Returning To The Spiritual Home

After the industrial revolution in Europe, science and technology have developed rapidly, and human society has made great strides in politics, economy, culture and other fields. However, the environment has been polluted with unforeseen seriousness and destruction, resulting in the imbalance of the ecosystem and giving rise to the survival threat on men themselves. What is worse, ecological imbalance and environmental pollution have rapidly spread into the spiritual space of human beings and secretly corroded their souls. Thus, people have fallen into a serious spiritual crisis, even losing their nature and their spiritual home. What will man do to overcome his spiritual crisis and return to his spiritual home? William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet, lived in the nineteenth century at the dawn of the industrial era, but already saw the crisis brought by industrialization to civilization, and felt the consequent spiritual crisis with spiritual ecological consciousness. Perceiving the degeneration of human nature and decay of the human spirit, Wordsworth believed that Nature has great moral influence on the human heart and mind, that the human spirit can grow up healthily under the impacts of Nature, and that only when man rethinks over Nature and its functions, gets back his nature, and recovers his spirit in a natural stage can he return to his spiritual home. Wordsworth's spiritual ecological consciousnesses mentioned above will provide significant reference for solving the spiritual crisis of the moderns and for building a harmonious society.Through a study of Wordsworth's poetry from the perspective of spiritual ecology this thesis tries to seek a way of hope for the moderns to return to their spiritual home, enlightening modern people to make a new understanding in the field of spiritual ecology.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the background of the selected topic that has inspired this thesis, the present situation of Euro-American and Chinese research on Wordsworth and his poetry, and the guiding theory of spiritual ecology in the thesis together with the innovation and arrangement of the paper. Chapter Two analyzes the background of Wordsworth's spiritual ecological consciousness, which contains Wordsworth's childhood and the influence of the French Revolution and of Rousseau, and summarizes the connotation of his spiritual ecological consciousness. Chapter Three is a spiritual ecological reading of Wordsworth's two representative poems Tintern Abbey and The Prelude, which explores Wordsworth's spiritual ecological consciousness imbued in his poetry. Chapter Four makes an evaluation of Wordsworth's forward-looking consciousness of spiritual ecology and indicates the realistic significance of studying Wordsworth's poetry from the perspective of spiritual ecology both in solving the spiritual crisis of the moderns and in constructing a harmonious society. In Chapter Five, the author of this paper concludes with the results of this research and points out the theoretical significance of the present research in the area of ecocriticism.