ABSTRACT
The homes of William Wordsworth have been the site of literary pilgrimage since Hazlitt and De Quincey presented themselves on the poet's doorstep to pay homage, and yet it is doubtful that any of Wordsworth's contemporaries could have foreseen the transformation of the English Lake District into what the British Tourist Authority unabashedly calls 'Wordsworth Country'. Rawnsley reveals how ultimately Wordsworth's service to the nation lies in the ways in which the poetry can be said to draw one into a kind of personal and political isolationism. To provide a service to the 'poetic glory' of his country, Arnold must create a universal, globalized poet, a Wordsworth. Arnold is writing a eulogy, but what is being eulogized is the possibility of poetry itself to have a place in what Arnold himself called this "deeply unpoetical" age. Arnold's "Memorial Verses" memorialize not merely the man or even poetry, but a relationship between poetry or literature or culture and the nation itself.
