ABSTRACT
This chapter pairs the poem The Influence of Local Attachment and the prose History of Cornwall. It suggests that Polwhele’s poetry of place fuses traditional ideas about retirement with an interest in personal experience and the illumination of place through memory that is highly self-conscious about the workings of sentimental illusion. In the History, the method by which Polwhele memorialises ‘the romance of everyday life’ is interpreted as both Romantic gesture and by way of recent sociological understandings of the everyday. This leads to a reassessment of both Polwhele’s cultural politics and the easy categories of radical and reactionary.
