| Summary: | This paper is a comparative ecocritical investigation considering the relationship between man
and nature in cross-cultural contexts as reflected in the poetry of two great admirers of nature in
England and Malaysia: William Wordsworth and Ghulam Sarwar Yousuf. Both poets have
composed poetry that strengthens man’s bonds with nature and inspires environmental
consciousness. Their nature poetry has been previously studied from different individual
perspectives, but none has approached it comparatively from an ecocritical stylistic viewpoint.
This study aims at analyzing selected nature poetry to identify the unique philosophy of nature
both poets adopted, highlighting the artistic and aesthetic values their poetry are teeming with.
The study demonstrates the cognitive development of the poets’ environmental consciousness
through three phases of attitudes towards nature; the physical, the intellectual and the mystical.
Using major ecocritical concepts like ecocentrism, symbiotic interrelationship and ecological
consciousness, the study adopts a comparative stylistic approach to scrutinize linguistic and
literary representation of nature in the selected poems. It identifies the similarities and
differences between both poets concluding that despite differences in their times, places,
cultures, language and style, there is an affinity between both poets in their treatment towards
nature. The present study responds to the enormous need for literary-linguistic investigation of
leitmotifs of nature across geographical, cultural, and linguistic contexts as a means of
facilitating environmental sensitivity and sensibility.
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