ABSTRACT
Poetry writes place, and it writes about place, descriptively; the country house poem, the loco-descriptive effusion rely on evoking locale in order to achieve the poem’s end, whether political, personal, artistic or pictorial, for instance. We read Romantic nature poetry, by contrast, as conveying a Nature that is knowable, rather than simply visible. Alive to the history of poetics, the poet (usually male, and usually Wordsworth) takes up the genre of the loco-descriptive but uses the poem not merely to explore topography; rather, he develops something new. Focusing on the inscription poem, Geoffrey Hartman notes that Wordsworth moved it from a place-bound notation to an evocation of ‘the poet in the grip of what he feels and sees’, ‘contain[ed] … in the act of writing’. 1 Thus, in knowing Nature, we know the poet, and vice-versa. The poem becomes topography; the poet, in exercising his physical mobility, facilitates an imaginative peripatetics that institutes travelling and writing as a joined activity, and resting and reading as perhaps its necessary corollary. 2 The freedom of movement that characterizes Wordsworth’s poetry, in contrast to, for instance, the anxious homeboundedness of so much of Coleridge’s work, has for many readers established him as the poet of place, and also of pace. In this essay, however, I would like to complicate the consensus that Wordsworth inaugurates a Romantic condition that Jonathan Bate describes as being ‘always aware of himself in relation to the landscape, [and] conscious of his own acts of naming’ by bringing Charlotte Smith into the picture. 3 There is something about being embedded in a landscape through poetry that underlies the work of both poets; as they create a poetics of Nature, both poets also think about what it means to write and compose such poetry. They situate their personae at the intersection of artifice and reality: real places, real spaces that in the loco-descriptive operate as scenery but which, for Smith and Wordsworth, act as the machinery for a poetics of spatial and compositional geographies, where not only the poet’s locale matters, but also how the poet conveys or makes the poem itself.
