ABSTRACT
Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” written nearly one hundred years after Pope’s “Ode on Solitude,” broaches similar questions about the relationship of persons to places and the connection of emplacement to imaginative expression. Both poems describe states of solitude. Wordsworth’s exploration of this state is, however, more complex and unconventional than that of Pope, engaging issues of indigenousness, ownership, and perspective not only on the narrative level of the poem, as an outside speaker struggles to identify and thereby, as some critics have argued, “claim” the reaper’s song, but also in regard to the provenance of the poem, which exhibits indebtedness to Thomas Wilkinson’s Tour of the British Mountains, Dorothy’s journals, and other works. The sad event of Wordsworth’s brother John’s death at sea in 1805 is also arguably woven into the lines later in the compositional process in Wordsworth’s dwelling on the melancholy of the reaper’s song and in the hopeful claim that art can ameliorate such sorrow.
