ABSTRACT
Romantic poets are constantly on their feet. Few literary periods are as crowded with walkers as the Romantic era; the walk may even be defined as a ‘quintessentially … Romantic image’. 1 Beside the fact that pedestrianism was an important and widespread means of travelling at the time, it also constituted a vital factor in the physical and intellectual well-being of nearly all major Romantic writers. William Hazlitt’s joy in walking, for example, is instantly recognizable in his impulsive ‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner – and then to thinking!’ 2 John Keats, too, was an avid walker; he toured the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1818. In a letter to Benjamin Haydon, he described the trip as ‘a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue – that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence’. 3 The age’s most prominent walkers, however, are undeniably Wordsworth and Coleridge. In ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Hazlitt records the different peripatetic habits that accompanied their writing of verse; whereas Coleridge ‘liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood’, Wordsworth preferred ‘walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’. 4 Wordsworth can indeed be regarded as the foremost pedestrian poet of the Romantic age; Thomas De Quincey once noted that the poet probably walked a 100,000 miles in his lifetime, 5 and indeed, the theme of walking can hardly be separated from Wordsworth’s creative potential or sense of self. As John Elder argues, ‘Wordsworth’s understandings of history, of poetry, and finally of the integrity of his own life may all be related to … depictions of himself walking’. 6
