Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic Landscapes of Genius

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how author love and a love of nature came together to establish national landscapes as focal points for imaginative identification, creating a template that, paradoxically, proved to be internationally portable. Hess explores how associations between Wordsworth and the Lake District influenced Henry David Thoreau’s later association with Walden Pond to produce an American version of the ‘landscape of genius’—a natural landscape associated with the genius of a specific, individual author. The essay focuses not on Wordsworth’s and Thoreau’s initial constructions of such landscapes or on direct influence between them (though Thoreau did see continuities between the lake countries), but rather on the reviewers, travel writers, and literary pilgrims who enshrined such places over the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, as the landscape of genius was translated from British to American imaginative geographies. It demonstrates how physical and imaginative pilgrims approached such authors in their landscapes of genius as mediators, both to those particular landscapes and to ‘nature’ in general, in ways that supported new forms of personal, authorial, and national identity and developed a new model of environmental consciousness in transnational dialogue across the Atlantic.