ABSTRACT
James Thomson’s use of pronoun ‘his’ is enough to trigger the conventional personification, decked out with all the prolixity of an Arcimboldo fantastic head, and placed in an idyllic landscape. In the preface to his account of the intimate relationships between poetry, painting and landscape gardening during the eighteenth century, John Dixon Hunt remarks that ‘once poets had acquired certain habits of looking and thinking inside a garden they found them equally serviceable beyond the ha-ha’. Constable was aware that originality meant not the wholesale rejection of his predecessors Claude Lorraine and R. Wilson but a rethinking from first principles of the received pictorial grammar. The landscapes within the frame comprise both a graphic sense of place and an inscribed sense of time through Wordsworth’s technique of transforming the schema of the single classical viewpoint into one which contains multiple perspectives. Wordsworth’s landscapes are as much concerned with learning about himself as they are with learning about the natural world.
