Byron and the Politics of Ecology

J. Andrew Hubbell

Two observations are frequently made about British Romantic poetry: that their representations of nature are inherently political; and that their representations of the materiality of nature are a prototype of modern ecology. Usually critics stake one of these positions out in order to attack the other: an ecology in service to politics is no ecology at all; or the attempt to detail the material world is apolitical. This either / or debate fails to acknowledge that definitions of the natural world are always going to have a political valence.

One effect of this debate has been a search for poets who can represent a nature poetry purified of political interest. Thus the interest in finding the poet of pure ecological consciousness has tended to focus attention on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, and Shelley, and less often on Dorothy Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, and Mary Shelley. These writers appear to conform to the extremist assumption that nature is wilderness purified of human presence, that human presence destroys nature, and that only the most primitive of human societies can be harmonious with nature. Nature is thus an escape from politics. Although eco-critics of this decade—Bate, McKusick, Oerlemans, Hutchings—have done away with this binary of “Nature-Culture,” their focus remains on the traditional Romantic nature poets.

Byron’s representation of nature, however, appears not to fit the pattern of Romantic nature poet. The reasons for this are many, but a central one is the fact that the received wisdom is that Byron is a poet of “Culture” not “Nature.” Furthermore, Byron’s ecology and representations of nature are firmly in the service of his politics, violating the still-surviving desire among critics that these interests remain separate and not interpenetrate.

In this conference paper, I will demonstrate how Byron’s nature poetry exhibits an ecological awareness and is part of a political agenda. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and related poems, Byron represents Athens and the surrounding area as a completely integrated ecosystem, a fluid, interdependent whole composed of Nature and Culture, animate and inanimate, flora, fauna, and human. This view of Athens as an ecosystem underwrites Byron’s promotion of Greek insurgency, his passionate attacks on Lord Elgin, and his anti-imperialism, both Western and Eastern. For Westerners like Lord Elgin to remove a “keystone” masterwork such as the Acropolis Marbles from this integrated system was as disastrous as removing a “keystone species” like the grizzly from the Pacific Northwest. Without the “keystone,” the ecosystem cannot recreate itself. In Byron’s ecological politics, the ecosystem of Hellas must be allowed to regenerate itself so that its great product, the concept of Freedom, can re-emerge and take root in the now sterilized, blood-soaked soil of Napoleonic, absolutist Europe. Byron’s later participation in the Greek Revolution can be taken as his final commitment to restoring and preserving the integrity of the region, both environmental and cultural, as the necessary condition for the resurgence of Hellenic culture.

This paper lays the ground for a re-assessment of Byron as a Green Romantic, and for a re-assessment of the part that politics plays in the ecological consciousness of Green Romantics.