ABSTRACT
In the Thanksgiving Ode poems written and published after the war, Wordsworth made his most overt attempt to write the nation, to assume the bardic voice and explain the meaning of great national events. Differences would exist between statements made in an unsent letter to a friend and statements made to a family member, but it is interesting that in reporting Catharine's improvement Wordsworth focuses first on other people's comments and adds his own and his wife's concurrence. Colonial war in North America shifted the focus of mapping away from Scotland, and Roy's later work on coastal surveys was also superseded by another colonial war in 1775. While agreeing with Watson's assessment, the following argument attempts to offer a sympathetic reading of Wordsworth's investment in the war and Britain's victory. In 1816, the abstract vision of the nation proved inadequate to the nation itself, and the prospect view, like Mudge's abstract triangulation map, proved false to the dense textuality.
