SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “A Language That Is Ever Green.” In Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, pp. 12‐35. New York: Routledge, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Bate examines William Wordsworth's use of the pastoral, arguing that there is a continuity between the poet's love of nature and his revolutionary politics. Bate also discusses the critical response to Wordsworth's ecological writing.

During his highly productive residence at Racedown in Dorset and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, Wordsworth worked on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, a poem which Coleridge took to be one of the most beautiful in the language. Over the last twenty years this poem has come to look absolutely central to Wordsworth's achievement and its narrative is now highly familiar to students: owing to failed harvests and high prices, Margaret's husband enlists as a paid recruit; he does not return, Margaret and her family decline and die, nature re‐encroaches...