nightingale", Coleridge attempts to rectify the cultural manipulation of a nightingale as a response to John Milton's nightingale poems. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", which is traditionally understood as a poem of tension between the mortality and immortality. Compared with Coleridge's attitude to the natural objects, Keats shows the limits which Coleridge fails to overcome. Distinguishably, John Clare in “Nightingale's Nest” tries to approach the natural objects, in an ecologically correct way, which is subtly balanced with poeticization of the natural objects. It must be noted that the errors Coleridge and Keats make are not the poetic error but the ecological error and it is possible to argue that a poet is not a scientist and the poem does not have to be ecologically correct. However if attempts is made to examine ecological aspects of the poems, the distinction between poetic license and ecological errors must be made.

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