The Recurrent Metaphors in English Romantic Poetry: An Ecocritical Rereading of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats

Abstract

In the poetry of William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats, it is possible to observe some recurrent metaphors that are born in and stemming from poets’ similar imagination. All these poets portray in their poems that the poetic imagination as a constitutive factor in poetic creation, and they take human being’s relation to nature as a factor that inspires the imagination to employ mythical and metaphorical modes of expression. Ecocriticism highlights the fact that the literary texts should be examined whether or not they present or study the natural elements and the environment in their narration because romantic poets, who felt the pressure of the modern industrial urban life on both nature and humans, found the refuge in the natural world. Hence the idea of inquiring about the presence of nature in literary works becomes strongly meaningful when English Romantic poetry is studied. Moving from this notion, the aim of this study is thus first shedding light on the afore-mentioned Romantic Era poets’ idea of imagination, and then analysing the functions of metaphors in poems of the First (Wordsworth and Coleridge) and the Second (Shelley and Keats) generations of English Romantic Poets through the theoretical lens of ecocriticism.