ABSTRACT
Of the several visits to the European continent that William Wordsworth made during his life, three in particular are significant: his trips of 1790, 1820 and 1837. What makes these excursions notable is that in each case Wordsworth conceived of the journey as belonging to the genre of the ‘tour’, a subset of the phenomenon of ‘the grand tour’, the favoured educational and cultural experience of the British gentry and aristocracy going back at least two centuries to people such as Sidney and Moryson; and, second, in each case Wordsworth memorialized his trip by making a poetic record of it. I need hardly rehearse the history of the grand tour; to do so would be like carrying fallen leaves – or would that be pine needles? – to Vallombrosa, another subject in itself, but one that I will touch on later. The English grand tour had on its agenda an exposure to foreign languages, customs, manners, politics, theology and art and architecture, both ancient and modern. The young Wordsworth’s aspirations were not all that different. Travelling through France for the first time in 1790, the developing poet was caught up in the spirit of the French Revolution. But he was also caught up in something else that held strong sway over the growth of this poet’s mind: the power of Nature as experienced through the visual and literary aesthetics of landscape. The interest in Nature for its own sake, however, was a somewhat special and recent development in the grand tour; as Wordsworth himself pointed out, ‘the relish for choice and picturesque natural scenery’ 1 had begun only with Thomas Gray. Scholars have generally agreed: Gray ‘was virtually alone’ 2 in his enthusiasm for the beauty of the Alps – that is, until Romantic poets such as Wordsworth came along and raised the consciousness of Nature to a new pitch. But Wordsworth’s interest, as we shall see, was eclectic right from the start: landscape and politics and poetry blended with one another. In book VI of The Prelude, describing his 1790 tour, Wordsworth writes: But Nature then was sovereign in my mind, And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy, Had given a charter to irregular hopes. In any age of uneventful calm Among the nations, surely would my heart Have been possessed by similar desire: But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again. 3
