This article was downloaded by: [Monash University Library]On: 18 November 2013, At: 21:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Angelaki: Journal of the TheoreticalHumanitiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Ecstatic dwellingkate rigbyPublished online: 19 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: kate rigby (2004) Ecstatic dwelling, Angelaki: Journal of the TheoreticalHumanities, 9:2, 117-142

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725042000272780

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

kate rigby

ECSTATIC DWELLINGperspectives on place ineuropean romanticism

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 9 number 2 august 2004

In retracing the “fate of place” in the history ofWestern thought, Edward Casey spares few

words for the Romantics. Of the German Natur-philosophen he observes only that in their pre-occupation with diachronic processes ofdevelopment, “they neglected to pay any carefulattention at all to how the body relates to space,”and hence to place.1 While there is certainlysome truth in this assessment, the reconceptual-ization of nature as a dynamic, self-generativeunity-in-diversity, of which humans were inte-grally a part, effected by Romantic natural phi-losophy did in fact imply a recognition of theformative role of place, as well as time, inconditioning human existence.2 An appreciationof the power of place to affect human sensibili-ties and dispositions, which follows from thisphilosophical reanimation of nature and renatu-ralization of humanity, can also be traced in theliterature of the Romantic period. In this regard,European Romanticism can be seen to haveprefigured the insights of those late twentieth-century phenomenologists of place who are con-cerned with the ways in which, as Jeffrey Malpashas put it, “our relation to landscape and en-vironment is […] one of our own affectivity asmuch as of our ability to effect.”3 At the sametime, moreover, many Romantic writers werewell aware also of the place of power in con-ditioning human relationships with the naturalenvironment: then, as now, if not perhaps inquite the same terms, the rethinking of the oikoswas necessarily entangled with the concerns ofthe polis.

If, in the wake of a century marked to anunprecedented degree by the dislocation of peo-ple and the transformation of the physical en-vironment, we now talk of “topophilia,” “gettingback into place,” “bioregionalism,” and

“reinhabitation,” it is surely because any unself-conscious connection that we might once havehad with a particular dwelling place has beenlost.4 For the Romantics, too, the rediscovery ofplace arose from the experience of dislocation,largely in connection with the modernization ofagriculture and the beginnings of industrializa-tion at home, and colonial expansion and theslave trade abroad. In responding to these unset-tling processes, the Romantic take on place wasnonetheless by no means homogeneous or un-equivocal. My discussion of Romantic perspec-tives on place begins with a discussion of JohnClare’s invocation of the notion of an indwellinggenius loci as a voice of protest against thedespoliation of his own dwelling place as a resultof the enclosure of formerly common land. Yet

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/020117–26 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725042000272780

117

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

much Romantic thought and literature is turnednot towards a beloved home place, as in the caseof Clare, but towards the unfamiliar, the un-homely and even, in some cases, the unearthly.While William Wordsworth’s determination,manifested in both word and deed, to be “homeat Grasmere” might be seen as an early exampleof the ethos of reinhabitation, the structure ofRomantic being and dwelling is in my analysistypically “ecstatic.” For the places that are dis-closed within the poetic frame of European Ro-manticism are in fact rarely rendered as acomfortable locus of earthly belonging: theseare, rather, more often than not places of en-counter with the Other, where human being anddwelling is cast amidst the elemental, the unin-habitable, and the incomprehensible.5

genius loci: the brook speaks

In order to discern the historical significance ofthe Romantic revaluation of place, it is necessaryto recall that against which it cut its figure. Tothat end, a consideration of an influential workof English topographical poetry from the earlyeighteenth century, John Dyer’s “Grongar Hill”(1726), is instructive.6 Drawing upon the classi-cal tradition of genius loci, the Augustan poethere calls on the “silent nymph” of the hillsideto aid his Muse as he endeavours to respond insong to the invitation of the place, depicting inwords the “landskip,” to which her “curious eye[…] Painting fair the form of things,” has drawnhis. In keeping with the conventions of eigh-teenth-century landscape appreciation, Dyer’spoem is not so much about Grongar Hill itself,as about what can be seen from its summit. Dyerdescribes this view in a certain amount of detailand with not a little drama, linking it to aspecific locality by giving a proper name notonly to the hill but also to the river below: theTowy. However, the picture Dyer paints is of ageneric and somewhat Italianate landscape of“brooks and meads,” “groves and grottoes,”“woody valleys” and “windy summit,” “townand village, dome and farm,” full of pleasingcontrasts, “[a]s pearls upon an Ethiop’s arms,”and replete with the requisite ruins, which allow

the poet to express suitable sentiments about thevanity of worldly striving. Abstracting from theparticularity of the place, Dyer turns GrongarHill into a metonym for the “Peace” and“Pleasure” purveyed by rural views in general.Privileging visuality, Dyer’s invocation of geniusloci in the guise of the painterly nymph servesprimarily as a model for the poet’s own attitudeof aesthetic contemplation, while her silence pro-vides the necessary warrant for his speech.Whereas she, not unlike many a cultivatedyoung lady of Dyer’s day, captures merely thevisual beauty of the scene, he will give voice toits moral significance – a “trick” commonlyemployed by eighteenth-century landscapepoets, upon which Coleridge would later pourscorn.7

Among English Romantic writers, it wasnonetheless not Coleridge but John Clare whoarguably went furthest in restoring a voice, anda more-than-human interest, to the genius lociof a particular place. This place, moreover, isvalued by Clare not because of its views butbecause it was his home: namely, the countryaround Helpston in Northamptonshire, where hewas born in 1797 and raised as a rural labourer,like his parents.8 Even after acquiring limitedfame and making a few trips to London as a“rural muse,” he remained in Helpston until1832 when he was persuaded to move, disas-trously as it turned out, to a more commodiouscottage four miles away in Northborough. Themost significant of Clare’s early topographicalpoems pertains to Round Oak Waters, a streamflowing from an underground spring in thesouth-west corner of Royce Wood, the courseand surrounds of which had been altered dra-matically as a result of the enclosure of Helpstonas decreed by an act of parliament from 1809.

Despite Clare’s idiosyncratic spelling and re-jection of punctuation, “The Lamentations ofRound-Oak Waters” (c.1818) begins convention-ally enough.9 In keeping with the tradition of thepastoral elegy dating back to Theocritus, Clare’smelancholy poet, “[o]ppress’d wi’ grief a doubleshare” (1), has retreated to nature to seek solacein song. Not unlike Milton in “Lycidas” (1637)or Shelley in “Adonais” (1821), Clare, it turnsout, is mourning the death of a friend. He was

118

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

Richard Turnill, a childhood companion whodied young of typhus, who is named ellipticallyin the apostrophe “O T-l, T-l dear should thou /To this fond Mourner be” (141–42). Less con-ventionally, this invocation of the deceased oc-curs only fairly late in the poem. Initially, itseems that the poet is simply bewailing his ownmiserable social condition, “Hurt friendless poorand starv’d,” the “sport” of “money’d men” (18,21–23). This, the first-named moiety of the“double share” of grief referred to in the open-ing line, also has a biographical basis in Clare’spoverty and sense of isolation. What is reallysurprising about this poem, though, is the waythat these self-preoccupied reflections are inter-rupted by the very stream upon whose banks thepoet had been pouring out his sorrow. UnlikeDyer’s “silent nymph,” the “genius” of Clare’sbrook speaks, and it does so on its own account:

“I am the genius of the brookAnd like to thee I moanBy Naiads and by all forsookUnheeded and alone”(45–48)

As the spirit of the place proceeds to recounthow the brook’s once verdant banks had beenstripped bare, and the surrounding pastureland,meadows and moors turned over to the pro-duction of cash crops for the profit of privateowners, the poem dramatically changes direc-tion. Returning to the opening stanza, we findthat what had at first appeared as a classic caseof what John Ruskin would later term the“pathetic fallacy,” now demands to be takenliterally:

My naked seat without a shadeDid cold and blealy shineWhich fate was more agreeable madeAs sympathising mine(5–8)

The bleakness of the poet’s physical environ-ment does not represent a projection of thepoet’s state of mind onto the natural world, aswe might have previously supposed. It is ratheran invitation to the reader to consider the plightof place itself, along with the suffering of those,human and otherwise, for whom it had hitherto

provided pleasure, shelter and sustenance. Theconnotation of the title is thus also altered: theseare not the lamentations of the poet by RoundOak Waters, but rather the lamentations of thebrook itself. Overthrowing Dyer’s discourse ofthe gaze, Clare repositions the place as subject,rather than scene. Swerving away from the regis-ter of classicist pastoral towards the vernacularpoetry of rural protest, moreover, Clare proceedsto have his “injur’d brook” (158) name thesource of this devastation. This lies, we areassured, not with the “sweating slaves” (165),victims too, whose labour was exploited in thedespoliation of the place, but rather with themoneyed landowners and those serving theirinterests in parliament, who were responsible fordecreeing the enclosure of Helpston.

In Clare’s radical recasting of the pastoral,this rural spot, far from providing consolationfor human woes, is itself presented to us aswounded. Clare, to be sure, anthropomorphizesthe brook, but he does so to surprisingly ecocen-tric effect. It is precisely within this experienceof wounded place that Clare recovers an under-standing of genius loci that ten centuries ofChristian antagonism to “idolatry” had appar-ently failed to erase entirely: the sense, that is, ofan indwelling spirit of place that could be felt tocry out for justice when the land was abused.The land, however, needed defenders to plead itscase within human society. It is, in fact, as a lostally, and potential mourner, that the genius ofthe brook recalls Clare’s deceased friend.10 Andit is as its special friend and champion that thegenius of the brook now addresses the poet, onewhose own life had been so entwined with andnurtured by this place that in recalling its pastfelicity he could protest what had now become ofit, and why. Not unlike Dyer, Clare concludesby alluding to the vanity of striving for materialwealth in the face of the inevitability of death:“‘Will riches keep them from the grave? / Orgive them rest in heaven?’” (195–96). Here,though, this point is not arrived at by areflection upon the eternal cycles of nature, butrather upon the land’s vulnerability to politicalinterests perceived as destructive of environmen-tal, social and spiritual values.

This is a key text for Clare, for it is here that

119

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

he first articulates his major poetic project of the1820s and 1830s. In responding to the call of thebrook, Clare discovers his own true calling, giv-ing voice to the suffering of the land and in sodoing also to his vocation as a poet. Few, if any,other authors of the Romantic period respond tothe call of a wounded place as ecocentrically asClare does. Wordsworth, it is true, refers in“Nutting” (1800) to “a spirit in the woods,”which he imagines to have reproved him when,as a child, he ravaged a bower of hazelnut trees.11

Wordsworth’s woods, however, are not explicitlylocalized, and their indwelling spirit partakesmore of the universal than the particular.Wordsworth did in fact develop a sense of con-nection to a particular place. As I will arguelater, however, he did so intentionally, as a“reinhabitant,” and neither he nor any otherauthors of this period articulate quite the feelingof indigeneity that we find in Clare: a feeling ofconnectedness with the place into which he wasborn, which he knows intimately, and which inturn knows him, such that to stray even a fewmiles out of his home territory was to find that“the very wild flowers seemd to forget [him].”12

Certainly, none appear to have been so devas-tated by the experience of loss of place as wasClare, firstly through the changes wrought bythe enclosure of Helpston; then by the increas-ing distance from his fellow villagers broughtabout by his status as a published poet and byhis wider experience of the world beyond theparish bounds; and finally by his own departurefrom Helpston for Northborough and, not longafter, from thence to the mental asylums at HighBeech and Northampton, where he died in 1864.There is nonetheless something exemplary aboutthe case of Clare, for it provides a powerfulreminder that the rediscovery of place duringthe Romantic period was premised upon pro-found dislocation.

changing landscapes, colonial con-quest and the disappearance of place

John Barrell concludes his important study ofClare and the idea of landscape with the observa-tion that “insofar as Clare was successful in

expressing his own sense of place, he was writinghimself out of the mainstream of Europeanliterature,” for, he asserts, “we are all touristsnow.”13 From a contemporary ecocritical per-spective, however, it is precisely Clare’s untime-liness, his resistance to the forces of dislocationthat were reshaping his world, which guaranteesthe significance of his work today, above all forthose who are not reconciled to the condition ofglobal tourist and who identify with others ac-tively resisting the loss or despoliation of theirown places of belonging. The present movementto reclaim a sense of place, as evidenced withinthe literature, philosophy and practice of biore-gionalism, as well as in the struggles of colonizedpeoples to regain their traditional lands, hasnonetheless emerged at a point when the processof dislocation, or “deplacialization,” to use Ed-ward Casey’s term, has assumed a whole neworder of magnitude.14 The forces of capitalistmodernization that in Clare’s day necessitatedthe creation of straight new roads linking thenewly enclosed fields of Helpston with the ex-panding market town of Peterborough are nowgenerating vast new communication networks incyberspace in the context of an increasinglyintegrated global economy. Meanwhile, theplanned redesign of the rural landscape under-taken in Clare’s county of Northamptonshireand elsewhere through parliamentary enclosure,today finds its hypertrophic counterpart in talkof “terraforming” Mars. Where once, with thedissolution of feudalism, peasants were emanci-pated to find work in another parish, and later,with the expansion of empire, the poor wereencouraged to seek their fortune in the colonies,now, we are told, technology will free us fromplanet Earth itself, ravaged as it is by industrial-ization.

Finding a point of origin for this process isbound to be contentious and inconclusive. Tak-ing a very long view, for instance, we might lookto the invention of alphabetical writing, which,as David Abram argues, created an abstract,portable and purely human world ofsignification, apparently disconnected from themore-than-human world of embodied experi-ence.15 Alternatively, focusing more narrowly onthe cultural traditions of the West, we might

120

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

consider the legacy of that strand of Christianthought which posits earth as a place of exilethrough which we pass, with more or less suffer-ing, on the journey to our true home in thebeyond. While Nature in general might deserveour respect as God’s other “book,” no particularplace should command our affections to such anextent that we forget the yearning of our immor-tal souls for that other place, God’s heavenlykingdom, which was not yet, or not entirely, ofthis world. Moving closer to the timeframe of thepresent study, a more immediate preconditionfor the suppression of place might be sought inthe new understandings of space that came tothe fore in the scientific revolution. In Casey’sanalysis, this involved “the triumph of space inits endless extensiveness, its coordinated anddimensional spread-outedness, over the intensivemagnitude and qualitative multiplicity of con-crete places.”16

Under the supremacy of Cartesian–Newtonianspace, both the agency of the land and the waysin which it had hitherto been shaped throughearlier practices of place making are effaced ordisregarded. Land, as space rather than place,looses its telos and tends towards the conditionof a blank page, awaiting inscription accordingto the needs – or fashion – of the day. Theimplications of this way of viewing land asnecessarily subject to human design are revealedmost dramatically towards the end of the seven-teenth century in the strictly geometricalconfiguration of the neoclassical gardens or-dained by the Sun King Louis IV at Versailles.More subtly, however, the ascendancy of thepreconceived design over responsiveness to thegivenness of a particular place is also evident inthe Augustan landscape aesthetics underlyingDyer’s poetic reconstruction of the view fromGrongar Hill. Here, and, for example, in theprospect views of James Thomson’s immenselypopular work The Seasons (1730), the contoursof the actual countryside being described areassimilated to the model of the ideal landscape,as represented by artists such as Nicholas andGaspard Poussin and, above all, Claude Lorrain.

The perception of land as “landscape,” itshould be recalled, always already implies anabstraction from place as encompassing environ-

ment. Introduced to England from the Dutchlandschap in the sixteenth century, the term“landskip,” like Landschaft in German, orig-inally signified a pictorial representation of apiece of countryside, and then, by extension,countryside considered primarily as a visualphenomenon, as, for example, in Milton’s“L’Allegro” (1632). In the course of the eigh-teenth century, the appreciation of landscapefrom a fixed and ideally elevated viewpoint be-came a popular pastime of the leisured classes,and many of those who were in a position to doso had their own gardens redesigned so as tobetter afford such views. By contrast with theevident artifice of Versailles, English landscapegardening of the kind perfected by CapabilityBrown and Humphry Repton was more respect-ful of the pre-existing lie of the land. Indeed, itwas frequently legitimated as realizing the latentorder endowed upon nature by its divine Cre-ator. However, the conviction that to disclosethis underlying order required human interven-tion could be called upon to validate significantalterations to the existing landscape.

The Augustan insistence that only such placeswhere nature had been suitably “dressed” wereworthy of aesthetic appreciation came under at-tack towards the end of eighteenth century bythe theorists of the picturesque, whose taste ranto Salvator Rosa rather than Claude Lorrain, andwho favoured more wild and rugged landscapes.In his poem “The Landscape” (1794), for exam-ple, Richard Payne Knight has this to say aboutthe work of Brown:

See yon fantastic band,With charts, pedometers, and rules in hand,Advance triumphant, and alike lay wasteThe forms of nature, and the works of taste!T’improve, adorn, and polish, they profess;But shave the goddess, whom they come to

dress.(275–78)17

Picturesque landscapes, although less tame,were, as the term itself indicates, nonethelessjust as visually objectified as their Augustanpredecessors. The precondition for this kind ofaesthetic evaluation of the countryside was acertain distance from the land as a locus of

121

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

labour and a bounded dwelling place. This is notto say that a sense of the potential beauty of thenatural world is the exclusive property of theelite. However, the particular mode of landscapeappreciation that was cultivated above all by acertain class of gentlemen in eighteenth-centuryEngland was largely dependent upon privilegedaccess to leisure, education, and travel: for it wasonly through knowledge of other landscapes, andtheir representation by esteemed artists, that theconnoisseur learnt how to evaluate the particularplace that had fallen subject to his discerninggaze.18

By no means all such landscape connoisseurs,many of whom were in fact clergymen, werelords of all that they beheld and hence able tohave the land physically transformed in confor-mity with their preferred aesthetic. Most, how-ever, were or had been on tour. And to thecritical eye of the picturesque tourist, the pecu-liarities of any given place might well need to beimaginatively altered in order to render thescene more in keeping with the preconceivedmodel. Thus, for example, according to theRevd William Gilpin, an artist

has no right, we allow, to add a magnificentcastle – an impending rock – or a river, toadorn his foreground. These are new features.But he may certainly break an ill-formedhillock, and shovel the earth about him as hepleases, without offence. He may pull up apiece of awkward paling – he may throw downa cottage – he may even turn the course of ariver, a few yards on this side, or that. Thesetrivial alterations may greatly add to the beautyof the composition.19

Although we might detect a trace of self-ironyhere, it is clear that getting a picturesque viewrequired training and, potentially, a certain ef-fort: something that was delightfully parodied byWilliam Combe and his illustrator Thomas Row-landson in The First Tour of Dr Syntax inSearch of the Picturesque (1809).20 Less humor-ously, the cavalier attitude towards the existingcountryside that is evident in this quotationfrom Gilpin was shared widely by those contem-porary enthusiasts for agricultural improvementwho had no qualms about actualizing those

“trivial alterations” that the picturesque aestheti-cian merely imagines.

The complicity between eighteenth-centurylandscape aesthetics and agricultural improve-ment, especially in the context of parliamentaryenclosure, has been commented upon widely.21

To some extent, it is implicit in the very termi-nology of landscape aesthetics, according towhich one “surveys” a “prospect.” The aesthetictechniques employed by the landscape artist orpoet in rendering a view were informed by thescience of land surveying, which was deployedwidely at this time, and much improved, inconnection with enclosure.22 A prospect, mean-while, was not only a view but also that fromwhich one might expect to reap a benefit.Whether that benefit was defined primarily asmoral-aesthetic or practical-economic, to viewthe land as a “prospect” implied not only ob-jectification but also some degree of instrumen-talization. This is not to say that there were notensions between the moral-aesthetic and thepractical-economic appropriation of land. Thoseagricultural writers influenced by the pic-turesque do sometimes register a conflict be-tween their taste for uncultivated landscapes andtheir concern with agricultural productivity.Arthur Young, for example, in his accounts ofhis travels in Ireland and France repeatedlycouples descriptions of ruggedly picturesque vis-tas with ones of productive agricultural land-scapes.23 This oscillation could be intended tosuggest the possibility of the harmonious coexis-tence of the wild and the cultivated. In reality,however, the modernization of agriculture thattook place around 1800, first in England and alittle later also in other parts of north-westernEurope, entailed an ever more extensive andintensive domestication of the land, which was intension with picturesque tastes resisted stronglyby some elements within Romanticism.

In England, the most significant vehicle ofagricultural modernization was the parliamen-tary enclosure of the old collectively workedopen fields and commons. Some areas in south-ern England had already been enclosed followingthe felling of the ancient forests in pre-Roman,Saxon and medieval times. Elsewhere, particu-larly in the Midlands, large landowners had been

122

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

engrossing smaller properties and common landsince the fifteenth century in order to createmore extensive sheep pastures. Until the mid-eighteenth century, however, roughly half thearable land in England, again mainly in theMidlands, plus large areas of “wild,” “waste,”and common land throughout the country, wasstill unenclosed. According to W.G. Hoskins,the county most affected by the new wave ofenclosure between 1765 and 1820 was Clare’scounty of Northamptonshire, closely followed bythe adjoining counties of Rutland, Huntingdon-shire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire and the north-ern half of Buckinghamshire. Other areas, too,were enclosed at this time, including the chalkdownlands of Dorset, the moors of North Rid-ing, and the wetlands of the Somerset Levels andChat Moss in south Lancashire.24

Barrell’s account of the enclosure of Clare’sparish of Helpston, one of three thousand tosuffer a similar fate, indicates what this involved.Following the passing of the Enclosure Act forHelpston and the neighbouring parishes ofMaxey, Elton, Glinton, Northborough andPeakirk in 1809, commissioners were sent fromLondon to plan a series of changes that wouldprofoundly alter the appearance and ecology ofthe place, as well as fundamentally transformingthe way in which land was used. Surveyors werethen brought in to put the commissioners’ in-structions into action. Work appears to havealready begun by 1813, and by 1820, when thefinal Award was published, it was largely com-pleted. Landholdings that had previously existedas a series of strips (“lands”) scattered across thethree large open fields of the parish were consol-idated into square parcels divided by fences andhedges. Whereas the open fields had beenworked collectively according to an agreed sys-tem of rotation allowing animals to graze freelyon whichever field had been left to lie fallow andon the stubble of the corn field after the harvest,the newly enclosed fields were worked individu-ally by the landowner (or his tenants and em-ployees) according to whatever system hedeemed most productive. Many of the old foot-paths through the fields and surroundingcountryside were blocked off, and instead, anumber of straight new roads were constructed,

tying Helpston into the emerging national roadsystem. A stream known as Green Dyke, andpossibly also Round Oak Waters, were partiallystopped at source, their banks denuded of veg-etation and their courses straightened, as part ofa new drainage system. To this end, two newditches, which drained a long strip of land run-ning through all the parishes covered by the Act,were also constructed. Swordy Well, an ancientstone quarry that had long been used as commonsheep pasture, was partly given over to theplough and partly quarried for mending-stonefor the new roads. Throughout the parish andindeed much of the country, woodlands, heaths,wetlands and meadows, to which the poor hadhitherto enjoyed rights of access and usage, wereturned over to the production of meat or, morecommonly, cash crops for private profit. In thisprocess, many of the distinctive details of theplace were, as Barrell puts it, “erased”: “Thenew topography – of integrated holdings, ofheath perhaps enclosed and cultivated, of moorsdrained, of roads leading emphatically out of theparish – was a structure which could be appliedin some form or another to all open-fieldparishes undergoing enclosure.”25

It is not easy to assess the social effects ofthese dramatic changes to the rural landscape.Initially, it appears that the new constructionwork that they entailed increased the demandfor rural labour, but the up to thirty per centhigher rents charged on enclosed land, and theengrossing of smaller farms, increased the poolof day labourers and thus lowered wages.26 More-over, the loss of access to common land to grazeanimals, glean corn and collect fuel and furzewas devastating for many small landholders, notto mention landless labourers, such as Clare andhis parents. Although the impoverished weregenerally saved from starvation by the increasein Poor Relief (a form of social security thatexisted only in Britain at this time), they losttheir link to the land and became dependentupon handouts from the state: like the oldquarry, in Clare’s “Lament of Swordy Well,”they “fell upon the town.”27 As a result of therising population of this period, the absolutenumber of rural labourers increased in the early1800s, but as a percentage of the workforce their

123

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

numbers dropped, indicating a drift of labourfrom agriculture to the growing manufacturingindustries, which was partly attributable to en-closure. A measure of the hardship and disloca-tion entailed in enclosure might be seen in thewidespread, and occasionally violent, resistancethat it generated, especially among the ruralpoor. It is perhaps no coincidence that the“Captain Swing” riots of 1830, which targetedthe new threshing machines, occurred mainly inrecently enclosed parishes in the south of Eng-land.28

Ecologically, the most significant consequenceof enclosure was the increase of land undercultivation at the expense of meadows, wetlands,moors, heaths and woods, together with theirresident wildlife. The new taste for wilder land-scapes thus emerged at precisely the momentwhen agricultural modernization was claimingand taming the country to an unprecedenteddegree. While the planting of hedgerows,flanked with elm and ash, provided a valuablenew habitat for many species of smaller birdsand woodland animals, this only partly compen-sated for the decimation of actual woodland thatwas already well underway towards the end ofthe eighteenth century as a result of the in-creased demand for timber in industry and theexpansion of the Royal Navy. In addition toextending the range of cultivated land, enclosureassisted the general trend towards a more inten-sive and increasingly specialized mode of farm-ing. This involved such innovations as selectivelivestock breeding; greater crop rotation, includ-ing the planting of clover or turnips to providewinter fodder and restore nitrogen levels in thesoil, in place of allowing the land to lie fallow;greater use of fertilizers, including, from the1840s, mineral and chemical-based products,along with new machinery, such as threshingmachines and seed drillers.

The outcome of the increased extent and in-tensity of farming was highly beneficial in termsof agricultural productivity: between 1750 and1850, wheat production in England rose by 225per cent, while the number of cattle brought tothe London meat markets went up by 220 percent and of sheep by 135 per cent.29 While thisincreased productivity was essential to feed a

growing population and avert famine, it can beseen in retrospect to have begun a process ofcommercially driven intensified land use andanimal husbandry that would in time cause con-siderable ecological damage. By the end of thetwentieth century, virtually all of the hedgerowsplanted as a result of enclosure had been de-stroyed in order to create the prairie-style fieldsfavoured by contemporary agribusiness. In as-sociation with the concomitant heavy use ofchemical pesticides and herbicides, this has hada particularly deleterious effect on bird life.30

Moreover, as the emergence of bovine spongi-form encephalitis has revealed so dramatically,intensive farming is liable to produce unpredict-able and potentially hazardous by-products thatultimately also endanger human life.31 In thisnew turn in the still unfolding dialectic of en-lightenment, we are now beginning to experiencein the depths of our own bodies the insupport-able price of our attempted domination of na-ture.32

In the German region, the modernization ofagriculture was in some respects even more un-settling than in many parts of England, es-pecially those not subject to parliamentaryenclosure. Unlike England, the German stateswere still almost entirely feudal until late in theeighteenth century. Baden was the first to abol-ish serfdom in 1783, followed by Prussia in1807, with the remaining states following suit by1820, many of them as a result of the settlementof 1815 (which also reduced the number ofGerman states from over three hundred to a farmore manageable thirty). While the dissolutionof feudalism implied a liberation from the oner-ous duties of serfdom for a significant pro-portion of the rural population, it also swelledthe ranks of landless labourers, especially inPrussia, where, according to an edict of 1811,hereditary tenant farmers who were no longerbound to serve their landlords as serfs wererequired to cede one third of their land to them,while non-hereditary tenants had to give up onehalf.33

Throughout the German region, the ruralpoor were also badly affected by the loss of thecommons, and their plight was exacerbated by aseries of crop failures across Europe in 1805–06,

124

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

1816–17, 1830 and 1846–47. In those areas ofGermany that had previously had an open fieldsystem, enclosure was generally effected throughfencing rather than hedgerows, and those hedgeswhich had previously divided the old largerfields were lost, increasing pressure on wildlifeand the risk of wind erosion.34 Here, too, theexpansion and intensification of agriculture, es-pecially from the 1840s onwards, entailed thedraining of marshes, the felling of forest andwoodland, the reclamation of land from theNorth Sea, the use of mineral and chemicalfertilizers and new machinery, and a generaltrend towards specialization and monoculture. Inthe eighteenth century, Germany was still farmore heavily forested than Britain. The in-creased demand for timber towards the end ofthe eighteenth century generated considerablepublic concern, which led to the development ofan early concept of sustainability, or Nach-haltigkeit. For this reason, the modernization ofGerman agriculture also incorporated the expan-sion of a form of agriforestry based on theprinciple of sustainable yield, but largely in theguise of ecologically impoverished commercialpine forests.35

Over and above the possible short- and long-term social and ecological consequences of agri-cultural modernization, the shift in the balanceof subsistence vis-a-vis commercial farming sub-tly, but nonetheless fundamentally, altered peo-ple’s relationship to the land and experience ofplace. From being a locus of dwelling, to whichin a sense one belonged, the land became reifiedas something that itself could be possessed: onthe one hand, as we have already seen, as anaesthetic object, but on the other as a com-modity that could be bought, sold, and treatedas one willed.36 It was above all this ob-jectification and instrumentalization that Clareresisted, insisting on his experience of the landas a dwelling place for a diverse and vibrantmore-than-human community. Thus, for exam-ple, in the “Lament of Swordy Well” (c.1821–24), in which the neoclassical frame of the“Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters” has beenabandoned in order to allow the place to speakdirectly in the first person, Clare recalls that inaddition to providing pasture for horses, cows

and sheep, something of particular benefit to thepoor, this was a place where field mice, rabbits,birds, wildflowers, bees, butterflies and beetleshad once thrived, and where gypsies, too, couldfind a welcome camping place.

For Clare, moreover, the transformation ofcommon land into private property representeda form of profanation. Where, as he writes in“The Mores,”

Fence now meets fence in owners little boundsOf field and meadow large as garden groundsIn little parcels little minds to please[…]Each little tyrant with his little signShows where man claims earth glows no more

divine(47–49, 67–68)37

The acceptance of the faith of St Augustinemight have long since brought an end to the“idolatrous” deification of nature in Europe.However, it was only now, with the com-modification of land under agrarian capitalismand, soon, its ruthless industrial exploitation,that nature was fully desacralized. In this newcontext, Christian traditions could be calledupon as a potential source of resistance to thereduction of nature to mere resource. Clare’sproject, like that of many Romantic writers, thusinvolved countering the claims of the “rudephilistines” (65), as he calls them in “TheMores,” by disclosing the divine glow that, heinsisted, still irradiated God’s good Earth.

At the other end of the social spectrum, thePrussian nobleman Friedrich von der Marwitzdrew attention to a further consequence of thecommodification of land, when in an address toa community of peasant farmers in 1818 heobserved: “When land is passed from one handto another like a merchant’s […] people willbecome day by day stranger to one another. Aneternal roving around develops and everyone isconcerned only about making money. The fortu-nate hold on; whoever is unfortunate is lost; thepoor and weak lack a father who takes care ofthem.”38 While Marwitz’s perspective mightstrike modern readers as unacceptably paternal-istic, his perception of the threat of alienationand dislocation was prescient. This dislocation

125

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

entailed not only the increasingly common ex-perience of actually leaving the place in whichone was born and grew up in order to find workor acquire property elsewhere, but also thephysical transformation of the countryside itself,especially in newly enclosed areas. One of thecrucial consequences of that transformation wasto open the relatively self-enclosed space of thenucleated village to the surrounding region and,in England at least, to the nation as a whole. Inplace of the labyrinthine pathways and roadsdesigned to facilitate the movement of peopleand stock within the parish, the new road sys-tem, and the maps that accompanied it, linkedvillages into an extended network, which, asBarrell observes, “had no centre except perhapsin the metropolis,” rendering all places access-ible as stops along the way, and thereby enablingthat “eternal roving,” the endless circulation oflabour and goods that is the hallmark of capital-ist modernity.39 With the development of therailway network from the 1830s and 1840s, cut-ting across the countryside and ploughingthrough hills with all the ineluctability of coke-hardened iron, the “moving age,” as ThomasCarlyle dubbed it, gathered pace.40

A further dimension of this era of increasedmobility was the growth of towns and cities ascentres of commerce and industry. Again, theimpact of industrialization was twofold, trans-forming both the face of the land and people’sexperience of place. Until the mid-eighteenthcentury, nearly all manufacturing had been per-formed in small workshops or, through the out-work system employed especially in the textileindustry, in employees’ own homes. In thecountryside, but also for many poorer town-dwellers, outwork generally provided a secondincome to supplement seasonal agriculturallabour, and was thus compatible with a settledsense of place and a continued connection to theland. Cottage industry remained important untillate in the nineteenth century, even in Britain.Increasingly, however, the development of newtechnologies of production and the need for amore disciplined labour force favoured the relo-cation of manufacturing work outside the home.Unlike the water-powered cotton mills of the1770s and 1780s, which were located in hilly

countryside near falling water and surroundedby modest, but often attractive and well-de-signed workers’ residences, the coal-fired facto-ries that began to shoot up in the early 1800swere situated on the outskirts of growing townsin the coal-rich north. The densely populatedworkers’ tenements that proliferated aroundthese factories quickly became shabby, darkenedby soot and grime, and mouldering with thedamp that rose from the swampy land on whichthey had been built in close proximity to thecanals used to transport heavy materials prior tothe construction of the rail system. It was here,in the new industrial quarters of Sheffield,Manchester and Birmingham, that the “slum”was born. This term, which was first used forsuch damp and unwholesome places of working-class habitation in the 1820s, is derived from thedialect word “slump,” meaning “wet mire.”41 Asearly as the 1770s and 1780s, however, the glassand copper works of St Helens provided a fore-taste, as Hoskins puts it with Ruskinian melo-drama, of what was to come elsewhere: “Theatmosphere was being poisoned, every greenthing blighted, and every stream fouled withchemical fumes and waste. Here, and in thePotteries of the Black Country especially, thelandscape of Hell was foreshadowed.”42

Although heavy industry developed later inGermany, there too in the early to mid-nine-teenth century, the expansion of traditional in-dustries, such as glass and silver-oremanufacturing, began to cause localized air pol-lution that damaged crops, livestock anddwellings.43 By the time the German iron, coaland steel industries began to take off aroundmid-century, between the ever-expanding indus-trial towns of northern England there already“stretched miles of torn and poisoned country-side – the mountains of waste from mining andother industries; the sheets of sullen water,known as ‘flashes,’ which had their origin insubsidence of the surface as a result of miningbelow; the disused pitshafts; the derelict andstagnant canals.”44

The counterpart of the loss of place wroughtby agricultural modernization, urbanization andindustrialization in Europe was the dislocationand suffering visited upon other peoples and

126

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

their land through colonization. By 1800, theexpansion of European biota, culture and com-mercial interests, which had been going on sincethe time of the Conquistadors (backed up withconsiderable military might), was penetratingAustralia and the South Pacific, whilst in NorthAmerica the frontier of European civilizationwas being pushed steadily westwards.45 In theAmericas, moreover, land appropriated from in-digenous peoples had long been worked by slavelabour from West Africa. The wealth derivedfrom the sugar plantations of the West Indiesand the cotton farms of the southern states ofNorth America was thus won at the cost of adouble dislocation: that of the native populationand of the imported slaves.

Although their sufferings cannot be comparedwith those of the colonized and enslaved, thecolonizers also experienced their own kind ofdislocation to a greater or lesser degree. This wasespecially evident in places such as Australia,where the climate, topography and biotic com-munity were so profoundly different from thosewhich had been left behind, often unwillingly, aswas clearly the case for convicts, but also tosome extent for those escaping poverty, religiouspersecution or social anathema. The newcomersto what the Portuguese had optimisticallydubbed “the great south land of the Holy Spirit”were not universally disrespectful of the localecology and the indigenous peoples, who, to a fargreater degree than the settlers recognized, hadshaped it over the millennia. Their attempts tomake themselves at home in this seeminglystrange and unpredictable land nonetheless ledto the displacement, demoralization and decima-tion of the Aboriginal population, coupled withsevere, and still worsening, damage to soils,waterways and biodiversity.46 This appropriationof the place of the colonial other, and of otherothers as slaves, constitutes a further key contextfor the Romantic rediscovery of place backhome in Europe.

acclimatization, attunement and rein-habitation

One of the key sources for Romantic under-

standings of the importance of place is a work ofhistoriography: Herder’s Reflections on the Phi-losophy of History of Mankind (Ideen zurPhilosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit),which appeared between 1784 and 1791.47 Unlikemost subsequent philosophers of history, Herderlocates the development of human culture andcivilization within the wider historicity of theearth and cosmos. For Herder, human history isneither irreducible to natural history nor separ-able from it. For no human being is an“independent substance.” As embodied crea-tures we are “connected with all the elements ofnature,” caught up in a constant dynamic inter-change with our natural environment,“contributing to the change of the universe” andbeing in turn shaped by its forms and processes.More specifically, Herder argues, in our bodilyappearance as in our cultural practices, in ourpleasures and pathologies, hopes and fears, webear the trace of the physical environment ofthose regions in which we dwell, or at leastwhich our forbears inhabited over long periodsin the past; those regions to which, as Herderputs it, we have become “acclimatised.” Amongthe formative influences pertaining to whatmight today be termed our bioregional implace-ment, Herder cites latitude, altitude and top-ography, especially as these affect averagetemperatures, rainfall and wind patterns, as wellas the quality of light and air. In addition, hementions those more mysterious phenomenasuch as magnetic fields and electrical currents,which were to become so topical in Romanticscience. All of these factors together constitutewhat Herder calls “climate.” Particular climates,he argues, foster particular kinds of plants andanimals, as well as particular kinds of physicaland cultural adaptation in the human popu-lation.48

This theory of acclimatization also informsHerder’s philosophy of language. In his earlier“Treatise on the Origin of Language”(“Abhandlung ueber den Ursprung derSprache,” 1772), Herder argues that human lan-guage is neither purely natural nor purely cul-tural. Going part of the way with Jean JacquesRousseau, he acknowledges that our “mothertongue,” the “sap that enlivens the roots of

127

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

language,” consists of those preverbal vocaliza-tions of bodily and emotional feelings, which we“have in common with animals.” And yet, over-laying this “natural language” of feeling, hu-mans have developed a way of communicatingmore complex ideas by means of signs bearing apurely conventional relation to their referents.While the need for such a language, Herderspeculates, might be connected with our relativepaucity of innate impulses and technical skills, ithas given us a certain adaptive advantage byenabling us to collaborate in developing newways of doing things in a range of changingenvironments.49 In this sense, language has freedus from the necessity of living in particularplaces in particular ways. And yet the differentlanguages that have been developed by differentpeoples over time nonetheless bear the trace ofthose places that their users have historicallyinhabited, both in phonetic echoes of the soundsof the natural environment, and, as he empha-sizes once again in the Philosophy of History, onthe level of lexicon.50 The influence of place onlanguage use, as well as on language formation,is explored further by Herder in his theory ofVolkspoesie, or “folk literature,” which he un-derstands as a crucial locus of cultural memory,recalling a people’s mode of embodied being anddwelling in a particular place over time.51 It isthis understanding of oral traditions that subse-quently led some Romantic writers to make theirown collections of folk songs and tales, as well asinspiring many others to adopt and adapt theforms of folk literature in their own writing.

Herder’s postulate of a collective memory, atonce corporeal and cultural, connecting peopleto place over time, was far from new, but hisnuanced restatement of this theory was the mostinfluential one during the Romantic period. Hehimself acknowledges a debt to Hippocrates’ Deaere, locis et equis in making the link betweenenvironment, health and cultural difference.52

More immediately, elements of Herder’s theoryof acclimatization, along with many of the exam-ples that he cites, can be found in Montesquieu’sSpirit of the Laws (L’esprit des lois, 1748), andin much eighteenth-century writing on thephenomenon of “local attachment,” and its nega-tive counterpart, Heimweh (“homesickness”).53

Such theories ran counter to the rationalist re-duction of place to space, understood as theindifferent setting for the works of man, under-taken under the sway of a universal and disem-bodied power of reason (or, more often, thedictates of taste or profit). That this revaluationof place was made possible largely by the experi-ence of dislocation is evident from the examplesthat Herder uses in discussing acclimatization,many of which come from documents pertainingto European colonial expansion: the testimony ofwitnesses to the horrors of the African slavetrade; accounts of travellers on voyages of explo-ration; and the musings of missionaries to theIndians in North America. Herder also recog-nizes that among those living in the growingtowns of northern Europe, new kinds of identitywere emerging that were no longer, or to a lesserdegree, bioregionally attuned. “The citizen of aEuropean metropolis,” he observes, “is almost astranger” to that love of “country and climate”characterising rural and tribal peoples.54

It should be emphasized that Herder’s ac-count of acclimatization neither essentializes norhierarchizes racial difference. His Volksgeist,unlike that of late nineteenth-century Social Dar-winists, let alone twentieth-century fascists, isnot carried in the blood but formed and re-formed by the dynamic interaction of cultureand nature in a particular place over time. Assuch it might better be described as an Orts-geist: a cultural expression of the bioregionalgenius loci, the necessary counterpart to Hegel’sconcept of the Zeitgeist. Herder in fact explicitlydenies the existence of different human raceswhen he insists that “neither the pongo nor thegibbon is my brother: the American and Negroare: these therefore thou shouldst not oppress,or murder, or steal; for they are men, likethee.”55 In accounting for differences in appear-ance, he nonetheless falls prey to a commonform of European chauvinism, in that he as-sumes that the physiognomy of Caucasians rep-resented the norm from which other peoplesdiverged in response to environmental condi-tions. The dark skin of Africans, for example, hetakes to be occasioned by the high level andintensity of sunlight to which they had beenexposed over generations, without conceiving of

128

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

the possibility that it was the fairer peoples whohad departed from the African norm under theinfluence of the dark winters of the north. Un-like some later evolutionists, Herder is nonethe-less at pains to affirm the equal worth of allpeoples and their splendidly diversified cultures,and he is highly critical not only of the slavetrade but also of the displacement of colonizedpeoples through the attempted Europeanizationof their land.

In addition to its adverse effect on the indige-nes, the endeavour to “convert at once a foreignregion into another Europe by cutting down itsforest, and cultivating its soil” was in Herder’sview also environmentally hazardous, disruptingwaterways, altering rain patterns, thereby endan-gering many species of plants and animals.“Nature,” Herder explains, deploying the kindof proto-ecological discourse, which would be-come characteristic of Romantic philosophies ofnature, “is everywhere a living whole, and willbe gently followed and improved, not masteredby force.” To follow nature requires that youfirst acquaint yourself with its regional ways.Such acquaintance in turn generally presupposesa history of habitation. Valuing local knowledgesand oral traditions, Herder thus favours a kindof reverse colonization: a process of“naturalization,” whereby newcomers learn fromindigenous peoples how to accommodate them-selves to their new environment and how to livein friendship with its prior inhabitants.56 Natu-ralization did not necessarily mean going native,however. Herder is neither a naive primitivistnor a thoroughgoing relativist. His celebration ofthe diversity of peoples and of their regionallydistinct natural environments and cultural adap-tations is balanced by a belief in the historicalprogress of humanity as a whole. Yet this veryprogress, in his view, implied the acceptance ofdifference, rather than the imposition of onepeople’s version of civilization, claiming a spuri-ous “universality,” on all the others. Similarly,although Herder shared the traditional Judaeo-Christian assumption of humankind’s exaltedplace as “sovereign of the earth,” destined byGod to “alter it by art,” he cautioned thatour interventions should at all times be guidedby nature and respectful of pre-existing modes

of environmentally appropriate inhabitation.57

Among the many Romantic writers andphilosophers to be inspired by Herder’s work onacclimatization was the bio-geographer Alexan-der von Humboldt. Born in Berlin in 1769,Humboldt exemplified that mode of Romanticsubjectivity marked more by Wanderlust thanidentification with a homeplace. He was an invet-erate traveller with a fascination for exoticclimes that took him on a major journey ofexploration to Central and South America be-tween 1799 and 1803, and another to CentralAsia in 1829. For Humboldt, without doubt, thesignificance of place emerged in the encounterwith the place of the other, above all in theluxuriant tropics, in which the power and cre-ativity of nature could, he believed, be felt somuch more strongly than in temperate climes.58

Humboldt’s research provided a wealth of evi-dence in support of the Romantic concept of thenatural world as a “complex netlike web,” as heput it in Cosmos.59 In this respect, his workformed a crucial link between Romantic Natur-philosophie and nineteenth-century empiricalscience. Among those whom Humboldt inspired,the most notable in this context is Charles Dar-win, who asserted that his “whole course of life”was “due to having read and reread” Humboldt’sPersonal Narratives in his youth.60 More nar-rowly, his work made a valuable contribution toEuropean knowledge about the specific regionsthat he traversed, one of which, the Upper Ori-noco in present-day Venezuela, had not yet beenexplored by white travellers. While Humboldthad a generally optimistic view of technologicalprogress, he also cautioned that the future ofhumanity would depend upon a more careful useof natural resources.61 Ironically, his detailedtravel writings nonetheless contributed to a newwave of colonial exploitation by speculators andsettlers with far less regard than himself for theway of life of indigenous peoples and little ap-preciation of the dangers of ill-considered en-vironmental change.

Humboldt’s major contribution to Romanticthinking on place emerges from his discussion ofthe phenomenology of landscape in his in-triguing essay on the “Physiognomy of Plants”(“Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Pflanzen,”

129

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

1807). Humboldt’s deployment of the term“physiognomy” is surprising and novel, not leastbecause it departs from the human-centrednessof its more common usage as the art of deducinga person’s character from their facial features.This art had enjoyed something of a renaissancein the eighteenth century, when some of itsprominent proponents, such as Johann K.Lavater, sought to put it on a quasi-scientificfooting. This endeavour continued into the nine-teenth century, generating among other things adubious obsession with the size and morphologyof the skull as a presumed indicator of personal-ity and intellectual capacity. Although Lavater’swork on physiognomy was dedicated to further-ing the “knowledge and love of mankind,”62 it isnot without assumptions that today would beseen as racist and sexist. Such assumptions be-came more pronounced in nineteenth-centuryphysiognomics and phrenology, especially underthe influence of Social Darwinism. Humboldt’sunderstanding of physiognomy has a very differ-ent trajectory, however, not only because he usesit with reference to non-human phenomena butalso because he does not assume a necessarycorrespondence between a putative inner essenceand outer appearance. For Humboldt, physiog-nomy is a matter not so much of uncoveringwhat is “expressed” but of recording an im-pression.63 In this, he is following in the foot-steps of his close friend Goethe in his work onthe morphology of plants and animals and on the“sensual-ethical” (sinnlich-sittliche) effects ofcolour. Humboldtian physiognomics, not unlikeGoethean optics and morphology, is concernedwith the way in which natural phenomena dis-close, or as Jean-Luc Marion might say, “give”themselves to a perceiving subject, who is him-self subtly altered in the encounter: the physiog-nomy of the land, like the painting whose“upsurge” into visibility Marion describes inBeing Given, “appears as given in the effect thatit gives.”64

Every region, Humboldt writes in this essay,conveys a sense of its own distinctive“character” in such features as the “blue of thesky, the quality of the light, the haziness of theair that hovers in the distance, the shapes of theanimals, the succulence of the plants, the gleam

of the foliage.” Over time, the particular phys-iognomy of the region, Humboldt goes on toargue – and here he is following Herder –influences the culture, history and character ofthe peoples who dwell there, peoples whose wayof life inevitably also alters to a greater or lesserextent their natural environment. However, on amore individual level, we can also be affected, ifonly in a transitory manner, by the physiognomyof those places in which we spend even a rela-tively short amount of time: “Who does not findhimself differently disposed [anders gestimmt]in the dark shadows of the beeches; on hillscrowned with solitary fir-trees; or on a grassyfield, where the wind whispers in the tremblingleaves of the birch tree?”65 The key word here isthe one that I have translated as “disposed.” TheGerman term gestimmt derives from the wordfor voice, Stimme, and can thus also be renderedin English as “attuned.” From Stimme you alsoarrive at Stimmung, mood, which might thus beunderstood as the outcome of a process of“attunement” to the “voice” of a place in time.

The idea that natural places have a voice oftheir own is reinforced in a later essay from1827, in which Humboldt writes that the phys-iognomy of the landscape “speaks to us” (unsanspricht).66 There is an echo here of the theo-logical concept of Nature as the Book of God.Humboldt’s landscape, however, does not com-prise a static series of correspondences encodinga divine symbology; it is rather, in true Roman-tic fashion, a dynamic and self-generative unity-in-diversity that speaks to us in its own voiceand in its own regionally specific idiom. Al-though Humboldt was an influential proponentof landscape painting, the aesthetic experience oflandscape was for him ultimately not just abouttaking in, let alone constructing, a view. It re-quired, rather, that one immerse oneself in theambience of a place, attending to the manner inwhich one thereby became attuned, physicallyand psychically, to the mode or mood of itsgivenness. Here, then, we see the return ofgenius loci in the guise of a concept of atmos-phere or ambience: the local and particular man-ifestation, perhaps, of what Schelling, reworkingNeoplatonism, had termed the “soul of theworld.”67

130

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

Humboldt’s concern with the psychosomaticresonance that particular landscapes can engen-der in the perceiving subject was not withoutprecedent in the landscape aesthetics of the eigh-teenth century. Burke’s highly influential Philo-sophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas ofthe Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), for exam-ple, propounds a theory of sensory perceptionoriented, at least in part, towards the experienceof the natural world. In Burke’s account, ourideas of beauty are stimulated by objects that arepleasing to our senses, relaxing and soothing usand filling us with feelings of love and tender-ness. A sense of the sublime, by contrast, isengendered by vast or terrifying objects, such asloud noises, dangerous animals or stormy seas,which affront our senses, inducing in us “a sortof delightful horror,” and inclining us to anattitude of reverence and awe.68 The distinctionbetween the sublime and the beautiful, to whichGilpin added the concept of the picturesque,became commonplace in late eighteenth-centurylandscape aesthetics. In keeping with Burke’smodel, Gilpin himself was crucially concernedwith charting emotional responses to the physi-cal properties of the landscapes he described.However, as we have already seen, within theaesthetics of the picturesque, Burke’s emphasison our psychosomatic response to encounterswith things or places that solicit any or all of oursenses was sacrificed largely to a more narrowpreoccupation with visuality.

Within German idealist aesthetics, the role ofthe body in aesthetic judgement becomes evenmore attenuated. In his reworking of the theoryof the sublime and the beautiful in the Critiqueof Judgment, Kant rejects entirely the notionthat aesthetic pleasure, in the case of the beauti-ful, derives from sensual enjoyment, insistingupon a purely intellectual and disinterested ap-preciation of the formal qualities of the object.Any aesthetics which “needs the addition ofcharms and emotions,” he maintains, “is alwaysstill barbaric.”69 Having thereby totally discred-ited Burke’s account of the beautiful, Kant pro-ceeds to turn his understanding of the sublimeon its head. Burke’s take on the sublime islargely indebted to Lord Shaftesbury, a keyfigure in the revaluation of “wilderness” and an

early writer on the sublime, following the ap-pearance of Boileau’s French translation ofLonginus’ essay “On the Sublime” in 1674. InShaftesbury’s view those wild regions, whichwere once reviled as desolate and god-forsaken,were “sublime” in the positive sense that theywere more truly theophanic than places whichhad been made over by man:

I shall no longer resist the passion in me forthings of a natural kind; where neither Art, northe Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil’d theirgenuine order, by breaking in upon that primi-tive state. Even the rude Rocks, the mossyCaverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, andbroken Falls of Waters, with all the horridGraces of the Wilderness itself, as representingNATURE more, will be the more engaging,and appear with the Magnificence beyond theformal Mockery of princely Gardens.70

Whereas Burke follows Shaftesbury in associat-ing the sublime with an attitude of respect forthat which transcends the merely human, Kant’saesthetic theory is supremely anthropocentric.Although his examples are similar, includingalarming natural phenomena, which threaten tooverwhelm us both physically and mentallythrough their incomprehensible magnitude orfearful violence, Kant argues that the sublimepertains not to the object but rather to thesubject, for there is in nature no power greaterthan the human mind: “Thus nature is herecalled sublime merely because it raises the im-agination to the point of presenting those casesin which the mind can make palpable to itselfthe sublimity of its own vocation even overnature.”71

Kantian aesthetics is thus radically disjunc-tive, serving to shore up that rigid separation ofman from nature and mind from body, whichBurke’s theory of the sublime and the beautifulhad threatened to breach. The dualistic implica-tions of this move are revealed even more starklyin Schiller’s loyally Kantian essay on the sublime(“Vom Erhabenen,” 1793). According toSchiller, the sublime sense of freedom and tran-scendence that we experience in the face of theviolence or immensity of nature depends uponthe recognition that our physical condition “in

131

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

no way pertains to our own self, and is to beviewed as something external and foreign, whichhas no influence on our moral person.”72 In thesublime experience, our own corporeality thusbecomes as indifferent to us as that outer nature,over which we are also to triumph through ourpowers of reason. This demotion of nature, bothinner and outer, within idealist aesthetics istaken one step further by Hegel, for whom thebeauty of nature, in which the Idea was manifestonly in an alienated guise, was necessarily in-ferior to that of human art. In his lectures onaesthetics in the 1820s, Hegel allows that beauty,understood as the sensuous appearance of theIdea, begins in nature, and art that strivesmerely to imitate nature is both “superfluous”and “presumptuous,” as it will inevitably fallshort of the original.73 Nonetheless, he insiststhat it is only in the work of art that beauty canbe fully realized, for it is here alone that thetruth finally “wins an external appearancethrough which the poverty of nature no longerpeeps.”74

With Hegel, then, if not yet with Kant, aes-thetics becomes strictly delimited to the intellec-tual contemplation of cultural artefacts. Othersnonetheless followed Humboldt’s lead, such as,in Germany, the philosophical anthropologistCarl Gustav Carus. In his fascinating work Psy-che of 1860, Carus, pre-empting Sigmund Freudby nearly half a century, argues that humanconsciousness emerges from and remainsgrounded in the unconscious. In line with histeacher Schelling, Carus nonetheless maintains afar more encompassing view of the unconsciousthan Freud would, recognizing that our innernature is intimately interconnected with thatouter nature to which our existence as embodiedbeings is indebted. This implies that our psychiclife is steered not only by internal impulses andinterpersonal relations: it is influenced also byour physical environment as this impinges uponour corporeal, and thereby also psychological,state of being.75 If, for Schelling, the primarytask of philosophy was to remember that naturewith which we were once one, for Carus, thework of psychology involved raising to con-sciousness the affective force of our corporealimplacement.

A strong sense of the impact of environmentupon human well-being also underlies JohnRuskin’s work, including his reflections uponlandscape painting. In his defence of Romanticlandscape art, in particular that of Turner, overagainst the more classical approach to landscapepopular in the eighteenth century, Ruskin ar-gues in Modern Painters that the artist shouldendeavour not to present a pleasing design butrather to convey the “impression of nature intothe mind of the spectator.”76 Although it isRuskin who coined the term “pathetic fallacy,”which has been taken to imply that the moodsthat artists and writers attributed to inanimateelements in the environment were purely projec-tions of their own subjectivity, he does at timesapproach a theory of landscape art as the recordof quite a different process: namely, that of theimpingement of the environment upon humansubjectivity. Thus, for example, in one of his“Lectures on Landscape,” he maintains that

[l]andscape painting is the thoughtful andpassionate representation of the physical con-ditions appointed for human existence. It im-itates the aspects, and records the phenomena,of the visible things which are dangerous orbeneficial to men; and displays the humanmethods of dealing with these, and of enjoyingthem or suffering from them, which are eitherexemplary of sympathetic contemplation.77

As Jay Appleton has suggested, Ruskin comesclose here to articulating a view of landscapeaesthetics similar to that later put forward byJohn Dewey, according to which our sense ofbeauty in nature is conditioned not only bycultural norms but also by “vital needs.”78

Within this remarkably materialist line of Ro-mantic thinking about human implacement, it ispossible to find a model for an aesthetics ofambience and attunement, such as that put for-ward by the German philosopher Gernot Bohme,drawing on the work of the phenomenologistHermann Schmitz.79 The key term of Bohme’sexplicitly ecological aesthetics of nature is aphenomenon that Schmitz calls “atmosphere.”This is somewhat akin to Martin Heidegger’snotion of “mood,” but whereas Heideggerianmoods are located within the subject, Schmitz

132

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

interprets atmosphere as a phenomenon that isproperly pre-subjective: atmospheres, as Bohmeexplains, are materially constituted in the physi-cal manifestation or “self-unfolding” (ekstasis)of particular things in time and space. As em-bodied beings, we too are affected by the atmos-phere created by the things around us, and it isto this “ecstatics of nature,” and the dispositionsthereby engendered in us, that Bohme invites usto attend.80

Bohme’s ecological aesthetics provides a valu-able new perspective from which to reconsiderthe Romantic poetics of place. Consider, forexample, the opening of Wordsworth’s “Homeat Grasmere,” a key text of Romantic to-pophilia.81 Probably first drafted around 1806,“Home at Grasmere” was conceived as the be-ginning of the first part of a much longer workto be called The Recluse, of which “The Prel-ude” was but the introduction. The Recluse wasnever completed and this fragment of the firstpart was only published in the 1880s, long afterWordsworth’s death. In the “Prospectus to TheRecluse,” which was published together with“The Prelude” in 1850, Wordsworth declaresthat the “high argument” of this work was:“How exquisitely the individual Mind […] to theexternal World / Is fitted; – and how exquisitelytoo […] the external World is fitted to the Mind”(63–68).82 “Home at Grasmere” advances thisargument by providing what might be called alocal instance of the “fit” between the humanmind and the more-than-human natural world: itis, in a sense, an epithalalium, or bridal hymn,celebrating the marriage of poet and place. Likeall good bourgeois marriages around 1800,Wordsworth’s wedding to Grasmere was enteredinto, as he puts it, on “Nature’s invitation […]by Reason sanctioned” (71–72). Wordsworth re-frains from informing us in any detail regardingthe role of Reason in his decision to settle inGrasmere. We are not told, for example, whetheror not he first made a sober investigation of suchmatters as property values and town amenities.Wordsworth nonetheless provides ample evi-dence of what he might mean by “Nature’sinvitation.” This is presented in the opening twostanzas, in which he recollects what is laterrevealed to have been his first encounter with

Grasmere as a “roving school-boy” (2). Initially,however, this experience is distanced from theperspective of the mature poet through the useof the third person: Nature’s invitation was, itseems, issued to an other, the boy thatWordsworth claims he once was.

This invitation is recalled as having arisen ina particular place and time. In Wordsworth’sterminology, the experience of receiving itformed one of his treasured “spots of time”: aprofound experience which is embedded in timeand place, but which interrupts the flow ofeveryday life and carries over into other timesand places through the operation of memory. Inthis case we are told that it is summer, and theboy, who is wandering alone around the country-side in the Lake District during his school holi-days, has found himself on a steep hillsideoverlooking the valley of Grasmere.“[O]verpowered / At sight of this seclusion,” theboy is said to have sighed (in most unboylikemanner!): “‘What happy future were it here tolive! / And, if a thought of dying, if a thought /Of mortal separation could intrude / With par-adise before him, here to die!’” (11–14)

Presumably, the “seclusion” (8) thatWordsworth speaks of here refers to the way inwhich the little valley was enclosed by the sur-rounding mountains that rise up above the placeon which the boy is positioned. Interestingly,though, we are not told exactly what the boy hasseen. Despite his elevated lookout point and thesubsequent repetition of words from theparadigm of sight (“looked,” “gaze,” “behold,”“gazed”), Grasmere valley is precisely not dis-played to us in a view from above. Instead, weare told of what being there in that spot at thatmoment made that particular boy think, feel andimagine. Certain things are referred to as ele-ments in his experience of this place: the valleybelow and the hills above, clouds in the sky,breezes blowing across grass and cornfields, sun-beams, shadows, butterflies and birds, sylphs,Fays, Genii and angels, island and shore, mead-ows and woods. However, it is not always poss-ible to distinguish clearly between what wasactually seen, what otherwise sensed, and whatimagined. The perspective is not objectifying,but participatory. This, I would suggest, is

133

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

quintessentially a description of the phenom-enon of attunement to the circumambient atmos-phere of a place: to the way it gives itself byshowing itself in its effect. In this case, the effectis one of movement and vitality, leading to asense of freedom, empowerment and joy. It is inand through this ambient experience that theboy feels invited one day to make this valley hishome – an invitation, “by Reason sanctioned,”that the mature poet, as he declares in thefollowing stanza, was finally able to accept.

Wordsworth’s withholding of the view ofGrasmere valley in these opening stanzas is inkeeping with his disavowal of the “tyranny” ofthe reifying gaze in Book 12 of The Prelude.83

Reflecting self-critically on a time when he hadbeen somewhat influenced by the fashion ofjudging landscape “by rules of mimic Art”(111), Wordsworth argues that his preoccupationwith “meagre novelties of colour and pro-portion” had rendered him “insensible” to “themoods / Of time and season, to the moralpower, / The affections and the spirit of theplace” (117–21). The opening of “Home at Gras-mere” depicts an experience of place from theperspective of a child who had clearly not yetfallen prey to this tyranny of the eye, and whotherefore “sees,” as it were, with his whole body,and whose sensory perceptions nourish a fertileimagination. Having in the meantime once moreovercome his erstwhile ocular-centrism, theolder poet can now recall the child’s perceptionof Grasmere valley in terms of an experience ofattunement to the “spirit of the place.” Fromthis perspective, the genii loci that he refers toin the language of myth and fairytale as“sylphs,” “Fays” and “winged angels” (33–34)acquire a certain material reality: whether or notwe take these terms to refer metaphorically tothe physical presence of insects or birds, theypoint to a vivid experience of the land’s ekstasis,disclosing what Wordsworth refers to in Book 5of The Prelude, in terms that are strikinglysimilar to Humboldt’s, as “the speaking face ofthe earth and sky” (11–12).

There is, it seems, something of Burke’sunderstanding of the beautiful in the boy’s ex-perience of the ambience of this place. The spotupon which he was lying is said to have been,

“For rest of body perfect […] All that luxuriousnature could desire” (22–23). On the other hand,his experience is also tinged with the sublime.The boy might feel safe on his comfortablegrassy knoll, but this is initially described as the“verge” of a “steep barrier” (1), implying that itis in fact a cliff-edge. This suggests that in termsof its capacity to aid in the satisfaction of vitalneeds, this spot is experienced as both “refuge”(a term that Wordsworth later applies to Gras-mere itself) and “prospect.”84 It is in large partthe resultant sense of being pulled at once downinto the deep valley below and up into the high,cloud-topped mountains above that is, as he putsit, “stirring to the spirit” (24). Ambience, how-ever, is a mobile and shifting phenomenon, es-pecially perhaps in those places that are open tothe earth and sky. This too is admitted byWordsworth. The Grasmere that he fell in lovewith is said to have presented a rather differentface to him and his sister when they arrived totake up their abode there: “Bleak season was it,turbulent and bleak, / When hitherward wejourneyed side by side” (152–53). Making goodtheir commitment to their new home wouldinvolve accepting such ambient transformations,the many faces of the place that they had cometo love.

As it is presented here, Grasmere is a placewhere it was yet possible to truly dwell, asHeidegger would have it, in the Fourfold: uponthe earth and amidst its many and diverse livingbeings and natural formations; beneath the skyand hence subject to the alternation of day andnight, the rhythm of the seasons and the va-garies of the weather; in community with fellowmortals (humans, that is, who are mortal in thespecial sense that they live in the horizon ofdeath, accepting that they will die); and open tothe unpredictable advent of the divine in the“beckoning messengers of the godhead.”85 WhileGrasmere itself is “mild / And soft and gay andbeautiful” (114–15), providing shelter, comfortand the fulfilment of bodily needs, the surround-ing “crags and woody steeps” (118) retain acertain wildness, conveying a sense of thegreater, and by no means universally benign,natural order within which human life remainsembedded. This is a place of conviviality, an

134

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

“Abiding-place of many men” (146), where thepoet resides in joyous companionship with hissister (75–97), but where he can also find peaceand solitude (133). Indeed, for those who love it,this is a place where heaven and earth seem tomeet, an earthly paradise regained, and as such,far richer than that first Eden (104–09), fillingthe poet with a sense of well-being, which isultimately unspeakable:

’Tis (but I cannot name it), ’tis the senseOf majesty and beauty and repose,A blended holiness of earth and sky,Something that makes this individual Spot,This small Abiding-place of many Men,A termination and a last retreat,A Centre, come from whereso’er you will,A Whole without dependence or defect,Made for itself and happy for itself,Perfect contentment, Unity entire.(142–51)

Clearly, Wordsworth’s paean to his Lakelandhome involves a degree of idealization; but thatgoes with the genre. This is not, after all, a socialor environmental audit, but a song of praise. Histautological insistence on wholeness and unitymight engender a sense of claustrophobia or asuspicion of “totalization” in (post)modern read-ers, but it should be noted that Grasmere is notpresented as a closed community: it is, rather, aplace that welcomes the stranger, “come fromwhereso’er you will.” This is a crucial phrase inthat it guards Wordsworthian dwelling againstincorporation into the ideology of “blood andsoil,” while also hinting at its dependence uponthe experience of dislocation. In this regard,“Home at Grasmere” exemplifies not only thepoetics of attunement but also the project ofreinhabitation, the third key modality of theRomantic rediscovery of place that I would liketo discuss here.

There is perhaps a certain blindness inWordsworth’s universalization of Grasmere’scharms. As Herder might have observed,Wordsworth was probably far more predisposedto feel good there than, say, an indigenous in-habitant of central Australia might have been,having been born not all that far away in Cock-ermouth, where he spent his early years, before

attending school even closer at Hawkshead.This, then, was a region to which Wordsworthwas already “acclimatized.” Within the increas-ingly mobile middle-class society in which hewas raised, however, it was not a place to whichhe was bound. In choosing to return to it, aftera period of restless wandering, Wordsworth be-came a conscious reinhabitant, for whom hisnewfound dwelling place was a veritable paradiseregained. Thus, recalling God’s pleasure in Hisown Creation in Genesis 1.31, the psalmist ofGrasmere addresses his beloved:

Thou art pleased,Pleased with thy crags and woody steeps, thy

Lake,Its one green Island and winding shores,The multitude of little rocky hills,The Church and Cottages of mountain stone –(117–21)

God, it is true, has been effaced, but the trace ofholiness remains as given with and through theplace – a place presented as self-creating, gener-ated autopoietically out of a felicitous collabora-tion of human minds and bodies with themore-than-human natural world that enfolds andsustains them. This is what Edward Casey wouldcall a “thick” (dicht, in German) place: a place,that is, in which nature and culture are mutuallyenhancing; a place that is in itself poetic (a workof Dichtung), in the Heideggerian sense, that is,of arising from an interweaving or “thickening”of Earth and World, phusis and techne, suchthat the built environment does not conceal ordestroy, but discloses and preserves the naturalworld that supports it.86 Importantly, moreover,the immanent holiness of this place remains“unappropriated” (74). Although the poet de-clares triumphantly that this “calmest, fairestspot of earth” had become his “own” (73–75),this does not imply that he saw it as his privateproperty. Grasmere had become his, rather, tothe extent that he had assimilated himself to it,in grateful acceptance of the givenness of its“perpetual streams, / Warm woods and sunnyhills, and fresh green fields, / And mountains notless green, and flocks and herds, / And thicketsfull of songsters, and the voice / Of lordly birds”(126–30). The “Unity” afforded by this place

135

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

might then be understood in terms of the possi-bility it is seen to afford to dwell in “wholeness,”in communion, that is, with one’s fellow womenand men, with a richly varied more-than-humannatural world, and with the divine.

If Wordsworth’s song of praise borders attimes on the hyperbolic, this is surely because herealized that this mode of dwelling was, eventhen and there, under threat from the forces ofmodernization. Among these were the displace-ment of smallholders by larger landowners andwealthy newcomers with little regard for theintegrity of the local environment, and the alien-ation of people from the land through thegrowth of manufacturing, of which he writescritically in his Guide to the Lakes (1822). Tothis would later be added the extension of therailway from Kendal to Windermere in the heartof the Lake District, which Wordsworth vigor-ously opposed. Wordsworth’s objections to therailway “transferring at once uneducated personsin large bodies to particular spots,” the beautiesof which could only be fully apprehended bythose who had acquired a proper taste for them,have been castigated by some as classist.87 Ifthere is an element of snobbery here, however, itis directed primarily not at potential proletarianpassengers on the proposed railway but rather atthose who would seek to rob them of theirmeagre wages with cheap entertainments:

The directors of railway companies are alwaysready to devise or encourage entertainmentsfor tempting the humbler classes to leave theirhomes. Accordingly, for the profit of theshareholders and that of the lower class ofinn-keepers, we should have wrestlingmatches, horse and boat races without number,and pot-houses and beer-shops would keeppace with these excitements and recreations.88

This critique of the exploitation of the poorthrough the commodification of entertainment isreinforced in his subsequent Letter to the Edi-tor, in which Wordsworth maintains that “[t]herich man cannot benefit the poor, nor the supe-rior the inferior, by anything that degradesthem. Packing off men after this fashion, forholiday entertainment, is, in fact, treating themlike children. They go at the will of their master,

and must return at the same, or they will bedealt with as transgressors.”89

Ironically, Wordsworth himself contributedsignificantly to the growing tourist interest in theLakes from the early nineteenth century, notonly through his poetry but also, and especially,through his Guide to the Lakes, which was firstpublished separately in 1822 and had gonethrough five editions by 1835, becoming by farhis most popular work at the time. Although theGuide is informed by the discourse of the pic-turesque, it differs from earlier guides of thiskind in being written self-consciously from theperspective of a resident. And as a reinhabitant,Wordsworth valued the Lake District not aslandscape or “scenery,” “a poor and meanword,” which he apologizes for using in his first“Letter to the Editor,” but as a dwelling place.This, as Jonathan Bate has argued, is the realbasis for his objection to the railway.90 In ad-dition to scarring the beauty of the place, therailway is rightly recognized by Wordsworth asan agent of that process of ever-increasing mo-bility, which threatens today to turn us all intotourists. It is in keeping with this perspective onthe importance of a sense of connection to thenatural world within the place in which onedwells that Wordsworth recommends, in place ofthe extension of the railway, the introduction ofimproved work conditions and shorter hours toenable workers to experience nature closer totheir own homes in the form of parks, gardensand the nearby countryside. Read in this light,Home at Grasmere might be seen as an invita-tion not to join him in the Lake District, couldwe do so, but rather to seek to create conditionsconducive to dwelling within those places, ruralor urban, in which we presently reside, whetheras natives or newcomers. As such, it mightprovide a prospect for an alternative, andgreener, modernity, rather than a nostalgic ref-uge from a changing reality.

genius loci alterius: ecstatic dwelling

In general, as Bate observes, the Romantic litera-ture of place attempts a subtle negotiation ofwhat might be termed, with reference to

136

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

Friedrich Schiller’s literary typology, “naive”and “sentimental” modes of being and dwell-ing.91 Writers such as Wordsworth and the nov-elist Sir Walter Scott sometimes succeed inrecalling a naive mode of bioregional belongingin their representation of particular individualsand communities. They do so, however, from aperspective that is highly self-reflexive with re-gard to their own relationship to place. More-over, the level of local attachment evidencedvariously by Clare and Wordsworth is rather theexception than the rule within the wider frameof European Romanticism. The places recalledby Romantic writers are frequently not theirown home places, which were themselvesoften far from fixed, but rather places of en-counter with the Other: exotic, erotic, sublimeplaces, places of longing or dread, imaginaryplaces, places marked precisely as un-homely oreerie (un-heimlich), places that were not at all,or not entirely, of this earth. The Romanticpoet, like Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen,might have been “always coming home.”92 Yetit was by no means certain that he would everarrive there.

A certain kind of itinerancy, however, is notnecessarily incompatible with dwelling. Indeed,there is a sense in which not being at home,experiencing the place in which one lives, tarriesor strays as unknown or strange, is of the veryessence of dwelling. This, at any rate, is thesomewhat surprising conclusion that might bedrawn from Heidegger’s claim that “[m]ortalsdwell insofar as they save the earth,” whereby“save” (retten) implies “to set something free inits own presencing” (etwas in sein eigenesWesen freilassen).93 That dwelling which“saves” the earth was for Heidegger nonethelessnot something that came naturally but an artthat needed to be learnt (which is precisely whyit is so vulnerable to forgetting). It is not, as theNazis had claimed of the “Aryan” farmer’s con-nection to his natal soil, “in the blood.” Forwhile the earth that in dwelling we are said tosave is for Heidegger first and foremost theearth where one lives, the “home ground” (hei-matlicher Grund), it is not simply because one’sancestors had lived there that this is one’s truedwelling place. The Heimat, for Heidegger, only

becomes such to the extent that we care for it,not least by allowing it to unfold in its own way,in excess of any positive knowledge of it, ordesigns on it, that we might have. “Every truefatherland,” concludes one of Heidegger’s mostinteresting contemporary reinterpreters, MichelHaar, is therefore “adopted; for the ‘natural’quality of the native land must also belearned.”94 Dwelling, in other words, is alwaysin some sense re-inhabitation, even if the placewhere you dwell also happens to be the placewhere you and possibly your forbears wereborn.

Recalling Wordsworth’s “come fromwhereso’er you will,” I would argue that a simi-lar concept of dwelling, one that does notnecessarily privilege indigeneity, is already to befound in some Romantic literature. Moreover,as Wordsworth also reminds us in his redemp-tive vision of London in the sonnet “Composedupon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,”cities too can become places of ecstatic dwelling,if they are rendered “open unto the fields, andto the sky” (7), providing habitation for a diver-sity of more-than-human others, and extendinga welcome to the stranger.95 It is this under-standing of dwelling, one that is place-sensitiverather than place-bound, which remains relevantto a world where the increased levels of mobilityand displacement experienced by some duringthe Romantic period have become almost uni-versal, and where ever more people are boundto live in towns. In a settler society such as myown, it nonetheless also remains important toacknowledge (as Herder would have had us do)the enduring value of indigenous understand-ings of the land, such as those that are still heldby many Australian Aborigines today, whichbear testimony to millennia of cultural acclima-tization in learning to care for country.

If to “save the earth” is to “set it free in itsown presencing,” then to dwell also impliesallowing that there is a dimension of the landwhich remains latent or undisclosed: somethingthat gives itself to experience as exceeding ourpowers of comprehension and control. Takingthis idea a little further than Heidegger does, atleast explicitly, Haar suggests that in dwellingwe necessarily make our home “in exile,” in the

137

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

midst of the elemental and the uninhabitable: inwhat Haar, reappropriating from Heidegger aRilkean expression, calls “the Open.”96 This is acrucial insight for the contemporary ecopoliticsof dwelling. For it implies that the earth cannever be entirely, and certainly not exclusively,our home without thereby losing its latency: itsinclusiveness of an inassimilable otherness thatoverwhelms our ability to understand, commandand consume it. Recalling Heidegger’s critiqueof modern technology as a mode of enframingthat reduces the earth to “standing reserve,” onewould have to conclude that a world in which wewere always and everywhere totally at homewould be one that had been completely en-framed: revealed and reordered according to ourdictates and delectation alone.97 Clearly, such aworld, of which some “real” places, as well asmany imagined places of science fiction, alreadygive us a foretaste today, is likely to becomeincomprehensible, uncontrollable and poten-tially uninhabitable in its own way. But thiswould be a totally anthropogenic and hencenarcissistic world, in which we would encounteralways and everywhere only things of our ownmaking, devoid of the diverse alterity of aflourishing more-than-human earth.

To open oneself to the givenness of earth andsky in the abiding strangeness of even the mostfamiliar of places, as well as to tarry or stray inplaces that are genuinely foreign, places, per-haps, where one is exposed to the elemental anduninhabitable, from which, in our daily living,we are bound to take shelter, is, Haar suggests,to dwell “ecstatically.”98 And it is into this ec-static kind of dwelling, the aesthetic correlate ofwhich might be termed “the sublime,” that theRomantic poetics of place, more often than not,would appear to invite us. To open oneself to thesublime dimension of an earthly dwelling placeis nonetheless a very different thing from beingforced to abandon one’s home, seeing a holyplace profaned, or a beloved place made strange,perhaps even rendered uninhabitable, for thosewho formerly dwelt there. Ecstatic dwellingis not identical with homelessness, althoughit might present itself as a welcome possibilityfor the itinerant. In affirming the former,though, we should never forget the pain of

dislocation, dispossession, anddesecration, to which, aswe have seen in the case ofClare, some Romantic litera-ture also bears eloquent wit-ness.

notesThe present essay is adapted from the secondchapter of my forthcoming book Topographies ofthe Sacred: The Poetics of Place in EuropeanRomanticism (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P).Reprinted with permission of the University ofVirginia Press.

1 Edward Casey, Fate of Place: A PhilosophicalHistory (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997) 285.

2 In Topographies of the Sacred, I argue that the“rediscovery of place” in Romantic literature andthought is premised upon a proto-ecologicalreconceptualization of the more-than-humannatural world, the contours of which are out-lined in my first chapter, “The Rebirth of Na-ture.”

3 Jeffrey E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philo-sophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999) 1.

4 See, for example, E.C. Relph, Place and Place-lessness (London: Pion, 1976); Yi-Fu Tuan, To-pophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception,Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-tice-Hall, 1974); David Seamon and RobertMugerauer, Dwelling, Place and Environment (Dor-drecht: Kluwer, 1985); David Seamon, Dwelling,Seeing, Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecol-ogy (Albany: State U of New York P, 1993);Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward aRenewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloom-ington: Indiana UP, 1993); Gary Snyder, A Place inSpace: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds: New andSelected Prose (Washington, DC: Counterpoint,1995); Bruce Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger,Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of Nature(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1995);Michael Vincent McGinnis (ed.), Bioregionalism(London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

5 The concept of “ecstatic dwelling” that I elab-orate towards the end of this chapter is takenfrom Michael Haar, Song of the Earth: Heidegger

138

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

and the Grounds of the History of Being (1986),trans. R. Lilly, foreword J. Sallis (Bloomington:Indiana UP, 1993) 139–40.

6 John Dyer, Poems 1761 (Menston: Scolar,1971) 9–16.

7 Coleridge, in a letter to Southey of 10 Septem-ber 1802, criticizes earlier landscape writers fortheir “perpetual trick of moralizing everything.”“Nature,” he continues, “has her own properinterest; & he will know what it is, who believes& feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, &that we are all one Life.” Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Ox-ford: Clarendon, 1956–71) vol. 2, 459.

8 See Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography(London: Picador, 2004).

9 Clare, Early Poems 1804–1822, eds. EricRobinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon,1989) vol. 1, 228–34.

10 “Nay I as well as he am griev’d / For oh Ihop’d of thee / That hadst thou stay’d as Ibelieved / Thou wouldst have griev’d for me”(145–48).

11 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems,1797–1800, eds. J. Butler and K. Green (Ithacaand London: Cornell UP, 1992) 220.

12 This is how Clare recalls in his“Autobiography” the experience of getting loston a walk as a child, in Clare, Prose of John Clare,eds. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1951) 13. Jonathan Bate’s suggestionthat “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters”can be read as embodying a sense that the landitself might experience and express pain, such asthat found traditionally among Australian Abo-rigines, finds support in Clare’s need to be rec-ognized by the land. See also his letter to hispublisher Taylor from early 1832 with referenceto his imminent move to Northborough: “I havehad some difficulties to leave the woods &heaths & favourite spots that have known me solong for the very molehills on the heath & the oldtrees in the hedges seem bidding me farewell,” inClare, The Letters of John Clare, eds. J.W. andAnne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1951) 258. Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 165–66). Theidea that the land knows its own traditionalowners, but will not recognize strangers to the

place, is integral to the Aboriginal understandingof “country” as the particular area of land, withall its inhabitants, human and otherwise, livingand ancestral, to which one belongs and towardswhich one has a duty of care. See Deborah BirdRose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian AboriginalViews of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra:Australian Heritage Commission, 1996).

13 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and theSense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to thePoetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1972) 188.

14 Casey, The Fate of Place xii.

15 David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous: Perceptionand Language in a More-than-Human World (NewYork: Vintage, 1997) 99–102.

16 Casey, The Fate of Place 201.

17 Robert Payne Knight, The Landscape, a DidacticPoem in Three Books, 2nd ed. (London: Bulmer,1795; reprint Westmead, Hants.: Gregg Inter-national, 1972) 21–23.

18 The gendered nature of this mode of land-scape aesthetics is foregrounded by JacquelineLabbe in Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Genderand Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1998).

19 Gilpin quoted in Barrell, The Idea of Landscape11–12.

20 See Bate, The Song of the Earth 133–36.

21 The first major study to explore this connec-tion was Barrell, The Idea of Landscape. For amore recent study, also centred on Clare, seeTimothy Brownlow, John Clare and the PicturesqueLandscape (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983).

22 Brownlow, John Clare and the Picturesque Land-scape 22.

23 Young edited and contributed to theinfluential periodical The Annals of Agriculturefrom 1784 to 1809. His Tour of Ireland appearedin 1780 and his Travels in France in 1792. Barrelldiscusses complicity, but also the tension, be-tween the discourse of improvement and that ofthe picturesque in The Idea of Landscape 60–79.

24 W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the EnglishLandscape [1955], intro. and commentary C. Tay-lor (London: Hodder, 1988) 140–66.

25 Barrell, The Idea of Landscape 96.

139

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

26 The classic study of this process is J.L. Ham-mond and Barbara Hammond, The VillageLabourer, 1760–1832: A Study of England beforethe Reform Bill (London and New York: Longman,1978), first published in 1948, but some of theHammonds’ findings have since been revised. Fora more recent view, see J.M. Neeson, Com-moners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Changein England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1993); and Kenneth Morgan, The Birth ofIndustrial Britain: Economic Change 1750–1850(London and New York: Longman, 1999).

27 “I’m swordy well a piece of land / Thats fellupon the town / Who worked me till I couldn’tstand / And crush me now Im down” (21–24).“Lament of Swordy Well” in Clare, Poems of theMiddle Period 1822–1837, eds. Eric Robinson,David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford:Clarendon, 1996–98) vol. 5, 105–14.

28 Neeson, Commoners 259–93; and Morgan,Birth of Industrial Britain 26–27.

29 Morgan, Birth of Industrial Britain 17.

30 According to a report in New Scientist from 4July 1999, tree sparrows were estimated to bedown by eighty-nine per cent, corn buntings byeighty per cent, turtle doves by seventy-nine percent, bullfinches by seventy-five per cent, reedbuntings by sixty-one per cent and linnets byforty-nine per cent (3).

31 See Richard Kerridge’s insightful ecocriticalanalysis of the impact of BSE in “BSE Stories,”Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 2(1999): 111–21.

32 As Gernot Bohme remarks in his ecologicalreconsideration of Adorno’s aesthetics, “we arenow beginning to feel in our own bodies whatwe have done to nature: this is the core of theso-called environmental problem.” Bohme, Fureine okologische Naturasthetik (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1989) 24.

33 Wolfram Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Na-tionalstaat: Deutschland 1806–1871 (Munich:Beck, 1995) 124.

34 Engelbert Schramm, “Zu einer Umweltges-chichte des Bodens” in Besiegte Natur: Geschichteder Umwelt im neunzehnten und zwanzigstenJahrhundert, eds. Franz-Josef Bruggemeier andThomas Rommerspacher (Munich: Beck, 1987)90.

35 Siemann, Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat132–33.

36 One of the implications of the development ofa more individualistic concept of property is the“copyrighting” of written texts. On the implica-tions of changing views of land and property forliterary culture, see Kevin Hart, Samuel Johnsonand the Culture of Property (Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 1999).

37 Clare, “The Mores” in Poems of the MiddlePeriod 1822–1837, vol. 2, 347–50.

38 Marwitz, quoted in Siemann, Vom Staatenbundzum Nationalstaat 127.

39 Barrell, The Idea of Landscape 86.

40 The method of smelting iron with coke tocreate a harder, less brittle product was devel-oped only in the early eighteenth century, andcounts as one of the preconditions for industrial-ization. See Morgan, Birth of Industrial Britain 49.Carlyle, quoted in Morgan 85.

41 Hoskins, Making of the English Landscape 35.

42 Ibid. 183.

43 Pollution from the Barnberg glass works wasalready eliciting protests from nearby residentsin 1802, while complaints against the silver-oreworks in Freiberg led to an official inquiry, whichprovided the first scientific evidence for thedeleterious effect of sulphur dioxide on plantsand animals. Against the advice of the report bythe chemist Adolph Stoeckhardt, the responsewas to raise the chimney stacks, which simplyspread the pollution further afield. See Siemann,Vom Staatenbund zum Nationalstaat 142–45; andArne Andersen and Franz-Josef Brueggemeier,“Gase, Rauch und Saurer Regen” in BesiegteNatur: Geschichte der Umwelt im neunzehnten undzwanzigsten Jahrhundert, eds. Franz-Josef Brugge-meier and Thomas Rommerspacher (Munich:Beck, 1987) 64–66.

44 Hoskins, Making of the English Landscape 187.

45 See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).

46 The environmental and art historian TimBonyhady has recently revealed evidence of asurprising level of environmental awareness incolonial Australia in The Colonial Earth (Carlton:

140

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

Melbourne UP, 2000). Despite that, Australiatoday boasts the highest mammalian extinctionrate in the world, along with the second highestrate of deforestation; all of our major waterwaysare suffering from reduced water flow due todamming and irrigation, as well as from pollutionfrom agricultural run-off, while ever more land isbeing blown away or turning to salt. Australia isalso vying with the USA for the unenviable titleof the highest per capita producer of greenhousegases, and, despite being the driest inhabitedcontinent on the planet, we also have the highestper capita level of water consumption.

47 J.G. Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of theHistory of Mankind, trans., ed. and intro. Frank E.Manuel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968).

48 Ibid. 4–20.

49 Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language”in Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Lan-guage, and History, trans. and intro. Marcia Bunge(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 64–68.

50 Herder, Philosophy of the History 41.

51 See, for example, his essays “On GermanCharacter and Art” (“Von deutscher Art undKunst, 1773) and “Correspondence on Ossian”(“Briefwechsel uber Ossian,” 1773). An extractfrom the latter in English translation can befound in David Simpson (ed.), Origins of ModernCritical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary The-ory from Lessing to Hegel (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1988) 71–76. In “Yet Another Philosophy ofHistory” (“Noch eine Philosophie der Ges-chichte,” 1774), Herder reflects on the possibil-ity of a “physics of history,” which wouldexamine the effect of “various climates and tem-poral circumstances” on cultural development. InAgainst Pure Reason 46.

52 In this highly influential early work of environ-mental determinism from the fifth century BCE,Hippocrates claims that different climates “causedifferences in character; the greater the varia-tions in climate, so much the greater will bedifferences in character […] the constitution andthe habits of a people follow the nature of theland where they live.” Hippocratic Writings, ed.G.E.R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983)161.

53 See the excellent discussion of “local attach-ment” in Alan D. McKillop, “Local Attachment

and Cosmopolitanism: The Eighteenth-CenturyPattern” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: EssaysPresented to Frederick Pottle, eds. F.W. Hilles andH. Bloom (New York: Oxford UP, 1965) 191–218. On the history of environmental determin-ist thinking generally, see David Arnold, TheProblem of Nature: Environment, Culture and Eu-ropean Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 9–25.Unfortunately, Arnold overlooks the key contri-bution of Herder to this tradition of thought.

54 Herder, Philosophy of History 13.

55 Ibid. 7.

56 Ibid. 31–32.

57 Ibid. 19.

58 On Humboldt and the “invention” of theTropics, see Arnold, The Problem of Nature 146–48.

59 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurfeiner physischen Weltbeschreibung [1845], ed.Hanno Beck (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1993) 37.

60 Charles Darwin quoted in Arnold, The Prob-lem of Nature 148. For a more extended dis-cussion of Darwin’s indebtedness to Humboldtand other German Romantics, see Robert J.Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Scienceand Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2002).

61 Frank Holl and Kai Reschke, “‘Alles ist Wech-selwirkung’ – Alexander von Humboldt” in Exhi-bition Catalogue for Humboldt Exhibition (Berlin“Haus der Kunste” 6 June – 15 Aug. 1999) 13.

62 Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Frag-mente zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnis undMenschenliebe (Zurich: Orell Fussli, 1969).

63 Gernot Bohme refers to Humboldt’s physiog-nomy as “nicht als Ausdruck, sondern als Ein-druckspotential” (not as expression, but asexpressive potential). Recorded lecture series onaesthetics, Darmstadt University, 1994.

64 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phe-nomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 52.

65 Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur (Nordlingen:Franz Greno, 1986) 245, 247.

66 Humboldt, “Einleitende Betrachtungen” in An-sichten der Natur 322.

141

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

ecstatic dwelling

67 Schelling, Von der Weltseele – Eine Hypotheseder hoehern Physik zur Erklaerung des allgemeinenOrganismus, in Werke, vol. I,6, ed. Joerg Jantzen(Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 2000).

68 Edmund Burke, “Philosophical Enquiry intothe Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and theBeautiful” in The Writings and Speeches of EdmundBurke, eds. J.O. McLaughlin and J.T. Boulton (Ox-ford: Clarendon, 1997) vol. 1, 255, 288.

69 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans.Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 108.

70 Lord Shaftesbury, The Moralists, quoted in N.Pevsner (ed.), Studies in Art, Architecture and De-sign (London: Thames, 1968) 82–83.

71 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment 145.

72 Friedrich Schiller, “Vom Erhabenen” in Werke,ed. Julius Peterson et al. (Weimar: Bohlaus Nach-folger, 1943–2001) vol. 20, part 1, 184.

73 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans.T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) vol. 1,116, 41–42.

74 Ibid. 152.

75 Carl Gustav Carus, Psyche: Zur Entwicklungs-geschichte der Seele, foreword Friedrich Arnold(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1975) 431.

76 John Ruskin, Modern Painters in The Works ofRuskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedder-burn (London: George Allen, 1903–12) vol. 3,168.

77 Ruskin, “Lectures on Landscape” in Works,vol. 22, 12.

78 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape(London: Wiley, 1975) 48–49.

79 Gernot Bohme, Fur eine okologische Naturas-thetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989); and “An Aes-thetic Theory of Nature: An Interim Report,”Thesis Eleven 32 (1992): 90–102. See also mydiscussion of Bohme’s model of ecological aes-thetics in Rigby, “Beyond the Frame: Art, Ecologyand the Aesthetics of Nature,” Thesis Eleven 32(1992): 114–28. The implications of Bohme’secological aesthetics for a rethinking of the con-cept of “spirit of place” are explored further inRigby, “Myth, Memory, Attunement: Towards a

Sensuous Semiotics of Place” in Imagined Places:The Politics of Making Space, eds. ChristopherHouston et al. (Bundoora: School of Sociology,Politics and Anthropology, La Trobe University,1998) 175–82.

80 Bohme, “An Aesthetic Theory of Nature” 94.

81 William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: FirstPart, First Book of The Recluse, ed. B. Darlington(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). The concept of to-pophilia, or love of place, is explored by Yi-FuTuan in his book of that name. See also CarlKroeber’s early ecocritical reading ofWordsworth’s poem in his article “‘Home atGrasmere’: Ecological Holiness,” PMLA 89(1974): 132–41.

82 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selin-court and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon,1940–49) vol. 5, 5.

83 Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude[1805–06], ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca and London:Cornell UP, 1991).

84 These are the key terms of Jay Appleton’sanalysis of landscape aesthetics in The Experienceof Landscape.

85 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Think-ing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and ed.Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971)149–50.

86 Casey, Getting Back into Place 253.

87 Wordsworth, Letter to the Editor of theMorning Post 9 Dec. 1844, in Peter Bicknell (ed.),The Illustrated Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes,foreword Alan G. Hill (Exeter: Webbe & Bower,1984) 191.

88 Ibid. 192.

89 Ibid. 194.

90 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworthand the Environmental Tradition (London: Rout-ledge, 1991) 50. For a more critical analysis ofWordsworth’s opposition to the railway, alongwith his conception of the national park, seeKaren Welberry, “‘The Playground of England’: AGenealogy of the English Lakes from Nursery toNational Park, 1793–1951,” unpublished Ph.D.thesis, English, La Trobe University, 2000.

91 Bate, Romantic Ecology 102–05. Bate is refer-ring to Schiller’s famous essay “On Naıve and

142

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

rigby

Sentimental Poetry” (Uber naıve und sentimen-talische Dichtung), 1796–97.

92 “’Wohin aber gehen wir?’” (But where are wegoing?) asks Heinrich in Novalis’s lyrical novelHeinrich von Ofterdingen, to which his mysteriousfemale interlocutor replies “‘Immer nach Hause’”(Always home). Novalis [Friedrich von Harden-berg], Schriften, eds. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel(Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1968) vol. 1, 325.

93 Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” 150.

94 Haar, Song of the Earth 63.

95 Wordsworth, “Composed upon WestminsterBridge, September 3, 1802” in Poems, in Two Vol-umes, and Other Poems, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1983) 147.

96 Haar, Song of the Earth 140.

97 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Tech-nology” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell(San Francisco: Harper, 1977) 307–41.

98 Haar, Song of the Earth 139. In the third chap-ter of my book Topographies of the Sacred I arguethat the aesthetic correlate of an “ecstatic” con-cept of dwelling is an ecopoetics of negativity,whereby the literature of place is valued pre-cisely in its failure to provide an adequate re-sponse or representation of the embodiedexperience of which it is the trace.

Kate RigbyCentre for Comparative Literature and CulturalStudiesSchool of Languages, Cultures and LinguisticsMonash UniversityPO Box 11AMonash, Vic 3800AustraliaE-mail: kate.rigby@arts.monash.edu.au

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mon

ash

Uni

vers

ity L

ibra

ry]

at 2

1:59

18

Nov

embe

r 20

13