The Evolution of Environmentalism in English Romantic Literature

我们是浪漫主义者的后代，因为我们对自然的现代观念以及对环境和生态系统的欣赏都归功于他们。例如，想想济慈的《丘比特与普赛克》。在一个有着“朦胧思想”的诗人的形象中，他渴望成为绿凉亭里普赛克神庙的牧师，我们看到了济慈的绿色思想。在他对待自然、同情自然、与自然和解的过程中，似乎也有一种原始生态的观点，警告我们地球上的绿色正在减少。济慈在《普赛克颂》中“亲眼所见”的，或者他在《夜莺颂》中敢于用“诗的无形翅膀”去把握的，都是浪漫主义诗人所看重的最本质的创造力——想象力。无论是普赛克的“朗朗的扇子”，还是象征想象力和诗歌的“诗的无形翅膀”，似乎都与诗人对“消极能力”的信仰和“变色龙诗人”的立场有很大关系。在济慈看来，理想的诗人应该是一个“自我毁灭”的人，没有突兀的性格，能够融入周围的自然，从而获得终极的灵感和想象力。济慈和其他一些英国浪漫主义诗人在寻找对自然的无私之爱的精神漫游中，很可能是我们自己命中注定的寻找与自然生态共存的旅程的例证。我们可能生来就会永远重复这段旅程。

We are the descendents of the Romantics, since we owe the modem notion of Nature and this appreciation of our environment and ecosystem to them. Consider, for instance, Keats's Cupid and Psyche. In a figure of a poet with "that shadowy thought" who aspires to be a priest in the fane of Psyche in the green bower, we see what we might call Keats's green thought. Also in his treatment of, sympathy for, and reconciliation with nature, there seems to be a proto-ecological viewpoint which warns us about the decreasing of greenness on the earth.What Keats sees "inspired by his own eyes" in Ode to Psyche, or he dares to grasp with "the viewless wings of Poesy" in Ode to a Nightingale is what the Romantic poets valued as the essential creative power, imagination. Both Psyche's "lucent fan" and his "viewless wings of Poesy," the symbol of imagination and poesy, seem to have much to do with the poet's belief in "negative capability" and his stance as a "chameleon poet." The ideal poet for Keats is one who can, with no obtrusive character but a "self-destroying" (Endymion I,799) one, melt into the nature around him to consequently gain the ultimate inspiration and imagination.The spiritual wandering of Keats as well as some other English Romantic poets in search of disinterested love for nature's disinterested beauty is likely to exemplify our own predestined journey in search of ecological coexistence with nature. We might be born to repeat this journey perpetually.