This article examines the relevance of romanticism to ecocriticism. It analyzes some cases of contradictory trends and tendencies that can be traced in the thought and literature of the romantic period and considers some of the ways in which romanticism was taken up in the “new world.” It explores romantic conception of Nature and Freedom and the contrapuntal movement of secularization and resacralization. While the article emphasises the diversity of Romantic thought and writing, it suggests that some strands anticipate contemporary postequilibrum ecology.