ABSTRACT
Poetry inspired by a vantage point or prospect has a long history, from seventeenth-century examples such as Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642) to far more recent contributions by twentieth-century poets such as Auden. This chapter uses William Wordsworth’s nineteenth-century sonnet “Composed after a Journey across the Hamilton Hills” (1807) and Norman Nicholson’s twentieth-century poem “Scafell Pike” (1981) to consider how writers have engaged with a sense of place and impermanence through the form. While commenting on the characteristics common to prospect poems more broadly, this chapter considers how the form continued to resonate during and after the Romantic movement.
