Ecocriticism:Relevance of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “The World is Too Much With Us.”

Ecocriticism addresses how humans relate to non-human nature or the environment in literature. It has grown out of the traditional approach to literature in which the critic explores the local or global, the material or physical, or the historical or natural history in the context of a work of art. This paper is a modest attempt to unearth the concerns of ecocriticism as well as to explore William Wordsworth's contribution to the awakening of modern man towards conservation and preservation of the ecosystem. All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation in one way or the other. As a result of want of systematic or organized movement in the study of ecological or environmental side of literature, the ecocritical works came to be nomenclatured variously such as pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. Raymond Williams, the British Marxist critic wrote The Country and the City (1973), where he professed a decidedly green socialism. Ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific historical moment, examining how the concept of "nature" is defined, what values are assigned to it or denied it and why, and the way in which the relationship between humans and nature is envisioned. Wordsworth advocated for the preservation of Nature way back in the 18th century. Besides divinizing Nature, Wordsworth pleaded that it is a panacea for all with the capacity to elevate human mind to a higher level of feeling for everything in Nature. Tintern Abbey exposes Wordsworth's development of love for Nature through various stages and in every stage there was a need to preserve it because it helps in developing the mind, attitude and feeling. The World is Too Much with Us is an exploration of the poet's dissatisfaction of the modern men over their indifference to and indiscriminate destruction of Nature.