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European Romantic Review


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Byrons Cultural Ecology


J. Andrew Hubbell

Department of English , Susquehanna University , Selinsgrove,


PA, USA
Published online: 20 Apr 2010.

To cite this article: J. Andrew Hubbell (2010) Byrons Cultural Ecology, European Romantic Review,
21:2, 183-203, DOI: 10.1080/10509581003644014
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European Romantic Review


Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2010, 183203

Byrons Cultural Ecology


J. Andrew Hubbell*
Department of English, Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA, USA

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10.1080/10509581003644014
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hubbell@susqu.edu
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J. AndrewHubbell
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Childe Harolds Pilgrimage is Byrons first major expression of his environmental


consciousness, a product of the existential embeddedness he achieved during his
181011 tour of Greece. Canto 2 represents Greek culture as an evolved outgrowth
of its environment, and Greece as a place that depends upon preserving the
integration of natural and built environments in order to retain its identity as the
spiritual birthplace of European concepts of freedom. This environmental portrait
underlies Byrons Philhellenism and his critique of Lord Elgins removal of key
artifacts of the Greek cultural environment. In later writings, Byron extended this
environmental consciousness to a vision of Europe and the Mediterranean as a
bioregion connected by its waterways. Byrons cultural ecology provokes some
necessary rethinking of key ecocritical concepts, specifically dwelling and
nature, leading to a broader understanding of how writers imagine humanenvironment relationships.

During the fifteen months he traveled through Greece (181011), Byron developed an
awareness of how the environment conditions all facts of existence. Combined with
an extensive study of Greek scholarship, this immersion in Greek cultures and landscapes taught him how a people and their culture evolve from their landscape and
climate. It also enabled him to identify himself with Greece, the place he now saw as
his spiritual home. Byrons outlook thus approximates the environmentality, or
ecological consciousness, that Lawrence Buell and Jonathan Bate have identified in
other writers.1 Byrons environmentality, which I call cultural ecology, made its
first published appearance in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, and it is part of how and
why he positioned himself in that work as a credible advocate for Greece.
Byrons identification with Greece was instrumental in his gaining a reputation in
England as an expert on all Hellenistic issues, and he often flourished his eco-cultural
knowledge of Greece to establish his authority on other issues too. He claimed to
know Greece better than most scholars or European residents because he had not only
studied the published record, he had also achieved a sympathetic identification with
the place through the hard work of existential embeddedness.2
What Byron claims to know is how the weather, landscape, flora, fauna, and
human culture of Greece work symbiotically as an interdependent system. This
cultural ecology underlies both his Philhellenism and his objections to Lord Elgins
removal of the Acropolis marbles. The social ecology is also the basis for his
representations of Greece as a political unit, a nation-state.
This analysis of Byron as an ecological poet and thinker has a number of important
ramifications. For one, it allows us to place him squarely in the nineteenth century
*Email: hubbell@susqu.edu
ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10509581003644014
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J.A. Hubbell

environmentalist movement, and compare his environmentality to other influential


nature writers like William Wordsworth. We can compare Byrons definition of
nature to theirs, and compare their ecological epistemology to his.
This analysis also shows how an environmental imagination is an important
component in the nineteenth-centurys process of nationalization, because it provided
a means for representing diverse communities coexisting in a particular place as an
integrated unit. Byrons cultural ecology makes it possible to imagine the Greek
Nation in the same way that Thomas Lekan has demonstrated that German environmentalism made it possible to imagine the German nation.
Finally, this analysis allows a comparison to Byrons later ecological thinking, in
which he imagines that the entire Euro-Mediterranean area is one interconnected whole,
united by its watershed. This later Byron, who imagines an oceanic aesthetic (to adopt
another term from Buell, Writing 24764), can be usefully compared to Wordsworth,
who imagines a much more limited watershed aesthetic in the Lake District.
I
Except for work by Jonathan Bate,3 Karl Kroeber,4 and Timothy Morton,5 Byron has
not received much attention from ecocritics, so a discussion of his ecology must be
prefaced with some analysis of why this is. One reason is because previous critics
have tended to pigeon-hole Byron as a poet primarily concerned with social, political,
and cultural subjects.6 The second has to do with the interests and critical categories
of ecocriticism, which, until recently, have privileged writers who take rural and wild
nature as their main subject.
Byrons life and works seem to offer little material for an ecocritic interested in a
poets views on nature and ecology. Unlike Wordsworth, who rooted himself in one
place, Byron drifted through many places, mostly urban, aristocratic circles, and satirized place-identification as archaic and provincial. With the exception some stanzas
in Canto 3 of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage and Manfreds monologue in Act 3, there
is very little celebration of wild, sublime nature in Byrons poetry. Byrons antiheroes Harold, Juan, Hassan, Manfred, Conrad seem to celebrate the same kind of
world-weary, alienated, homeless, wandering life that Byron himself lived. These itinerant observer-outcasts make a virtue of their ability to transcend place and refuse
belonging. They portray salvation in the egos ability to preserve itself apart from the
temptations of the Other, especially those represented as domestic and female any
manifestation of Mother Nature.
In his embrace of a liberal, Whiggish cosmopolitanism and the class-based privileges of mobility and access to high culture,7 Byron could in fact be seen as a participant
in what Jonathan Bate has called The Enlightenment Project, the European effort to
scientifically map nature and develop technologies for subduing it to human uses (The
Rights 11).8 The Enlightenment Project depends upon an absolute separation of
human from nature, mind from body or to use the terms from Byrons Manfred, spirit
and clay. This dualistic ontology is necessary for a cosmopolitan life of mobility that
scorns rootedness and place identification as part of agrarian-based culture.
Wordsworth has sometimes been celebrated for place-attachment, for rooting the spirit
in the clay, but Byron often represents the spirit triumphing over its clay by preserving
itself apart, transcending place.
According to Lawrence Buell, First wave ecocritics celebrated the writers who
sought encounters with the sublime, mystical forces of nature in remote outbacks in

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185

order to form an ecocentric Natural Contract to balance the Enlightenments


anthropocentric Social Contract (The Future 21).9 Buell and others have shown
that ecocritical categories developed from environmental philosophy that traces its
lineage back to the very Romantic writers that ecocriticism has tended to focus on,
Wordsworth in particular.10 This gets us to one of the basic problems in first wave
ecocritical studies: ecocritics typically share the same environmentalist world view
with the writers they analyze.11 In this world view, the city and most urban forms of
social and cultural organization stand for the ills of modernism, anthropocentrism, and
a techno-rational domination over nature. As Wordsworth characterizes it in the
Prelude, the city is where humans are most alienated from the harmonies of natures
rhythms, and thus least capable of achieving ecological insight. This is Jonathan
Bates focus in his writings from the 1990s; his analysis of Hardy and Austen shows
how both writers critique a lack of rootedness and a metropolitan brashness [that] are
associated with modernity and corruption (Culture 2).
At the heart of this world view is a nature-culture binary, where nature is defined
as wilderness: unspoiled, pristine, and mostly empty of human presence.12 To date, as
Ralph Pite argues, Romantic ecocritics have privileged this type of nature by focusing
on the writers who prefer what nature can teach to what man has taught, [and find]
true and unalienated life in rural, pre-industrial communities (357). These normative
categories were created, Pite argues, because ecocritics needed to identify what is
specific to ecocriticism and green writing. In one of the defining works of Romantic
ecology, James McKusick articulates these norms and uses Wordsworth and
Coleridge to exemplify them:
Wordsworth and Coleridge are more than just itinerant observers of scenic beauty; they
are dwellers in the landscape of the Lake District, and the poetry that they composed in
that region often adopts the persona of a speaker whose voice is inflected by the local
and personal history of the place he inhabits. Such a perspective may legitimately be
termed an ecological view of the natural world, since their poetry consistently expresses
a deep and abiding interest in the Earth as a dwelling-place for all living things. The word
ecology is derived from the Greek word oikos, meaning house or dwelling-place, and
the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge clearly foreshadows the modern science of ecology in its holistic conception of the Earth as a household, a dwelling place for an interdependent biological community. (McKusick 289)13

Dwelling and oikos have provided two crucial organizing concepts for the
Romantic return to nature, validation of rural life, emphasis on outdoor, wilderness
experience, and critique of urban, industrial, rootless modern life.14 Dwelling is the
process of rooting oneself in the landscape and learning to see that landscape as ones
oikos, the home that nurtures but also determines the life that takes shape within it.
Dwelling is the necessary epistemology for attaining environmentality.
These concepts appear to exclude a poet like Byron, who, with his commitment to
cosmopolitan rootlessness and high, urban-centered culture, seems the very antithesis
of the rooted, rural, ecological Romantic poet. This appearance is false. The concept
of nature that the ecocritical definitions have privileged reveals some false binary
logic, as ecocritics themselves have come to recognize.15 Nature is not opposed to
culture, but is rather the larger phenomenon from which culture evolves. Therefore,
dwelling in rural nature is not the necessary prelude to developing environmentality.
Because any environment, not just wildernesses, can yield ecological insight, perhaps
there are other epistemologies for developing place-identification and imagining the
landscape as oikos. Once these biases sustained by the binary logic of nature v.

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culture have been cleared away, a strong case can be made to include Byron, as Karl
Kroeber has, among the Romantic forerunners of a new biological, materialistic
understanding of humanitys place in the natural cosmos [who] believed that
humankind belonged in, could and should be at home within, the world of natural
processes (25). In the remaining sections of this essay, I examine how Byron came
to be at home in Greece.
II
Byrons travels to Greece opened him to an ecological understanding of human
culture, which influenced his representations of Greece in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage,
and his conception of nature and culture in subsequent writings. His letters from
his travels suggest that he achieved this understanding by throwing himself open to all
experiences that came his way, from rigorous, dangerous, and rustic, to comfortable,
safe, and urbane. He contrasts his stoic endurance of hardship with his companions
complaining:
Fletcher is a poor creature, and requires comforts that I can dispense with, he is very sick
of his travels, but you must not believe his account of the country, he sighs for Ale, and
Idleness, and a wife and the Devil knows what besides. I have not been disappointed
or disgusted, I have lived with the highest and the lowest, I have been for days in a
Pachas palace, and have passed many a night in a cowhouse, and I find the people inoffensive and kind. (Byrons Letters and Journals 1: 250).16

Byron makes a point that he is in Greece for a total immersion experience, and
characterizes his openness as very atypical for most other Europeans in the Levant.
While he made the expected social rounds, he claims to distinguish himself from
other European socialites by engaging in formal studies of Italian, and modern
Greek language, literature, art, and culture, and mixing with all types of people: I
have lived in the houses of Turks, Greeks, Italians, and English (BLJ, 2: 9). He
knew all of the European antiquarians and traveled with Lord Elgins agent, the
landscape painter, Lusieri, and with the British Hellenist, Lord Sligo; he also chose
an eclectic mix of locals as his attendants and involved himself in local affairs (in
both senses).
The result of this immersion is a certain cultural relativism: all countries are
much the same in my eyes, I smoke and stare at the mountains, and twirl my mustachios very independently, I miss no comforts, and the Musquitoes that rack the
morbid frame of Hobhouse, have luckily for me little effect on mine because I live
more temperately (BLJ 1: 240); and also stoic wisdom: I have learnt to philosophize on my travels, & if I had not, complaint was useless (BLJ 1: 229). These ideas
take form in the epigraph for Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, Cantos 1 and 2: The
universe is a kind of book of which you have read but one page when you have seen
only your own country. I have leafed through a sufficient number to have found them
equally bad (1026).17 The point to recognize is that Byron approaches Greece with a
surprising openness to all experiences that will deepen his awareness of the place,
surprising because he is also famous for ironic detachment. This openness is
combined with another surprising tactic (for Byron anyway) temperance. Temperance is characterized as the attitude that allows Byron open himself to a fuller sensory
experience of the Greek environment than Hobhouse who must literally cover up to
avoid destructive impressions by the local inhabitants. Temperance, stoicism, and

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openness discipline the body to experience fully and the mind to see clearly and
completely, creating the opportunity for place attachment.
Byrons immersion is an epistemological method that he used to overcome his
outsider status and speak authoritatively about Greece. In order to clarify precisely the
type and significance of Byrons immersion, it is helpful to use Lawrence Buells
analysis of two other writers, John Muir and Jane Addams, who developed a similar
kind of immersion practice as an epistemological method. These writers, not coincidentally, have been identified as environmentalists, and it is this connection between
immersion, place-knowledge and identification, and environmental consciousness that
I want to emphasize:
Especially striking in this regard is their identification both as persons and as literary personae with specific places: Muir with Yosemite and the Sierras, Addams with the workingclass wards of South Side Chicago. This place identification gave Muir his reputation as
John of the Mountains, Addams hers as the Mother Teresa of Halsted Street But for
each a regime of long-term sympathetic immersion and discipline in place was key to
personal well-being, environmental knowledge, and ethical commitment. Both were selftransplanted outsiders, who then sought to be credible spokespersons and advocates for
their chosen places. Both wondered, as Muir said of the wild creatures of the Sierras, shall
I be allowed to enter into their midst and dwell with them? Both realized that they had
to achieve a bona fide existential embeddedness For both, this required a considerable
measure of voluntary poverty and self-mortifying asceticism. (Buell, Writing 14)

This analysis can be used as a lens for developing a new understanding of Byrons
travels in Greece. His temperate-stoic-immersive travel is the epistemological process
that triggers his environmental unconscious so that he can become aware of how the
Greek environment constructs and is constructed by Greek culture. This epistemology
allows him to develop a complex imaginative identification with Greece as his spiritual oikos. Byron, Muir, and Addams demonstrate that the wanderers existential
embeddedness produces the same kind of ecological vision of oikos as the dweller
in the landscape.
Byrons identification with Greece is just as intense as Muirs and Addams identification with their places or Wordsworths with his.18 Not only did he become a
Greek national hero after his death, he also gained a reputation as Byron of Greece
shortly after his return to England and publications of Greek-inspired works.19 Also
like Muir, Addams, and Wordsworth, Byron became the most notable advocate for his
place. To authorize this position, he references his immersion experience in Greece,
and this became Byrons general strategy for claiming authority to speak on a broad
number of subjects.20
The stages of Byrons ecological insight and identification with Greece are evident
in his letters. One of the memorable incidents that he relates is of an Albanian chief
who provides food and lodging for Byrons entire suite after they have been shipwrecked. Byron offers to pay for this hospitality, but the chief says, no I wish you
to love me, not to pay me (BLJ 1: 230). Byron goes on to rationalize this anti-modern,
anti-European behavior by attributing it to the environment: The fact is, the fertility
of the plains are wonderful, & and specie is scarce, which makes this remarkable
cheapness (BLJ 1: 230). The hospitable manners, a trademark of the heroic Greek
character, are conditioned by the fertility of the unique climate.
This insight gets fuller representation in praises of Monastic Zitza in Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage, Canto II. Byron sees this favourd spot of holy ground as
completely integrated:

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What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!


Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound,
And bluest skies that harmonize the whole. (CHP 2.4279)

The convent and its human population dwells amidst this landscape and shapes its
harmonies into a culture of hospitality and cheer. This hospitality emanates from the
environment: Here winds of gentlest wing will fan his breast, / From heaven itself he
may inhale the breeze (CHP 2.4445). The parallel between the caloyers attention
to the travelers comfort and the prevailing winds suggests an interdependency
between the natural environment and the human culture.
Byrons letters reveal not only his ascetic method of travel and his desire for
embeddedness, but also the reciprocity of this place to his desire. His attitude strikes
the right chord with the people he meets, who respond by welcoming him to embrace
their country to love it, to identify with it, to belong to it. Such an encounter
produces the result it asks for, as Byron does come to love not only the Greeks, but
Greece itself. Following the same process as Muir and Addams, Byron is allowed to
enter into their midst and dwell with them, discovering the key to personal wellbeing, environmental knowledge, and ethical commitment. The more he knows of
Greeks, the more he becomes aware of the shaping influence of Greece, and the more
he feels a sense of identification, belonging, and commitment.
Interestingly, Byrons bonding is set up by prior knowledge of classical Greek
literature, history and art, and that combines with his personal contact to propel a
deeper, denser bonding. When he arrived in Greece, Byron was already fluent in Latin
and ancient Greek, and familiar with modern histories of the area. But as he says to
his mother before his voyage, it is from experience not Books, we ought to judge of
mankind. There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses (BLJ 1:
173). This does not mean that Byron discounts the way books enrich experience,
judging from his study of modern Greek languages and other scholarship under the
Capuchin monks at the Athenian convent where he stayed in the winter of 181011.
A truly intensive immersion meant scholarship as well as experience; bonding is a
work of belonging to the place which happens not only socially, but topographically,
historically, linguistically, and literarily. This is the kind of openness to the materiality of the world that Onno Oerlemans argues is a specific feature of the Romantic
empiricism that defines the specifically Romantic environmentalism (329). These
things have reciprocal effects: indigenous people who are impressed with Byrons
sensitivity, knowledge and awareness, invite him to come further in to continue
loving Greeks and Greece (see BLJ 2: 914).
The poetry Byron writes after bonding with Greece, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage,
the minor poems set in Greece, and the Turkish Tales, are Byrons first ecopoesis, the
imaginative construction of Greece as an ecosystem. They lead to his later, more
comprehensive ecopoesis of the greater Mediterranean Basin as an interdependent
bio-region.

III
Byrons locodescriptions in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage are not simply related to the
physical topography. He actually spends fairly little time describing the scenery.
Instead of constructing Greece as a series of separate picturesque vignettes, Byron
undertakes to map the region in a more complex way, fusing the historical and

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fictional landscapes with his experiential landscape.21 The purpose of this multidimensional mapping is to avoid both the lococentrism of the indigenous people who
know only their present reality, and the ethnocentrism of foreigners who know only
the historical and fictional images of Greece. Byrons multi-dimensional mapping is
possible because he occupies two positions simultaneously as an outsider who seeks
bona fide existential embeddedness, Byron can see with local eyes, but as a classically-trained European, Byron can also see the historical and fictional records.22 This
new mapping allows breakthroughs in poetic form as well as new chartings of
relationships between topography and culture.23
When Europeans traveled to Greece, they experienced a cognitive dissonance
between what they imagined they would see and what they actually saw. From reading
Sophocles, Ovid, Thucydides, Plato, and seeing any number of heroic paintings,
Europeans were prepared to see the ancient Athens of fiction and history. What they
actually saw was a country where people devoted themselves to the unheroic business
of trying to survive as an oppressed people in an occupied city on the western boarder
of the Ottoman Empire, pawns in the 1000 year history of Mediterranean power
struggles. To diminish this dissonance, Europeans tended to isolate themselves in their
European enclaves, and used Orientalism and racialized theories in their published
travelogues to explain the difference between the heroic past and the degenerate
present.
According to Nigel Leask, the typical Levantine travelogue was written by a
European who nostalgically portrays the geography of classical Greece while lamenting the hopeless degeneracy of present-day Greeks. Leask calls this nostalgia for the
past temporalization, and explains how it serves the Whig narrative of Britain as the
Land of Liberty, the successor to the Greece that was (Byron 1036). As Leask,
Malcolm Kelsall, Caroline Franklin, and others have demonstrated, because Byron
rejects temporalization as the exclusive frame for understanding Greece, Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage is not a typical Levantine travelogue (Leask, British; Kelsall,
Once did she 24655; Franklin, Some samples 22142).
In many of his notes to Childe Harold II, Byron directly attacks European temporalization and ethnocentrism by showing how little real knowledge of the present
place and its people Europeans have:
Of the ancient Greeks we know more than enough [but] of the moderns, we are
perhaps more neglectful than they deserve; and while every man of any pretensions to
learning is tiring out his youth, and often his age, in the study of language and of the
harrangues of the Athenian demagogues in favour of freedom, the real or supposed
descendants of these sturdy republicans are left to the actual tyranny of their masters.
(CHP 96)

Nostalgia for ancient Athens combined with ethnocentric scorn of modern Greeks to
create the paradoxes of men who have read superficially of the ancients, and seen
nothing of the moderns (CHP 98).
Byrons notes undercut the self-proclaimed authority of resident Europeans, pointing out their lack of knowledge of present-day Greece: during a residence of ten
years in Athens, [Lusieri, agent for Lord Elgin] never had the curiosity to proceed as
far as Sunium, till he accompanied us in our second excursion (CHP 86). In a note
on Albania, Byron says that with the exception of Major Leake, then officially
resident at Joannina, no other Englishmen have ever advanced beyond the capitol into
the interior (CHP 87).

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This remarkable lack of curiosity is partly due to European arrogance. A smattering of bookish knowledge of ancient Greece, they presume, gives them the authority
to make pronouncements without any further investigation: Athens, for instance, is a
city of which every body, traveler or not, has thought it necessary to say something
(CHP 93). Secure in their superior knowledge of what Greece was, Europeans have
no motive to investigate the present.24 Furthermore, some, like Lord Elgin, have a
stake in maintaining an ethnocentric view of Greeks in general, and the Athenians
in particular as ungrateful, notoriously, abominably ungrateful (CHP 95), because
this justifies their exploitation.
Generally speaking, the Europeans book knowledge was superior to the indigenous Greeks book knowledge, but this, as Byron recognizes, is a classic example of
outsiders scorning insiders for not having the outsiders knowledge or values. Byron
offers a corrective to this imbalance: instead of considering what they have been, and
speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are (CHP 96). Neatly
reversing the ethnocentric perspective of the British, Byron imagines that a Turk in
England would condemn the nation by wholesale, because he was wronged by his
lacquey, and overcharged by his washerwoman (CHP 95). He then asks why the
Greeks are required to be grateful when they are subject to general scorn and abuse.
Without denying that Greece is not the great power it once was, Byron imagines the
world from the Greek perspective and represents Greek knowledge for his European
readers.25
In challenging the opinion of these authorities, Byron references his fifteen month
regime of sympathetic immersion and discipline in Albania, Greece, and Constantinople as his chief authority. His Preface and his notes are filled with reminders that
he is writing on location and has willingly endured a considerable measure of voluntary poverty and self-mortifying asceticism in order to see Greece with native eyes.26
By contrast to the argumentative techniques of the notes, the poetry uses a
dramatic technique that elicits a sympathetic identification with the narrator-Harold
figure. This figure is simultaneously inferior and superior to the reader. As Byron is
at pains to point out in his Preface, Harold never was intended as an example
(CHP 21). But his moral failings are caused by circumstances, and are therefore pitiable. His virtues, on the other hand, are a result of rising above his fate and social
circumstances, and are therefore admirable. For example, Harold follows a heroic and
stoic travelers creed:
Now Harold felt himself at length alone,
And bade to Christian tongues a long adieu;
Now he adventurd on a shore unknown,
Which all admire, but many dread to view:
His breast was armd gainst fate, his wants were few;
Peril he sought not, but neer shrank to meet,
The scene was savage, but the scene was new;
This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet. (CHP 2.37986)

As I have argued, this is identical to the travelers creed by which Byron gains local
knowledge. By inviting his reader to identify with this method, Byron makes available
the process of accumulating local knowledge for his European reader.
This method of dramatizing the experience of a European traveler allows the
reader to have a vicarious immersion experience and the same kind of transformative
insight. Thus, a good deal of the poem recreates attitudes that the European reader can

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be assumed to hold already, attitudes that Byron criticizes in his notes. For example,
in the first stanza of Canto 1, the narrator portrays himself as the typical European
poetic pilgrim seeking the traditional source of inspiration at Delphi or on Parnassus,
sigh[ing] oer Delphis long-deserted shrine, / Where, save that feeble fountain, all is
still (CHP 1.67). Voicing the stereotypical nostalgia of European temporalization
allows Byron to objectify this attitude for his audience. Intertwining first- and thirdperson narrative voice dramatizes the European perspective on Greece, but also
demonstrates its limits. From a European perspective, Athens and the Parthenon do
seem uncanny, surviving in ruins despite the forces aligned for their destruction. This
sympathetic presentation of the Europeans real experience provides an opening for
Byron to go beyond the simple explanations of temporalization or ethnocentrism.
The insufficiency of temporalization is implied when the narrator addresses
Athena in the first stanzas of Canto 2:
Ancient of days! august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were:
First in the race that led to Glorys goal,
They won, and passd away is this the whole?
A school-boys tale, the wonder of an hour! (1015)

The narrator, representing the typical European, confronts the sense of past-present
paradox, and this spurs him to question whether the school-boys tale of ancient
Athens, told in history and literature, is the whole meaning of Greece. In the poem,
the search for the whole takes place as the narrator engages more and more closely
with the reality of the present day setting, even as he remembers the historical and
fictional meanings of that setting. Though knowledge of classical Athens has fed a
false, ethnocentric way of defining Greece, history is nevertheless an important part
of the definition. It is a starting point for developing a deeper, truer bond.
Everywhere a European would look, reminders of past greatness would leap
forward, memorialized in the famous landmarks. The spirit of freedom represented by
these ancient landmarks coexist with a very different social geography, dominated by
landmarks of Ottoman despotism.
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslavd; in word, in deed unmannd.
In all save form alone, how changd! (CHP 2.7045, 70811)

Given these two conflicting geographies, the European Hellenist understandably


longs for the heroic one he knows and loves. But in the notes, Byron challenges a
Europeans desire for the map of the shadowy past because it leads to a very static
view of the present: it seems to me rather hard to declare so positively and pertinaciously, as almost every body has declared, that the Greeks, because they are very bad,
will never be better (CHP 95).
While the prose attacks temporalization directly, the poem, through the mediation
of the embedded narrator, shows how the past and present have striking similarities.
The celebration of Carnival suggests that modern Greeks have the same desires as
their ancestors:

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who
That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye,
Who but would deem their bosoms burnd anew
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their fathers heritage. (CHP 2.71116)

The narrator sees that the Greeks are aware of the difference between the present
circumstances and their fathers heritage, represented in the ruins that dot their
landscape. However, the Greeks are no more capable of seeing how to reconcile the
geography of ancient, heroic Athens with the geography of present-day, occupied
Athens. They imagine that European powers will give them back their fathers heritage: For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh, / Nor solely dare encounter hostile
rage, / Or tear their name defild from Slaverys mournful page (CHP 2.71719).
Through the privileged mediation of the outsider-insider narrator, readers can see that
the indigenous Greeks know too little about how their ancestors achieved greatness,
and thus how they themselves will be able to recover their ancestral heritage, a point
the narrator stresses in lines addressed to modern Athenians: know ye not / Who
would be free themselves must strike the blow? / By their right arms the conquest
must be wrought? (CHP 2.7202).
The solution is a fusion of outside, European knowledge of the past and indigenous, local knowledge of the present. The idea that ages of oppression incapacitated
the oppressed for successful revolt repeats British analyses of the French Revolution, such as Mary Wollstonecrafts, but Byron is careful to trace that theory to a
modern Greek satirist, who represents the Greeks as having internalized their slave
status. However, looking at the problem of Greek oppression through local eyes
does not prohibit the narrator from also offering a European lesson on military
intervention: Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same (CHP 2.727).
Europeans know from experience that intervention leads to colonialism, and if the
Greeks ask Europeans to liberate them from the Ottomans, then they will merely be
vassals of a new lord.
While the notes present examples of Europeans who make the fatal mistake of
judging the Greeks without knowing the specifics of the Greek situation, the poem
shows that there continues to be an abundance of life, wit, playfulness, and Love in
present-day Greece: Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy rosy band redeem Lifes
years of ill! (CHP 2.7713). While todays joy must be somewhat feigned under
Ottoman oppression, its continued existence suggests that the present is not
completely different from the past. Carnival exposes the inadequate binary opposition
in the past-present paradox that Westerners use to map Greece. If the transitory freedom and joy of Carnival exists, could the spirit of freedom also exist? Where?
These are the questions that the poem moves on to consider, and in doing so,
presents a more inclusive construction of the place. This is where the embedded
outsiders knowledge pays off, for he alone is able to see the power that drives the
Greek culture as evolving from its specific environment. If the Greeks, taken generally, have degenerated from that sublime record / Of hero sires (CHP 2.7901), their
environment has not:
Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smild,

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And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields;


There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendelis marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair. (CHP 2.81927)

Like the fire sparkling in each eye and the sounds of Carnival, the natural landscape
of Greece embodies a living power: Thy vales of ever-green, thy hills of snow /
Proclaim thee Natures varied favorite (CHP 2.8034). In his notes, Byron reiterates
this claim: the very situation of Athens would render it the favourite of all who have
eyes for art or nature. The climate, to me at least, appeared a perpetual spring (CHP
93). As Natures favorite, Athens and Greece are sustained by a climate that encourages rebirth a perpetual springtime, young Love and this environment produces
its culture.
These statements repeat similar claims Byron made elsewhere about Greek
hospitality in his letters when, after being rescued from shipwreck off the Albanian
coast, he ascribed the remarkable hospitality he experienced to the landscape and
climate, and in the passages about Monastic Zitza in Canto 2. If the human culture
of hospitality flows directly out of the shady trees and gentle breezes at Zitza, then the
spirit of freedom can be said to flow out of Athens perpetual springtime.
With his sensitivity to the wild crags, sweet groves, verdant fields, and gilding
summer sun, Byron provides a map of the physical place that is identified with youth,
wildness, freedom, and joy. This map is compatible with the fictional and historical
geography of the Western Hellenist and the social and physical maps of the contemporary Greek. From the composite map, it is possible to reconcile the present with the
past, and see Greek culture as temporally, spatially, and socially constructed. With
this map in hand, Byron teaches his Western readers how to see Greece. Just as the
ancient Greeks evolved from their environment to construct the greatest civilization
of the ancient world, so also modern Greeks devolved back into it. The ancient
temples and marbles are described as extensions of the land they are built from and
upon:
Thy fanes, thy temples to thy surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic plough
So perish monuments of mortal birth,
So perish all in turn, save well-recorded Worth; (CHP 2.8059)

This passage represents the great heroic past flowing out of the land, but then ebbing
back into the land over the course of time. The things that were created crumble back
into earth, but the power that created them is conserved:
Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crushd thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athenas tower, but spares gray Marathon. (CHP 2.82836)

For Byron, the power that enabled the Greeks to create the greatest civilization on
earth was the spirit of freedom. This is an energy that flowed out of Natures varied
favorite ground of perpetual spring and into the Greek psyche and culture.

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While the record of what Greece was can still be read in the material remains of
that culture, the energy that created them, like sap in winter, has ebbed back into the
ground into the hills and dales, glens and wolds, and especially into the landscape
of Marathon:

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The sun, the soil, but not the slave, the same;
Unchanged in all except its foreign lord
Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame
The Battle-field, where Persias victim horde
First bowed beneath the brunt of Hellas sword,
As on the morn to distant Glory dear,
When Marathon became a magic word;
Which utterd, to the hearers eye appear
The camp, the host, the fight, the conquerors career. (CHP 2.83745)

There is no monument on Marathon, just the plain itself. Yet the power that made
Marathon a magic word has merely sunk back into the soil. The spirit of freedom
that once inspired Athenians to undertake the heroic task of defending their land and
culture from imperial Persia still resides in Greece, though not in present day Greeks.
It can be seen in the sun, the soil, the sky, the crags, the groves, and the blithe bee
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air. The human inhabitants may have
allowed themselves to become enslaved by foreign conquerors, and no longer manifest the spirit of freedom that drove their ancestors, but the land still defies the power
which crushd thy temples. The land still retains its spirit of freedom and is still
vigorous and inspiring, even though the human population and its material culture
devolves.
Byrons ability to read the dramatic moments of Athenian history in the present
Greek landscape suggests an important political function for his ecology. Because
his existential embeddedness has allowed him to see the full social ecology, he is
able to lay the theoretical foundation for imagining Greece as a unified nation,
despite the actual disunity of its inhabitants. Unlike the Greek people, the Greek
landscape, scenic landmarks, and indigenous flora and fauna [are] natural monuments that anchored the organic foundation of national identity (Lekan 4). In his
discussion of German nationalism, Thomas Lekan points out that the assertion that
there is an organic link between a people and its landscape was one of the most
powerful rhetorical means for grounding national identities and geographic
features [were used] to endow the nation with a sense of longevity and permanence
(12). The landscape symbols Byron identifies are united with the cultural symbols
and the Greek people in order to create a greater sense of unity and longevity. Thus
the landscape symbols resolved the problem of glorious past and deficient present
by projecting the unalterable meaning of Greece into the places that Europeans and
Greeks could continue to experience. While this imagined nation does not correspond to the actual social or political situation in Greece, past or present, the idea
has enormous power for Greeks who needed a rallying concept to organize their
insurgency, and for Europeans who needed an identifiable political entity to support.
Presenting Greece as the national home of the Spirit of Freedom and grounding that
idea in an ecological description of place anticipates the nationalist ecologies of
nineteenth century Europe and provides Byron with a powerful rhetoric for his
Philhellenism (see Lekan 818).

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Because the meaning of the place is constructed on the dimensions of time and
space, the present culture and its received literary reputation, it can take on the identity
as the birthplace and continued home of the spirit of freedom. This is the place that
gave birth to the Western concepts of political and personal freedom, and Western
Europeans, under threat of having their own freedom snuffed out by Napoleons
imperialism, can return to be rejuvenated at its spiritual wellspring:

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Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past


Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng
The parted bosom clings to the wonted home,
If aught thats kindred cheer the welcome hearth. (CHP 2.85565)

Pensive (European) pilgrims searching for home, the place where they belong spiritually, find their kindred cheer in this place. With this kind of place identification,
Byron is constructing Greece in terms ecocritics would recognize as the oikos. Greece
is an oikos of European freedom.
But pilgrims cannot return to their spiritual oikos unless that entire ecosystem
remains intact. Precisely for this reason, Byron insists that the depredations of the antiquarians, especially Lord Elgin, are the greatest threat Greece faces. Because the idea
of Greece is imagined as an energy exchanged within an integrated social geography,
that idea is threatened by actions that disrupt the energy flow. The Ottoman despotism
has driven the energy underground, but Lord Elgin and his antiquarian colleagues
threaten to cut it off completely. By taking the symbolic monuments, they are engaging in a kind of exploitative resource extraction of the social geography.27 Byron
strenuously disagreed with this policy and pointed out the flaws in its practice. Not
only did Elgin destroy a good deal of the temples and marbles in his excavations, he
also destroyed the integrity of the remnants. Most important, he destroyed the continuity between the environment and the culture, and thus the organic foundation of
Greece as a nation. Once the artifacts had been removed to the British Museum, they
had no contact with the soil, air, sun, and groves that had given them their power.
They lose their place of belonging in the oikos of freedom, becoming merely pretty
rocks, incapable of inspiring the sympathetic imagination with a perception of what
civilization could be under the Spirit of Freedom. It is the magic waste, complete and
whole, that embodies the Spirit of Freedom. Unless that spirit can be read as having
literally gone underground, leaving the material culture and human population to
molder back into the ground of their existence, then the spirit of freedom will never
be imagined to arise again. That reading depends on leaving the ruins in place.
Byron concludes the narrative of Canto 2 with this warning to European pilgrims:
Let such approach this consecrated land,
And pass in peace along the magic waste:
But spare its relics let no busy hand
Deface the scenes, already how defacd!
Nor for such purpose were these altars placd:
Revere the remnants nations once reverd:
So may our countrys name be undisgracd,
So mayst thou prosper where thy youth was reard,
By every honest joy of love and life endeard! (CHP 2.87381)

As Byron proposes in these lines, European prosperity depends upon preserving the
integrity of the place where thy youth was reard. If Europe is to be reborn from the

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ashes of its Napoleonic wars, destructive capitalism, and Enlightenment modernity, if


its civilizations are once again going to embrace the spirit of freedom, then the
sustaining environment and home of this spirit must be intact. Europeans must be able
to return to their Hellenic origin and draw its empowering magic for their own reconstruction. The integrity of Hellenic culture and environment is at least as important for
Europes future as it is for prophesizing a future independent Greek nation. In this
respect, Greece, as the oikos of European Freedom, is interrelated with all of
Europe.28
For this reason, if free Britannia bears / The last poor plunder from a bleeding
land (CHP 2.11314), then Britannia will cut itself off at its root and destroy its own
place identity.29 To continue to define itself as free Britannia, Britain must preserve
the place where that freedom originated. To break this interdependency is analogous
to breaking other interdependencies in the ecosystem it leads to a diminishment and
instability in that system. In sum, Britain ignores its affiliation with Greece as the
oikos of freedom at its peril. At stake are Britains ability to identify itself as a place
of freedom, and its ability to gain inspiration for defending the spirit of freedom from
Napoleon.
Byrons ecology is firmly entrenched in his politics. He turns to an ecological
description in order to construct a sense of place that is sensitive to the interdependencies of historical change, literary meaning, social organization, and natural environment that he witnessed as a traveler. He presents this ecological description of Greece
to his European readers so that they can understand how the spirit of freedom evolved
from the environment of Greece, which continues to be the sacred home of freedom,
and as such, must be preserved intact. Contact with this meaning of Greece is also
important for helping the British to see how Greece and Britain are interdependent.
These are the first broad strokes of a massive, pan-European ecology that will not be
more finely detailed until Byrons continental wanderings.
IV
Childe Harolds Pilgrimage demonstrates that neither the ethnocentrism of the
foreigner nor the lococentrism of the native provides a complete understanding of
Greece. Byron identifies not just the built environment and human history-centered
places as worthy of care, but also the natural environment, out of which the human
environment evolved. Greece without its history is not Greece, but Greece without
its natural environment is inconceivable. Likewise, Europe without the Greek experiments in personal and political freedom would not be Europe, but Greece without
Europes development of the ideas and practices of freedom is no more than a historical anomaly. These more metaphysical interrelationships between Europe and Greece
are grounded in the waterways that connect the two places, as Byron made clear in his
writing. His emphasis on water as the link connecting Greece and England is a multicontinent form of what Lawrence Buell calls a watershed aesthetics, which is a
defining gestalt for an ecocultural understanding of peoples defined by waterways
(Buell, Writing 246).30
While England has long been imagined as a sceptered isle [a] precious stone
set in the silver sea, and its people a seafaring race, that image has been primarily
a defensive one, designed to separate England from the rest of the world as this other
Eden. Ocean-as-defensive-wall was a potent image during the Napoleonic wars. But
Byron swimmer of the Hellespont, and resident of the great port cities of Athens,

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Rome, Venice, and London experiences the ocean as a great connector, both unifier
and leveler. Byron represents himself, like Harold, as the gloomy wanderer oer the
wave:

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I have swum more miles than all the rest of them together now living ever sailed and
have lived for months and months on Shipboard; and during the whole period of my
life abroad have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the Ocean. Besides
being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it. (The Complete Miscellaneous
Prose 131)

His lifelong experience of the ocean as a fluid medium linking the land prepares him
to recognize the unity of the greater Euro-Mediterranean Basin.
Byrons travels would have made him aware of how Britain, Oceans queen, is
linked by its shipping lanes to the entire Euro-Mediterranean Basin. In Childe Harold,
Canto 2, this awareness is given shape in his descriptions of the way Elgins marbles
are being shipped oer the long-reluctant brine (99) back to England. The ocean
annihilates the distance, enabling Britain to have economic, cultural and colonial
interests in Greece: Curst be the hour when from their isle they rovd, / And once
again thy hapless bosom gord, / And snatchd thy shrinking Gods to northern climes
abhorrd! (CHP 2.1335). The sea-lanes open Greece to Elgins depredations, but
Byron imagines that the connection can also be more productive.
This idea does not really come to fruition until Canto 4, when Byron identifies the
ocean as the great unifier and leveler:
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to desarts: not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves play
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creations dawn beheld, thou rollest now. (CHP 4.16308)

Empires stop at the shore, but it is the ocean that lends them their power and takes it
away.31 Not only does the ocean falsify the arbitrary, land-based divisions of the
world into metropolitan centers and peripheral outbacks, it also allows people to
imagine communities across time and space:
The midland ocean breaks on him and me,
And from the Alban Mount we now behold
Our friend of youth, that ocean, which when we
Beheld it last by Calpes rock unfold
Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolld. (CHP 4.15715)

Byrons vision of the ocean is a powerful idea for seeing the interdependence and
connectedness of all places and peoples. While his cultural ecology of Greece identifies that place as a specific, integral unit, interdependent within itself, his ocean-based
watershed aesthetic connects Greece to England, and both to a larger continental
region: as Buell concludes, Thinking watershed in these terms challenges parochialism not only of jurisdictional borders of whatever sort but also of natural borders

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that fail to take larger interdependencies into account, interdependencies that finally
reach out to include the whole planet (Buell, Writing 264).
This concept provides a useful way of comparing Wordsworths watershed
aesthetics of the Lake District to Byrons oceanic aesthetics. Ecocritics have
contended that Wordsworths ecological sense derives from his intimacy with the
natural world of the Lake District, of his perception of the area as an interdependent,
integral unit. His ecological knowledge is a product of his strategy of knowing this
place his commitment to belonging, to dwelling, to rootedness. From his rootedness,
Wordsworth is able to attain the kind of existential embeddedness that gives him the
imaginative insight into his place as a place. Rootedness becomes a practice (an end
in itself), a means of knowing, and a theory of being. His model of rootedness has
become the dominant model the litmus test really for discerning a writers
ecological consciousness.
But cannot this devotion to rootedness lead to its own shortsightedness? The
mountain fastness that Wordsworth describes with such ecological understanding
becomes a utopian region cut off from the world that surrounds it or so Wordsworth
imagined in his vision of a republic of freeholders.32 The boundaries that
Wordsworth erects are both meaningful and false: the Lake District is a bio-region
with its own natural boundaries, defined primarily by the watershed. But this very
vision makes it impossible to insist upon the separateness of this region from other
regions: from a watershed perspective it is impossible to forget that country is
destined to flow into city by gravitational laws more inexorable than the historic
urbanization process itself; city is destined to remain integral with the half-forgotten
hinterland it thinks it has displaced (Buell, Writing 264).33 Wordsworths devotion
to dwelling tends to harden into parochialism when he forgets that his region is not
isolated from other regions.
Byrons oceanic aesthetic avoids parochialism. His strategy of knowing is wandering, the obverse of Wordsworths, but it is also a practice, a way of knowing, and a
theory of being. And just like Wordsworth, Byrons strategy of knowing earns him the
bona fide existential embeddedness that allows him to imagine place ecologically.
Dwelling or wandering, the result is the same: an ecological awareness of the
interdependence of humans and the natural environment, and of the interdependence
of environments. A greater consideration of Byrons ecological understanding can
help us deepen and complicate our picture of environmental discourse in the early
nineteenth century.

Notes
1. For Buells discussion of these terms, see Writing 1827 and 9563. Bates chapter, The

Naming of Places (Romantic Ecology), also develops terminology for analyzing literatures construction of place.
2. The source of this phrase, which will play an important part in my argument, comes from
Buell, Writing14.
3. In Song, Bate discusses Darkness as one of the earliest explorations of eco-cide (948).
In the same work, Bate also devotes part of a chapter to Byrons principle of Tuism, an
openness to thinking ecocentricly, as opposed to Wordsworths anthropocentric focus on
the solitary human communing with a metaphysical force called nature he argues that
Byrons vision of the world as an interspecies community contrasts with Wordsworths
solipsistic ecology (18294).
4. Although the scope of Kroebers book does not permit extensive analysis of Byron, he does
explore the broadly environmental factors conditioning the first murder in Cain.

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5. In Byrons Manfred and Ecocriticism, Morton suggests that the theatrical environment of

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Manfred functions as a reminder of how the self is embodied and conditioned by nature,
but this reading provides a jumping off point for Morton to critique normative ecocriticism
for its positivist definition of nature. Morton proposes that Byron has been neglected by
Romantic ecocritics because of the false categories ecocritics have used to define environmentalism, especially nature, but also because of an uncritical absorption of the received
opinion that Byron is the ultimate rebel against the Romantic back-to-nature movement.
I am following this same line of argument, though very differently and in somewhat greater
detail. The coincidence is accidental (Mortons essay was published long after my argument had taken public shape at conferences), but it indicates the timeliness of ecocritical
work on Byron.
There is also the related problem of the legacy of Romantic criticism, which used to define
Romanticism as nature poetry. In his massive tome, Joseph Beech dismisses Byron as one
who has the least tincture of the philosophical, the transcendental [interpretation of
nature] (35). Likewise, there is an argument to be made that Harold Bloom and M. H.
Abrams exclude Byron from their canon of Romantic writers because they also equate
Romanticism with nature poetry and do not see how Byron fits the definition.
Malcolm Kelsall explores the philosophical and poetic consequences of Byrons political
affiliation to the liberal wing of the Whig party in Byrons Politics. Kelsalls analysis of
Byrons commitment to direct-action, anti-colonial politics in Greece, and the relation of
those politics to a Spirit of Freedom invoked in his poetry, are particularly relevant to my
essay: see 513.
See also Bates complication of this critique of Enlightenment Discourse in Song 2467;
Max Oelschlaeger, studying the history of philosophical and scientific definitions of nature,
names this discourse the Baconian-Cartesian view of nature (6896). He argues that the
Romantic idea of nature-as-an-organism contrasts with the Enlightenment-Modernist
idea of nature-as-a-machine (97132). Donald Worster also organizes the responses
coming out of seventeenth and eighteenth century natural philosophy around a binary opposition, Arcadian ecology and imperial ecology, the latter corresponding to Oelschlaegers Baconian-Cartesian view and Bates Enlightenment Discourse, and the former
corresponding to the Romantic view (255).
Buell goes on to say, for first-wave ecocriticism, environment effectively meant natural
environment. In practice if not in principle, the realms of the natural and the human
looked more disjunct than they have come to seem for more recent environmental critics
The paradigmatic first wave ecocritic appraised the effects of culture upon nature, with
a view towards celebrating nature, berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through
political actions (Future 21). See also the way Jonathan Bate uses Michael Serres argument from The Natural Contract to define his analytic categories (Bate, Song 99104).
Others include William Cronon; Gary Snyder in the chapter, The Etiquette of Freedom
and Hayden Whites particularly useful essay. Raymond Williams covers much the same
ground in Ideas. For an attempt to parse the real wild of real nature, see Jack
Turner. Max Oelschlaeger summarizes some of the more doctrinal positions in his chapter,
Contemporary Wilderness Philosophy: From Resourcism to Deep Ecology. These
works reveal the persistence of the nature-as-wilderness definition that has tended to
enforce the reductive nature-culture, anthropocentrism-ecocentrism binaries that pervade
much environmentalist discourse, greatly limiting that discourse both intellectually and
rhetorically.
James McKusick provides a thorough summary of Wordsworths influence on the environmental movement, particularly the influence of British Romantics on American environmental writers. Wordsworths influence on the creation of the National Trust Park System
has been tracked by Bate, Romantic Ecology, and Steven Gill. Although I cite McKusick
as one of the first-generation ecocritics who overemphasize wild nature, dwelling, and the
rest of the Wordsworthian ecology, all Romantic ecocritics are indebted to his excellent
review of Romantic critical history and environmental literary history, as well as his astute
interpretations of Romantic ecology.
In Nature and Culture, Morton calls attention to the problem of Romantic ecocritics
inheriting a deep ecology discourse of nature and culture that originates in the Romantic
Period. He concludes that Shelley used these categories ambivalently, but was open to the
idea that they are two sides of a whole, not opposites. His essay implies a call for rethinking

200

13.
14.

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15.

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

23.

24.

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the way Romanticists have applied these categories to divide Romantic Period writers into
nature or culture affiliations, and is an important precursor to this essay on Byron.
McKusick also claims that a true ecological writer must be rooted in the landscape,
instinctively attuned to the changes of the Earth and its inhabitants (24).
Kate Rigby provides a thorough analysis of the definition and practice of dwelling as it
comes out of Heidegger and applies to eco-philosophy.
In The Future of Environmental Criticism, referencing Michael Bennetts 2001 study of
urban environmentalism and the 2002 Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Joni
Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, Buell writes, second-wave ecocriticism has
tended to question organicist models of conceiving both environment and environmentalism. Natural and built environments, revisionists point out, are long since all mixed up
Literature-and-environment studies must develop a social ecocriticism that takes urban
and degraded landscapes just as seriously as natural landscapes Its traditional
commitment to the nature protection ethic must be revised to accommodate the claims of
environmental justice (22). Robert Kerns essay also provides a useful review of
ecocriticisms evolution. Important second wave ecocritical challenges include Armbruster
and Wallace and Timothy Morton, Ecology.
All future references to Byrons letters are from this edition and will be cited by the
acronym BLJ, with volume and page number.
All citations of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage will be from this edition and identified as CHP
with either line numbers (for the poetry) or page numbers (for the notes).
The identification of Byron with Greece is covered by Protopsaltos and Rutherford.
Byron received a good deal of praise for the accuracy of his analysis of the Greeks; for
example, see his letter to Edward D. Clarke, BLJ 3: 199200; and the tribute paid by
Colonel Charles Napier recorded in Thomas Moore 607.
For one of the more extreme versions of this, see Byrons Letter to John Murray Esq (The
Complete Miscellaneous Prose 11983, and especially 1314).
I am influenced by Buells analysis of the five dimensions of place-connectedness
(Writing 6474).
This statement needs to be qualified. I am speaking of degrees of difference and using a
terminology that reflects that difference. Unfortunately, the terms have the tendency to
sound monolithic and binary: local v. outsider. Nor do I wish to imply that Byron fully
occupies the subaltern position merely that he has labored through physical and mental
discipline to empathize with that position in a way that is unusual for a European of his
time. His labor and empathy ought not to be overlooked. Peter Kitson hits the right note, I
think, in his analysis of how Byrons Eastern Tales complicate the conclusions of much
post-colonial criticism. He suggests that Byrons cosmopolitan, cultural relativism led him
to criticize both West and East. My ecocritical analysis could be used to refine the postcolonial analysis even farther because Byrons knowledge of the East is not just textual,
his portraits of the East are not just Orientalist. In fact, Byrons ecological representation
of Greece is designed to challenge and displace the typical Orientalist portraits.
Jane Stabler has described the way Byrons digressive style reflects his political views
(2326). I suggest a modification of her argument: Byrons digressive style reflects his
ecological views. Jonathan Bate makes a similar connection between style and ecology in
his analysis of John Clare: the universal rights of nature cannot effectively be declared in
a systematic treatise; they can only be expressed by means of celebratory narrative. They
require not an Enlightenment project but a Romantic riot of sketches, fragments and tales
narratives of community, reminiscences of walking and working, vignettes of birds and
their nests, animations of children and insects and grass (The Rights 11). See also Angus
Fletchers work on ecology and style (2356). The ecology of style is another point of similarity between Byron and other Green Romantics.
Even those who should know better, such as Mr. Fauvel, the French consul, who has
passed thirty years principally at Athens, who gives his opinion that the Greeks do not
deserve to be emancipated; reasoning on the grounds of their national and individual
depravity, while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only
be removed by the measure he reprobates (CHP 95). Refusing contact with the indigenous
and non-European populations reinforces the ethnocentrism of European commentators,
who have no other information to counter their prejudices and their focus on ancient
Greece, and therefore nothing to challenge their ethnocentrism.

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25. Leask argues that Byron scorns the travelers self-interested motives, which created what

26.

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27.

28.

29.
30.
31.
32.

33.

Leask calls, the polemic of Ottoman Greece. Byron takes a neutral, detached position in
this polemic, a result, in Leasks opinion, of Byrons commitment to understanding modern
Greeces language, literature, and culture (Byron 10615). Saree Makdisi credits Byron
with anthropological neutrality (12334). Like Leask, Makdisi argues that CHP encodes
a counter history to the Whiggish version of Libertys transition from Greece to Britain.
Byrons anthropological neutrality is also evident in his letters during his affair with
Teresa Guiccioli, see BLJ 7: 201.
See, for example, his response to the Edinburgh Review article, inspired and authorized by
the spot where I now write (CHP 98). He goes on to say: the few observations I have
offered I should have left where I made them, had not the article in question, and above all
the spot where I read it, induced me to advert to those pages which the advantage of my
present situation enabled me to clear (CHP 102).
Nigel Leask makes the point that Byron critiques Elgins antiquarianism as the wrong kind
of Hellenism and symptomatic of the rapacity of British imperialism from Ireland to India
(British 358). Im greatly influenced by Leasks scholarship on Byrons difference from
European panhellenism.
My argument loosely follows McGanns theory that the renewal of Greece is the object
correlative for Byrons desire for the renewal of Western culture generally (260). Franklin
also makes the point that, for Byron, liberating Greece was a way for decadent European
nations to return to the pure springs of Western culture, which is necessary for regenerating
Europe itself (2402).
This logic is continued in Byrons statement, Free born men should spare what once was
free (CHP 2.97), because the act of sparing what once was free proves that those men are
themselves free.
Gary Snyders chapter, The Place, the Region, and the Commons, also provides a helpful
analysis for thinking about Byrons construction of a bio-region (2547).
Watershed, as a defining image of community, has the additional advantages of being a
quick and easy way of calling attention to the arbitrariness of official boarders (Buell,
Writing 246).
For his idealizations of closed mountain fastness, see The Excursion 2.31569. It could
be argued that Wordsworth is aware of the utopian falseness of this closed world because
it is identified as the home of the Solitary, who the Wanderer and Poet are attempting to
reconnect to society. A less ambivalent statement appears in Home at Grasmere:
Embrace me, then, ye Hills, and close me in (129).
See also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City.

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