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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [168 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [168 onno oerlemans Romanticism and the City Toward a Green Architecture Thirty years ago Raymond Williams pointed to the perceived duality between urban and rural environments as a key aspect of romantic ideology . Surprisingly, while much has been made of the romantic escape to nature, little attention has been paid to the distinctive anti-urbanism in romanticism. I am specifically interested in the collective myth produced through the collaborative poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which Wordsworth comes substantially to ground his poetic creativity and authority in his childhood exposure to rural/natural landscape, and Coleridge correspondingly is able to find a reason for his self-announced poetic failure in his overfamiliarity with urban landscape. It is by no means obvious why for Wordsworth and Coleridge natural landscape should have a surfeit of meaning, while urban landscape is essentially meaningless and thus a threat to personal and poetic identity. Indeed, this should strike us as a paradox. Though it is a common metaphor that the natural environment is a “text” designed by God or nature, it is literally true that urban landscape is a human one, designed with deliberation and intent, and so it should be easier to locate meaning in an urban environment than a seemingly natural one. Why then do these poets regard the city as radically other and hostile to the poetic imagination and the country as ultimately sympathetic to imagination, even if it too can be seen as somehow “other”? I want to answer this question by examining the responses of Wordsworth and Coleridge to urban landscape. This anti-urbanism is part of the legacy of romanticism to contemporary environmentalism and ecocriticism , significantly predating the sources identified by Michael Bennett’s recent investigation of the subject. My goal in this essay is to sketch some of the causes of this anti-urbanism, and to use romantic writing to suggest a way to a “green” architecture that understands the physical construction of buildings and communities in an environmentalist context. The romantic myth of the corrosiveness of the urban environment to the 168 Romanticism and the City 169 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [169 Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [169 imagination has not been carefully examined because it has generally not been taken seriously. Critics have accepted that both Wordsworth’s autobiographical narratives about the growth of his imagination (primarily of The Prelude) and Coleridge’s accounts of his poetic creativity in his early lyrics are self-enabling fictions. Additionally, it has been relatively easy to associate both romantic anti-urbanism and romantic naturalism with an antipathy toward rapid industrialization, and to write off anti-urbanism as a symptom of nostalgia for a simpler rural life. But this view ignores the puzzling ways in which Wordsworth and Coleridge categorized urban and rural landscape. That a specific rural landscape was crucial to Wordsworth’s development as a poet is obvious enough. But few would take seriously the proposition that a natural landscape is critical to the development of poetic genius, which is what Wordsworth argues in The Prelude and Home at Grasmere, and what Coleridge asserts in such lyrics as “The Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight.” Coleridge even argues that an urban environment could impair poetic creativity in general—one of Romanticism’s most romantic ideologies. Even Coleridge does not believe it for long; in the Biographia , as in “Dejection: An Ode,” he points instead to a history of excesses of self-analysis, being too engaged in “metaphysics and in theological controversy ” (8) to sustain his faith in the ability of poetic language to reveal and present truth, and nowhere in his voluminous later writings does he return to the idea that contact with urban landscape impairs the imagination. Yet at least for the time that Coleridge was collaborating closely with Wordsworth, he accepted the notion that engagement with rural landscape promoted a healthy poetic consciousness as well as its seemingly necessary corollary that contact with urban landscape destroyed this. The key idea here is stark...

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