NATURE AS A MODE OF EXISTENCE: DUALISM, ESCAPISM, PANTHEISM, AND CO-AUTHORSHIP IN ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY

Romanticism is a movement in art in general encompassing in literature, particularly, various thematic concerns such as individual subjectivity, authorship, imaginative flight, art, dualism of existence, and the experience of rustic life as well as nature. Significantly, as it is revealed by various more recent studies, including those comprised under the umbrella term of “ecocriticism”, the romantic nature is not yet seriously endangered as to raise ecological issues and receive an angry literary retort or require environmental protection. Therefore, the question of the ways in which physical environment is textualised to render the relationship between human being and nature as expressed in romantic literary works is much more complex than the above stated critical clichés, ranging from aspects such as pantheism, dualism of existence, and escapism to those of inspiration and co-authorship as well as nature as a mode of living and an alternative to culture, of which dualism, escapism, pantheism, and authorship are the four cornerstones of the romantic concern with nature. To concretize and strengthen this idea by disclosing the most important aspects of the thematic complexity of the nature poetry and ecopoetical discourse by English romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, the true poets of nature, among others, represents the main purpose of our article.