4 - Wordsworth: the politics of landscape

Summary

Wordsworth's tour of Scotland was made in 1803, and he visited many of the places seen by Gilpin in 1776. And throughout his career he retained an interest in Gilpin (he bought the Observations on the Lakes in 1796), as he did in Price (with whom he corresponded and whose picturesque estate he visited in 1810) and in Thomson and Johnson (whose critical ideas he modified in his own discussion of the poetry of inscriptions). The responses he made to these writers changed, however, for reasons to do both with his own changing conception of his social role as a poet and with his altered perspective on the politics of landscape (the landscape of Britain and of Europe). In this chapter I want to examine those changing conceptions as they manifest themselves in his poetry, in his thinking about poetry and in his politics. And I shall examine Wordsworth's politics in the light of Johnson's conflict between support of property, paternalism and patronage on the one hand, and his self-empowering rhetoric on the other. I shall focus too on the conflict between written tradition and unreliable oral culture that was already evident in Johnson and Gilpin.

I shall not, however, simply be attempting to show Wordsworth as a writer under the influence (amongst others) of Johnson, Thomson and Gilpin.