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Recent calls to understand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry as a response to deteriorating environmental conditions insist on a problematic continuity between our own time and the time of Romanticism. This essay explores the aesthetic and ethical possibilities of nescience, or unknowing, as a way to confront uncertain futures. Drawing on the work of William Cowper and Derek Jarman, it considers the discursive relationship between AIDS activism in the 1980s and the nature poetry of the Romantic period and finds in that relationship a philosophical bond between past and present states of being in the dark. This nescient or ignorant epistemology has resonances with Roland Barthes’s writings on Zen as well as with Derek Parfit’s rejection of personal identity and, by extension, of self-interest as a catalyst for moral action.

This article surveys studies in Romanticism over the course of the last decade, focusing particularly on work that engages what might loosely be called ecological concerns. In contrast to standard accounts of "ecocriticism," however, it holds that the most generative work being done in this field and, with these interests at heart, is not explicitly ecocritical. Instead, the article finds in the rhetorically attentive contributions of Romanticist scholars a kind of by-the-way environmentalism that remains admirably cautious about the consequences of a literary criticism deemed activist in and of itself. Building on Merleau-Ponty's concept of the phantom limb, and on Veronica Forrest-Thomson's critique of ref lexively "naturalized" and mimetic interpretations of poetic texts, the discussion groups together critics who adopt and develop what I refer to as a phenomenological formalism. It then pursues the ramifications of this disciplinary turn in very recent works of scholarship situated in the 18th century and Romantic period.Ah! Jockey, ill advisest thou, I wis, To think of songs at such a time as this [.] -Charles Churchill, The Prophecy of Famine (1763)The untimely is never far away.-Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987) Near the conclusion of a luminous essay on 18th-century "eco-georgic," David Fairer cautions that "it is surely invidious to use ecological criticism to fight merely literary battles" (214). The following discussion, comprising a survey of new work in the obvolute fields of Romanticism and ecocriticism, will respectfully disagree. Even as literary studies are more and more determined by ecological pressures -or rather, by a desire to respond meaningfully to those pressures -the greening of criticism raises old questions about the nature and value of representation, and thus about the disciplinary bases of criticism per se. From Plato to Bruno Latour, a philosophical concern over the truth-value of literary texts engenders a moral and political concern over the uses of criticism in a world saturated by misinformation and lies. If literature is artificial and self-contained, if it says nothing about the reality we inhabit, why read at all? If a critic insists that reality is itself a linguistic construct, what makes him any different from the merchants of doubt who treat climate change as an ideological formation and not a scientific fact (see Latour 2004)? The planetary situation is such that it seems we need all the help we can get. It also seems that neither literature nor literary scholars can give us the help we need -

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