Jónas Hallgrímssons inre och yttre natur

In Romantic Studies, poetical responses to nature have often been placed under such rubrics as pastoral, sublime and even scientific, depending on the general views or characteristics of individual poems, poets or literary traditions. Such rubrics can be questioned on philosophical or ecocritical grounds, especially if they are used to divide poetry into separate categories or fields. However, if taken as co-existing and interconnected discourses or literary modulations, instead of being seen as representing fixed categories, they can be useful in defining the nuanced and often contradictory representation of nature in literature. This understanding of the pastoral, sublime and scientific is put to the test in this article by looking at the poetry of Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–45), who grew up on a country farm in Iceland and later became a geologist by education and profession. As is the case with many a Nordic poet who enjoyed formal education but had rural roots, Jónas’s poetry does not fit easily into any single category, but can be seen to modulate constantly between what we can call pastoral, sublime and scientific, and thus reflects a complicated and creative vision of nature in all its diversity. It bears witness to an ongoing conversation between the poet and nature, and it reveals the constant interplay between an inner and an outer nature, between the subject and material reality