For the Stoics, to live well was to “live according to nature” — to accept the rational order of the cosmos. Lucretius found peace in understanding nature as atoms and void. Medieval writers read nature as God’s second book, full of symbols.
The Romantics made nature a living presence and a moral guide. William Wordsworth felt in the landscape around Tintern Abbey “a presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts”, and called nature “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart”. John Keats made autumn a season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness”; Jean-Jacques Rousseau taught that society corrupts what nature made good — an idea that runs through the creature’s story in Frankenstein, whose first joys are sunlight, birdsong and the moon.
The Victorians lost this faith. After Darwin, Tennyson saw “Nature, red in tooth and claw”; Hardy saw an indifferent universe ruled by “crass casualty”. The modern environmental imagination — the sense of nature as fragile, threatened and precious — descends from both: the Romantic love of wild places and the Victorian discovery that nature is not designed for us.
Thinkers & Authors
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William Wordsworth
The great poet of nature, memory and the growth of the mind — co-author with Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads (1798), which launched English Romanticism, and author of “Tintern Abbey”, the “Immortality Ode” and The Prelude, who taught that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet, philosopher, critic and talker of genius — co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel and Biographia Literaria — whose theory of the imagination shaped Romanticism, and whose life was haunted by opium, debt and unfinished work.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poet Laureate for forty-two years and the voice of Victorian England — author of In Memoriam, “Ulysses”, “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Idylls of the King — whose music, melancholy and struggle between faith and doubt made him the most popular poet of his age.
Emily Brontë
The most mysterious of the Brontë sisters — a solitary, fierce, visionary poet of the Yorkshire moors who, as “Ellis Bell”, wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a wild tale of love, revenge and the elemental passions of Catherine and Heathcliff, and died at thirty.
Thomas Hardy
The stonemason’s son from Dorset who created “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure — tragedies of chance, desire and an indifferent universe — then abandoned the novel and became one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
Sumitranandan Pant
The poet of nature among the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — a child of the Kumaon Himalaya whose Pallav and Guñjan sang of clouds, mountains and beauty — who later turned to Marxist, then Aurobindonian visions of a new humanity, and was the first Hindi poet to win the Jnanpith Award.
Works
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Coleridge’s literary ballad (1798): an old sailor stops a wedding guest and tells how he shot an albatross, how his ship was becalmed and his shipmates died, how he blessed the water-snakes and was saved — and how he must wander the earth telling his tale.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë’s only novel (1847): on the Yorkshire moors, the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw love each other with a ferocity beyond reason; when she marries the gentle Edgar Linton, Heathcliff’s revenge destroys two families across two generations — until, in death, the lovers seem to walk the moors together.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hardy’s tragedy (1891): Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful, poor country girl told she descends from the ancient d’Urbervilles, is seduced (or raped) by the false gentleman Alec, loses her baby, finds love with the idealistic Angel Clare, is rejected by him on their wedding night for her past — and is hanged for killing Alec.
Schools & Movements
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English Romanticism
The revolution in English poetry and feeling from about 1789 to 1832 — Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Byron, Shelley and Keats — which put imagination, nature, the self, childhood and freedom at the centre of literature, alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the novels of Scott and Austen.
Chhāyāvād
The romantic movement of Hindi poetry (c. 1918–1936) — Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala”, Sumitranandan Pant and Mahadevi Varma — which turned from didactic verse to the inner self, nature, love, mysticism and a new music of language, and made modern Hindi a language of lyric poetry.
Explore Next
related by shared connections
John Keats
The Romantic poet of beauty, sensation and mortality — a stable-keeper’s son and trained surgeon who, before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-five, wrote the great odes of 1819, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and some of the finest letters in English.
Victorian Literature
English literature in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) — the great age of the novel (Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy), of Tennyson and Browning, of the sage-writers Carlyle, Ruskin and Mill, and of a society wrestling with industry, empire, class, faith and doubt.
Jaishankar Prasad
Poet, dramatist, novelist and philosopher of Banaras, the first of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — author of the epic Kāmāyanī, the lyric sequence Āṁsū, and historical plays like Skandagupta and Chandragupta that recreated India’s ancient glory.
Mahadevi Varma
The “modern Mīrā” — the fourth pillar of Chhāyāvād, poet of mystical longing for an unseen beloved in Nīhār, Rashmi, Nīrajā, Sāndhyagīt and Dīpśikhā; pioneering feminist essayist of Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ; memoirist of the poor and of animals; principal of a women’s college in Allahabad for decades.
Suryakant Tripathi "Nirala"
The rebel genius of Hindi poetry — one of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — who freed Hindi verse from metre, wrote “Juhī kī Kalī”, “Toṛtī Patthar”, the elegy Saroj Smṛti and the epic “Rām kī Śakti Pūjā”, lived in defiant poverty, and died in Allahabad, half-mad and wholly revered.
Jane Austen
The novelist of “three or four families in a country village” — a clergyman’s daughter whose six comedies of courtship, money and moral growth (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion) perfected the English novel with irony, free indirect style and an unerring eye for self-deception.