Attaining the Harmonious Vision through the Natural World Anonymous College

From the 18th to the early 19th century, a wave of Romantic writers rose fervently against the emergence of industrialisation, resisting against the Industrial Revolution’s intrusion upon the natural world. Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and female writers such as Joanna Baillie were among the many Romantic poets rising against this decline of nature. These poets often constructed binaries of the pastoral world and the metropolitan city in their literary compositions, usually privileging the former’s rustic tranquillity over the latter’s cluttered and chaotic landscape. Associated with this preference for the natural world was the Romantics’ pursuit of a harmonious vision, which posits that any being containing a “centre within itself, as well as a centre outside itself” would strive “for greater harmony, [and] unity [in both spheres]" (Miller 85). Essentially, in the hopes of becoming a unified self, the Romantics envisioned an emotional and intellectual union with following: the divine, his physical environment – both of which are classified under the “centre outside” of an individual, as well as his inner self – the “centre within”. With reference to Joanna Baillie’s “London” (1800) and Samuel Coleridge’s “Frost at...