Wild Romanticism

S. T. Coleridge claimed that he attended the scientific lectures of Humphry Davy in order “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.”1 As a poet ever attendant to the nuances of language, he would appreciate the rich metaphorical associations of the words “wild,” “wilderness,” and “wildness” presented in an important new collection of essays titled Wild Romanticism , edited by Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke as part of the Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media series. The volume, in the words of the editors, “consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea” (i). It comprises a wide span of ways of “thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentrism,” whether it be from the perspective of aesthetics, gender, or political or social autonomy, in a similarly wide spectrum of canonical and noncanonical texts (i).