“A Green Thought in a Green Shade” James C. McKusick. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. St. Martin’s: New York, 2000. ISBN: 0-312-23448-1. Price: US$59:95.

Original in conception, James C. McKusick’s Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology relates the environmentalism and ecological perspectives of canonical British Romantic writers—suggestively explored, for instance, by Jonathan Bate’s version of Wordsworth in Romantic Ecology (1991)—to recent scholarly investigations into the legacies of Romanticism in America. McKusick’s study traces lines of Romantic influence that extend from William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, William Blake and Mary Shelley to nature’s representation in the American literary tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Mary Austin. Through an examination of variously conflicting critical conceptions of nature proffered by David Abram, Karl Kroeber, Clifford Geertz, and Alan Liu, McKusick places these debates concerned with the ecological beliefs of Romanticism at the centre of a stand-off between New Historicism and ecocriticism in Romantic studies. McKusick’s negotiates this intellectual impasse with an ecologically orientated history of literary criticism in the United States over the last sixty years, spanning from formalism to post-structuralism, to illustrate how New Criticism’s investment in the literary object as a sacred organic icon and New Historicism’s foregrounding of the socio-political context that affected a text’s inception are, ultimately, reductive accounts. At opposite ends of the spectrum, New Criticism wrests Romantic organicism from its environmental context and New Historicism conceives of the environment and nature as ideological constructs denied their own space. These antagonistic theoretical positions, in McKusick’s view, require a more expansive and less mutually exclusive definition that conceives of “nature” as both socially constructed and biologically inseparable from being itself (15). This all-inclusive sense of nature permits an ecocriticism that attends to the inherent organic formal properties of literary works as well as the environmental context and natural surroundings in which such texts were written. McKusick discovers in early Coleridgean ideas on the inter-related economy of nature and his “mature theory of aesthetic organicism” a template for his own eco-critical methodology (42). Coleridge’s later meditations on self-regulating artistic form begin, for McKusick, to crystallize an “understanding of the various ways that human artefacts can work in harmony with their natural surroundings” (43). Through such a delicately poised ecocritical approach, Wordsworth as poet and man is read by McKusick as an advocate of a homespun “human ecology” (70) alert to the complexities of the interaction between denizens of Grasmere and the natural environs of the Lake District. In this context, Wordsworth’s “The Female Vagrant” is centrally preoccupied with a lifestyle reliant on “multiple modes of subsistence” and exemplifies the poet’s “fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the best way of life in a rural community” (65, 62). What emerges is the valorization of a carefully managed symbiosis between the domesticated cultivation of a garden or smallholding and the unfettered wilderness beyond those defined boundaries. Wordsworth, McKusick contends, is a self-elected spokesman for all those creatures who exist “beyond the pale, outside the conventional boundaries of human civilization” without home, comfort, or commodity (65). These restorative powers of uncontained nature are essential to the human drama played out by protagonist of Wordsworth’s moonlit forest adventure in “The Idiot Boy,” where, mediated by “Johnny’s encounter with the wild, the entire village finds itself healed of its sickness, purged of its indifference to others, and transformed into a more integral and caring human community” (66). This emphasis on the co-existence of these cultivated and uncultivated ecosystems is, for McKusick, the key to understanding Wordsworth’s depiction of the “pastoral farms” (Tintern Abbey, 17) as recommending a harmonious existence “with the wild habitat that surrounds them” (67). Wordsworth’s ecological commitment to the preservation of the rural landscape and traditional farming methods is …