Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate is a research fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

Cry Treedom

Jonathan Bate, 4 November 1993

It must be cause for at least mild celebration that the United States now has a Vice-President who can use the word ‘Cartesian’ in place of one who could not spell the word ‘potato’. In a chapter called ‘Dysfunctional Civilisation’ in his book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore writes that ‘the Cartesian approach to the human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate collection of resources that we can exploit how we like; and this fundamental misperception has led us to our current crisis.’ For Gore, Descartes’s influence has been both cause and symptom of a separation between the mind and nature which has served as Western man’s licence for his ravaging of the environment. An array of Greens from ecofeminists to holistic New Agers share Gore’s hostility to what is seen as the arrogance of the Enlightenment, arguing that we are all now paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this tradition: it is an appeal for spiritual regeneration as much as a manifesto for environmentally-sensitive policies.

Letter

Fundamentals

15 August 1991

The argument of Romantic Ecology was that it might now be useful to read Wordsworth with the grain, as Victorians like Ruskin read him, instead of against it, as the most influential critics of the 1980s read him. John Barrell’s review (LRB, 15 August), which had a lightness and a wit that one does not associate with the prose of his books, was a splendid rebuttal of this contention, in that it showed...

Saint Terence

Jonathan Bate, 23 May 1991

In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly’. But it opens with great generosity, even warmth. I begin with its opening passage, having changed a word here and there, in order to suggest that Oxford has its continuities:

Silly Willy

Jonathan Bate, 25 April 1991

To write well about William Blake you need to be enthusiastic, aphoristic and contrary. It also helps to be slightly mad. You need to begin your book with a paragraph like this:

Letter

Distaste for Leavis

11 October 1990

I am sorry that David Craig and Robert Watson were not amused by the comparison of Dr and Mrs Leavis to the Piranha Twins. Rereading some Leavis recently, I was struck above all by its humourlessness. Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest.

Don’t break that fiddle: Eclectic Imitators

Tobias Gregory, 19 November 2020

The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato,...

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In 1801, Wordsworth congratulated a reader of Lyrical Ballads for identifying the pathos of the poems as ‘the pathos of humanity’ and not ‘jacobinal pathos’; only ‘bad poets and misguided men’,...

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So much in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to assess his actions and literary achievement.

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In a glass case in the garret of a house just off Fleet Street, a historic publishing contract has just gone on display.* It only takes up one piece of paper, rather smaller than a sheet of A4,...

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In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the...

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Gobsmacked: Shakespeare

Michael Dobson, 16 July 1998

‘Soul of the age!’ exclaimed Ben Jonson in the prefatory pages of the First Folio (1616), ‘The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was...

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A Kind of Scandal

A.D. Nuttall, 19 August 1993

Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet. The fact is central to his genius, crucial to the understanding of his work. Shakespeare himself remains visible to posterity; Ovid is now, through...

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Constable’s Plenty

John Barrell, 15 August 1991

The catalogue of the Constable exhibition which opened at the Tate in June is probably the glossiest, the heaviest, the most unwieldy volume ever to accompany an exhibition of the work of a...

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Hazlitteering

John Bayley, 22 March 1990

Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty...

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