The Long Perspectives

Abstract

Wordsworth’s devotion to landscape improvement was undertaken then not, like that of many of his contemporaries, as assistance to human complacency and self-assertion, but rather as a work of rescue and consolation. Against the doctrine that life in the midst of nature must be pleasant (a doctrine of the sentimentalists which would later thrive on a misreading of his own work) he, like Shakespeare, knew that such a life in its purest form must be that of ‘unaccommodated man’, exposed to the alien and uncaring processes of the universe at large; no response to the landscape which failed to acknowledge the fact could be adequate.