ABSTRACT
The picturesque played a prominent role in the Romantic-era valuation of the wild. A source of profound fascination as well as anxiety, natural wildness was transformed by the aesthetic theories of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price into a bounded, relational field of particularized but disordered objects subject to the editing interventions of the human viewer. Picturesque art, in turn, rendered such wildness as static and shallow, a merely visuospatial reality to be framed for pleasure. This chapter explores the impact of Gilpin’s and Price’s vision of the wild on John Clare who, like Wordsworth before him, dabbled for a time in picturesque framing devices but ultimately developed a different understanding of wild space and its relation to human being. Clare’s version of the “deep wild”—manifest in the soil of Cowper Green—recognizes the temporal and processual qualities of wild nature in which human history is levelled with the life cycles of weeds and wild flowers.
