ABSTRACT
This book discusses the intrusion, often inadvertent, of personal voice into the poetry of landscape in Britain, 1700–1807. It argues that strong conventions, such as those that inhere in topographical verse of the period, invite original poets to overstep those bounds while also shielding them from the repercussions of self-expression. Working under cover of convention in this manner and because for many of these poets place is tied in significant ways to personal history, poets of place may launch unexpected explorations into memory, personhood, and the workings of consciousness. This book thus supplements past, largely political, readings of landscape poetry, turning to questions of self-articulation and self-expression in order to assert that the autobiographical impulse is a distinctive and innovative feature of much great eighteenth-century poetry of place, and that the correlation of self and place, a topic of current discussion by humanist geographers, is powerfully manifested in the landscape poetry of this period. The book examines a wide range of canonical poets of the long eighteenth century—Pope, Thomson, Duck, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, Smith, and Wordsworth—and engages modes of loco-description (pastoral, georgic) as well as more modern ideas of emplacement.
