Abstract
Wordsworth’s devotion to landscape improvement was undertaken then not, like that of many of his contemporaries, as assistance to human complacency and self-assertion, but rather as a work of rescue and consolation. Against the doctrine that life in the midst of nature must be pleasant (a doctrine of the sentimentalists which would later thrive on a misreading of his own work) he, like Shakespeare, knew that such a life in its purest form must be that of ‘unaccommodated man’, exposed to the alien and uncaring processes of the universe at large; no response to the landscape which failed to acknowledge the fact could be adequate.
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Notes
‘Salisbury Plain’, st. 44 (Cf Salisbury Plain Poems 34). See also Enid Welsford, Salisbury Plain, a Study in the Development of Wordsworth’s Mind and Art (Oxford, 1966), pp. 14–15.
Ibid., st. 47.
C. Salveson, The Landscape of Memory (1965).
W. Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina (1792), p. 155.
J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927), pp. 364–5, quoting Gutch Notebook (=CN I 220).
D. Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown, Conn., 1959), pp. 12–15.
B. R. Haydon, Diary, ed. W. B. Pope (1960), II p. 470.
David Ferry, op. cit., pp. 23–4.
Samuel Daniel, Preface to ‘Musophilus’, ll.1–6. (Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (1885), I 223).
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© 1978 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1978). The Long Perspectives. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_9
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