In recent years a new approach to the study of British Romantic literature has fundamentally altered the kinds of questions posed by literary criticism. This new approach, known as ecocriticism, first emerged into prominence during the 1990s, a period of increasing environmental concern throughout the industrialised world. Jonathan Bate’s influential study Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition was among the first to examine the ecological elements of British Romanticism, arguing that Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature.1 Ecological critics have pondered fundamental questions about the purpose of literary criticism, and of imaginative literature itself, in a time of ever-increasing environmental crisis. In an era of impending threats to the global environment, the emerging discipline of ecocriticism is engaged in a vital re-vision of the fundamental task of poetry. Greg Garrard explains: ‘Environmental problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientific terms, because they are the outcome of an interaction between ecological knowledge of nature and its cultural inflection’.2 Because it often seeks to address perennial questions concerning the relationship between humankind and the natural world, British Romantic poetry has become one of the most important terrains for the development of ecocriticism. Moreover, the canon of British Romantic literature has been broadened and reshaped by the consideration of what constitutes an environmental text.3