Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
13 - Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape
- 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality
- 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland
- 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)
- 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake
- 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere
- 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry
- 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination
- 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)
- 10 Henry Crabb Robinson's Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey
- 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans
- 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama
- 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth's ‘Magnificent Debt’
- 14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley's Dim Crotonian Truths
- 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
- 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Of the several visits to the European continent that William Wordsworth made during his life, three in particular are significant: his trips of 1790, 1820 and 1837. What makes these excursions notable is that in each case Wordsworth conceived of the journey as belonging to the genre of the ‘tour’, a subset of the phenomenon of ‘the grand tour’, the favoured educational and cultural experience of the British gentry and aristocracy going back at least two centuries to people such as Sidney and Moryson; and, second, in each case Wordsworth memorialized his trip by making a poetic record of it. I need hardly rehearse the history of the grand tour; to do so would be like carrying fallen leaves – or would that be pine needles? – to Vallombrosa, another subject in itself, but one that I will touch on later. The English grand tour had on its agenda an exposure to foreign languages, customs, manners, politics, theology and art and architecture, both ancient and modern. The young Wordsworth's aspirations were not all that different. Travelling through France for the first time in 1790, the developing poet was caught up in the spirit of the French Revolution. But he was also caught up in something else that held strong sway over the growth of this poet's mind: the power of Nature as experienced through the visual and literary aesthetics of landscape.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romantic LocalitiesEurope Writes Place, pp. 185 - 196Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014