A Dialectical Love between Nature and Mind:
An Ecofeminist Reading of Wordsworth’s Poetry
Gwendolin Huey-jen Kuo*
Abstract
As one of the major poets in British Romantic period, Wordsworth is an important figure in nature writing.  Yet, early in the 1960s, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and Paul de Man have mentioned that imagination in Wordsworth’s poetry is of the same or more significance as nature .  Wordsworth’s dialectical love between nature and mind results in different interpretations among critics: some put emphasis on his love toward nature and some on the rivalry between nature and his imagination.  Jonathan Bate believes that Wordsworth’s poetry is an exemplar of nature writing from the perspective of the ecocriticism since his poetry teaches readers how to walk with nature through the depiction of the pleasure derived from natural scenes.  This paper, however, through the exploration of the nature represented in Wordsworth’s poetry and the relation between nature and his imagination, tries to demonstrate that Wordsworth’s nature is the result of anthropocentric appropriation of nature and this human-centered attitude is what ecofeminism argues against.
Keywords: Nature, mind, imagination, Wordsworth, ecofeminism