Sample 6, Nature vs. Technology in British Lit

Nature versus Technology in British Literature

In every time period, from the Romantic age to the present day, writers used nature scenes, natural objects, or creatures of nature to convey meaning. In the Romantic age, nature was used to describe a relationship between man and nature, and to show appreciation for God-given scenery. In the Victorian age, the Industrial Revolution caused an ever-increasing middle class, political reform, trade, print, and economic stability. Because of these changes writers began to write for the readers, who were the increasing middle class; and what the middle class was concerned with was the changes that were brought on by the Industrial Revolution and the economic growth. Victorian authors were not concerned with changing the themes of the Romantics, just expounding on it. While poets in the Romantic period wrote passionately about nature, and subtly about change; Victorian poets wrote more passionately about change, and more subtly used nature. In the Romantic period, the images of nature seemed to have been used to help the readers forget about the ever changing times and the overcrowding of an industrial England. By contrast, the Victorian authors used their writing to bring awareness to the changes, especially the negative aspect of change. The twentieth century brought another war, War World I, and an array of opinionated poetry and prose writers. Their passion was about the war, life in its aftermath, and a change towards poetry, once again. With the modern poetry came a combination of technology and nature, especially as the sciences saw an explosion in the twentieth century. No one epitomized the change from Romantic to modern, or shunned the Victorian more than Yeats. Yeats believed the Victorian poetry “corrupted” its audience, while he embraced the poetry of the Romantic, and later the poetry of modernism. (Fallis, 1976). On the other hand, Wordsworth and Blake used nature in their poetry during the Romantic time ‘in hopes of helping the readers escape the atrocities of an industrial age, to show the changes of landscape due to the industrial age, and to imply or allude to a human’s desire to enjoy and feel a oneness with the nature around them. In so doing, they were an example to the next generations, Victorian and into the modernism phase of poetry where Yeats duplicated many of the nature scenes with increased awareness to informalities and accuracy.

In the Romantic age, poets embraced imagination, nature, and the ordinary life. Within their normal lives, there was an ever present awareness of nature and nature scenes. Industry was just beginning to find a foot-hold in society, therefore people still live in rural areas where nature could be observed and enjoyed. Life was about leisure, love, and fulfillment. Poets wrote about this leisure and beauty. They incorporated imagination within their portrayals of nature, and as Wordsworth was noted to state, “feelings” (p. 11). He thought that this – feelings – was missing from the eighteenth century predecessors of his occupation. He, as well as other poets after his influence took it upon himself to correct this perceived error of former writers.

Therefore, Wordsworth used nature and very subtle comments on the industrial changes of the day. Wordsworth says this about nature:

From Nature doth emotion come, and moods

Of calmness equally are Nature’s gifts:

This is her glory; these two attributes

Are sister horns that constitute her strength.

Hence Genius, born to thrive by interchange

Of peace and excitation, finds in her

His best and purest friend, from her receives

That energy by which he seeks the truth,

From her that happy stillness of the mind.

 (Greenblatt, et al, 2006, p. 381)

 Wordsworth believed in nature bringing about a reason to write, and thought he was fixing the problems that other poets had of portraying nature in their poems (p. 11). Wordsworth was one of many poets who used “the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness” (p. 11) within his poetry. One poem which was used as an example of how the Romantic Wordsworth expressed the beauty of nature and how it affected the human psyche was “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (pp. 305-306), in which the narrator wanders about outside, observing nature and feeling lonely. Similes and personification help compare daffodils to a “crowd”. The daffodils twinkle and dance and have more glee than the waves. Perkins (1995) writes of Wordsworth’s use of nature versus industry:

I think of Wordsworth standing, in his famous poem, on a ridge above Tintern Abbey, looking over the valley of the Wye River. Wordsworth sees green fields and groves, mountains and sky... human beings are present in the landscape…seem part of nature or accord with it. This is Wordsworth's ideal. He describes a scene of peace and harmony…wisps of smoke curling above the trees. They also suggest the presence of human beings, and the poet guesses that the smoke comes from the fires of vagrants, or maybe of a hermit… a vagrant is only transient in nature. A hermit has fled from mankind to nature. In the vagrant and the hermit, human beings don't disturb nature's order. This relieves a fear that the green world of nature, the only paradise we can know, ceases to be a paradise as soon as there are human beings in it… the smoke Wordsworth saw came, as of course he knew, from charcoal burners in the woods? From workers who felled the trees and converted the wood into charcoal. And the wisps of smoke also came from steel mills along the Wye River, burning the charcoal to melt the ore. Industry polluted the landscape Wordsworth saw, though not the one his poem describes. He elided the charcoal burners and steel mills. (p. 71)

This relation to industrialism is not usually seen by many readers in the smoke billowing up from a fireplace or fire, but Perkins did, and it is a great reference to the nature versus industrialism argument. Some poets, such as William Blake, found Wordsworth’s poetry to be “committed to un-spiritualized observation: “Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in men” (p. 12).Yeats edited some of Blake’s work and used his poetry to influence his own “quietly precise nature imagery” (p. 2020).  

            While Blake may have criticized Wordsworth’s use of nature, he also used nature to describe love and life, and contrasts his poem of nature with images of a changing Industrial England. Although he mentions industrial and man-made objects within his poems, the theme of Industrialism would be a subtle one and would lead the Victorian poets to continue the poetics of Industrialism. Blake personifies nature in “Earth’s Answer” (p.88) and “The Ecchoing Green” (p. 82). From “Earth’s Answer”, “Earth rais’d up her head…Her light fled…her locks cover’d with grey despair.” He implies in this passage that Earth is a live, her light runs away, and she grays like a human woman. From The Ecchoing Green, “The sun does arise, / And make happy the skies…The sky-lark and thrush, / The birds of the bush sing louder around” (pp. 82-83). In these lines, Blake alludes to a happy sky which makes the birds sing much as a human would who basks in the sun’s glory. Blake also mentions Industrial objects in “The Tyger” (p. 92) and “A Divine Image” (p. 97):  from “The Tyger”, “What the hammer? What the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil” (p. 93), and from “A Divine Image”, “The Human Dress is forged Iron, / The Human Form, a fiery Forge, / The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d, / The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge” (p. 97). In these lines, the hammer, chain, furnace, anvil, and forging are all images of an Industrial England; one which Blake must have seen first-hand to have knowledge of such things.  While Blake comments briefly on man-made objects in a few poems, his poetry encompassed scenes of nature and love in hopes of drawing the readers attentions from the oppression of the time, if only for the moment.

One writer, Mr Bruns (1975), of the modern language Association, sought to discuss the difference between the thinking differences between the Romantic writers from the Victorian writers. Of the Romantic authors he states they were more inclined, like their predecessors to use metaphors to describe “growth and decay”, and to theorize about “recovering from a poet’s own history those strategic events” which knowledge, or experience seemed to draw from them. On the other hand, Bruns states that the Victorian writers thought they owned their history which “neither nature nor consciousness” stayed in one place, but dominated many aspects of history, such as politics and religion (p. 905).  One can only guess that he means that there was a lot of science and changes of scenery due to war depicted in the Victorian poetry and prose, but that the Romantic writers seemed to grasp a clearer picture of history, as it was depicted through their poetry. This depiction of history, through the changing profiles of the landscape, gave the modern poet and prose writers something to grab hold of, and to influence them towards a better understanding of their world.

 In the modern world of the twentieth century according to Greenblatt (2006), there was a change in the “traditional stabilities of society, religion, and culture” (p. 1828). Authors expanded on the evolving “vocabularies” of the new sciences, and technologies such as television, electricity, radio, and medicines. Greenblatt wrote, “…literature could not stand still, and modern writers sought to create new forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience” (p. 1829). This means that things were occurring so fast in England and throughout the world in the twentieth century that the writers were struggling to keep up. This is, also, much like the Romantic and Victorian ages of literature. While the Romantic authors wrote about life and experience, and Victorians wrote about change and war, so the modern authors continued to write about life, experiences, change, and war. Poetry began to change as T. E. Hulme’s “insistence on hard, clear, precise images, arose in reaction to what it saw as Romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry” (p. 1834) began to influence the other poets of the modern age. Yeats, for example, began as a Romantic poet where he displayed “the romantic evocation of escape into dream, art, and the imagination” (p. 2020), but eventually his style evolved from purely romantic to one of a combination of “colloquial with the formal” (p. 2021). While Yeats embraced Romantic and modern styles of writing, he found Victorian poetry to be “rhetorical and argumentative, directed always away from the poet’s consciousness towards a world he imagined to be outside himself” (Fallis, 1976).

If one were to read Yeats’ poetry they would discover many of the Romantic displays of nature, and very little of the Victorian industrialism. In “The Wild Swans at Coole”, Yeats portrays scenes of nature, “The trees are in their autumn beauty, / The woodland paths are dry, / Under the October twilight the water / Mirrors a still sky; / Upon the brimming water among the stones / Are nine-and-fifty swans” (p. 2033). Like Wordsworth and Blake, Yeats personified nature to show humans connection to the natural world. On the other hand, Perkins (1995) wrote, “Yet British poetry, since the death of Yeats, inhabits another scene entirely, almost a mirror image of the now-familiar landscape of ruins. “Even in our so-called postmodern poetry, which is continually self-undermining, love of nature remains an emotion poets can still sometimes voice without irony” (p. 70).

 One can also tell the changes he made from the Romantic language to the modern language when he changed his poem “The Sorrow of Love” from 1891 in the romantic style to 1925 in the modern style. He revised the poem in an attempt to make it more accurate and informal. For instance, he changed from the “quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves / the full round moon and the star-laden sky” (p. A19), to “The brawling of the sparrows in the eaves, / The brilliant moon and all the milky sky” (p. A20). Reading carefully, one can see the more personal term of “brawling” of sparrows and the sky lit up at night. The scenery of nature becomes more personal and accurate for the reader with his change from Romantic to Modern.  

The poetry of Blake and Wordsworth epitomized Romantic poetry of their day with their portrayal of nature, and man-made objects. Victorian authors tried to imitate this infusion of nature, but centralized on the social, economic, and industrial changes of their time as the population grew. The romantic age was all about feelings and nature; and reading was a means of escape from the everyday hum-drum of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.  By the time the Victorian literary period came into full swing, all that was on the minds of the literary giants was change, and it held a prominent place within their works, and nature became a dim light. As the twentieth century got into a full swing, so did the first World War, and with it came more destruction of nature, and more growth of industry and technology. Everyone from readers to authors was concerned with the war and survival. The sciences saw a major boom, and authors incorporated this it to their work. With modernistic poetry came a revolution of the romantic ideals, except with an increase in what Yeats referred to as “colloquial and preciseness”. Poetry had not changed overly much, matter of fact it had come full circle. Nature never really disappeared from poetry as it moved into the twentieth century.  Yeats enjoyed the poetry of the Romantics, seemed to despise the Victorian period works, but evolved into a more modern form of the Romantics.

References

Greenblatt, S., et al. (Eds.) (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th ed., Vol.2).

New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Bruns, G. L. (1975, October). The formal nature of Victorian thinking. PMLA, 90(5), 904- 918.

Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/

Fallis, R. (1976). Yeats and the reinterpretation of Victorian poetry. Victorian Poetry, 14(2), 89

100. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/
Perkins, D. (Fall, 1995). Sympathy with Nature: Our Romantic Dilemma. Harvard Review, 9,

pp. 69-82. Retrieved on October 31, 2010 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27560488.