With Skirmish and Capricious Passagings: Ornithological and Poetic Discourse in the Nightingale Poems of Coleridge and Clare.

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the relationship between the poetic discourse of Romanticism, and the scientific discourse of ornithology, the emergence of which as a serious scientific discipline took place, according to Paul Lawrence Farber, between 1760 and 1850, thus spanning the lifetimes of High Romanticism’s prophet-figure, William Blake, and its patriarch, William Wordsworth. It is intended as a contribution to the developing field of ecocriticism, which has in recent years offered a new and challenging perspective on the representation and function of the natural world in literary texts in general and Romantic ones in particular, through full length general studies such as Jonathan Bates’s Song of the Earth (2000) and essays with a more specific focus, like John Rowlett’s ‘Ornithological Knowledge and Literary Understanding’ (1999), both of which have contributed much to my own understanding of and approach to my chosen texts