This essay examines Wordsworth’s idea of nature as a home in his poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”. The poem was written when he revisited the banks of River Wye during a tour that he undertook on 13 July, 1798. Generally, a home is a place of rest where people can withdraw from the hustle and bustle of the outside world and can feel a sense of attachment and rootedness. After settling in Grasmere in 1800, Wordsworth began to describe nature as his metaphorical home. Wordsworth wrote poems, such as “Michael” and “Home at Grasmere”, about people who live and feel ‘at home’ with nature. In these poems, Wordsworth describes nature as a fundamental place that offers the following benefits — protection and care, a frame for understanding people’s moral being, deep attachment to moral being of the dweller’s heart. Previous studies have presumed that Wordsworth hit upon the idea of nature as a home after he settled in Grasmere.

  This essay argues, however, that Wordsworth’s idea of nature as a home had already germinated in his poem “Tintern Abbey”, written in 1798 and prior to the poems written by him after he settled in the Lake District. Tintern Abbey was famous as the most beautiful, picturesque site in this valley, which is a ruin described as a place for repose and meditation. For picturesque travellers, the amusement of their travel is a succession of scenes that changes continuously as they travel. Thus, on the one hand, the relationship between nature and traveller becomes transient, constantly detaching from one place (scene) and attaching to another. On the other hand, Wordsworth describes the poet’s deep attachment to this particular place, which sustained though he was absent for long. To avoid loco-descriptive conventions in picturesque writing, Wordsworth’s narrator stands at an unknown spot located ‘a few miles above’ the abbey and exclaims to the river, ‘How often has my spirit turned to thee!’ (57). For Wordsworth, this is a place to which he should return, a ‘nurse’ providing care and protecting his heart from ‘the fever of the world’ and an ‘anchor’ of his ‘purest thoughts’ (110).

Recent studies of English Romanticism, such as historicism or ecocriticism, tend to obliterate the philosophical problem of the modern subject or consider the abandonment of such an inquiry to be morally right. This essay aims to oppose these tendencies by elucidating its persistent and crucial role in understanding the works of the Romantics.

  We will first explore the current philosophical context of the debate. As Robert Pippin cogently points out, the modern subject has been condemned and labeled by many contemporary critics as merely a “bourgeois” fabrication that indulges itself in epicurean egotism, whose illusory nature must be revealed. Given these criticisms, recent Romantic studies tend to underestimate the importance of the autonomous subject that forms the basis of our human freedom, thus disregarding the Romantics’ ambivalence toward its value.

  This ambivalence becomes apparent when we analyze Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” one of the most famous and controversial “Lucy poems,” because “slumber” is the state in which we habitually abandon our conscious self. The performative power of the poem creates a narcotic atmosphere, effectively sealing the “spirit” of the poet (and readers); however, it also leaves space for the irony that regards such abandonment as analogous to death in terms of human freedom. Thus Wordsworth, dealing with this conundrum, uses two logics that are ontologically different and mutually exclusive: the abandonment of the subject and its persistence.

  Lastly, through the detailed analysis of “Three years she grew in sun and shower” and “There was a boy,” we will see the ambivalent state of the poetic imagination, which is both God-given (inhuman) and merely human. The ecstatic state of “slumber” enables the poet to touch the infinite in the realm of eternal truth, but it remains all too human so as not to entirely obliterate worldly notions of freedom. As a result of these readings, I hope to clarify the importance of not only elegantly but also naively re-engaging with the problem of the Romantic subject in the present state of literary criticism.

Political, idealistic, and ethereal—it is a typical image of P. B. Shelley in the tradition of English literary history. In 1970’s, Yasunari Takahashi, with Hidekatsu Nojima and Kenkichi Kamishima, discussed what is called “cerebral eroticism” in Shelley’s poetry. Shelley’s abstract imagery is, according to Takahashi, combined with eroticism (it is likely that this idea came from Susan Sontag and Wilson Knight); such images as caves, coves and the long hair of the west wind give Shelley’s poetry a tinge of cerebral eroticism. This topic, however, has yet to be further explored. My essay examines the co-relation between Platonic or intellectual imagery and sensual feelings, seen through Shelley’s “Jane poems,” love poems addressed to Jane Williams, the wife of his friend Edward Williams. An intensive reading of three Jane Poems, “The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient,” “One Word Is Too Often Profaned” and “To Jane (The Keen Stars Were Twinkling),” focusing on their formal aspects, shows that these poems are imbued with various transient and sensuous images in between heaven and earth, or the sacred and the profane. In so doing, Shelley seems to employ the traditional Platonic images of Venus Urania and Venus Pandemos representing sacred love and profane love respectively (these images are originally from Plato’s Symposium). This article aims to articulate the dynamism of such poetic images produced from the poet’s longing for Jane in between sacred love (Urania) and profane love (Pandemos), and that will enable us to reveal a form of intellectual eroticism in Shelley’s late style, which was to be inherited by D. G. Rossetti via E. A. Poe.