Wordsworth in the Tropics of Cumbria

Greig, Elias

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16241-2_3

Wordsworth in the Tropics of Cumbria

Elias Greig³

Chapter
First Online: 29 June 2019

538 Accesses

Abstract

In ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’ Aldous Huxley provides a representative and still covertly influential appraisal of the ‘Nature’ of Lakeland and its poets: ‘Nature […] is not at all like […] the cozy sublimities of the Lake District.’ Huxley’s statement presages and codifies a critical disposition to suspect Wordsworth’s nature as fake, or, in Marjorie Levinson’s words, an ‘attempt to green an actualized political prospect and to hypostatize the resultant fiction’. Such an account ignores the stark and often strange materiality of Wordsworth’s nature, peculiarly evident in moments of accident and exposure recurrent in early works like Salisbury Plain, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and The Borderers. With reference to these texts and contemporary reports from the Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association, this chapter will expose the critical commonplace of Wordsworthian ‘Nature’ to the inclement weather of the landscape dismissed by Huxley and those after him as ‘cozy’, and re-pose questions about the materiality of Wordsworth’s nature. Namely, can our conception of Wordsworth’s poetry (and the critical mythology of Romanticism itself) weather a radically material universe? Or will it succumb to exposure and accident in the Tropics of Cumbria?

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Notes

1.
Mountain Accidents 2012 (Cumbria: Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association, 2012), https://www.ldsamra.org.uk/documents/LDSAMRAAnnualReport2012.pdf/, 14, 10, 46, 25, 44, 21. Line breaks added.
2.
Aldous Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, in Do What You Will (London: Watts & Co., 1937), 90, 92.
3.
Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, 92.
4.
James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1984), xviii.
5.
Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, 95.
6.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, ed. J. Butler and K. Green (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 119.
7.
Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, 116; Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, xvii.
8.
Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, 101.
9.
John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 1.
10.
Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, 101–102, 90–91, 102–103.
11.
William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, ed. J. Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 224.
12.
Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 38.
13.
Huxley, ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’, 102; Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 15.
14.
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2.
15.
Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 314; McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 20.
16.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), 175.
17.
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 40.
18.
Bate, The Song of the Earth, 175, 251.
19.
Bate, Romantic Ecology, 10.
20.
Bate, Song of the Earth, 42.
21.
Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 60.
22.
Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
23.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 123, 153–154.
24.
See, among others, Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
25.
Paul D. Sheats, ‘Cultivating Margaret’s Garden: Wordsworthian “Nature” and the Quest for Historical “Difference”’ in Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed. P. J. Kitson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001): 16–32, 28.
26.
William Wordsworth, Salisbury Plain in The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. S. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1. Subsequent references to this edition are incorporated in the text.
27.
Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (London: Verso, 2016), 243.
28.
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. S. Greenblatt (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 3.4.28–3.4.32.
29.
Stephen Gill, ‘“Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and Wordsworth’s Poetry of Protest 1795–1797’, Studies in Romanticism, 11 (Winter 1972): 48–65, 53.
30.
Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973), 88.
31.
Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 92.
32.
John Williams, ‘Salisbury Plain: Politics in Wordsworth’s Poetry’, Literature and History, 9.2 (1983): 164–193, 176.
33.
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard in Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, ed. R. Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 73–76; Robert Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock: John Wilson, 1786), 18.
34.
Robert Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, 22.
35.
Paul D. Sheats, ‘“Tis Three Feet Long, and Two Feet Wide”: Wordsworth’s “Thorn” and the Politics of Bathos’, The Wordsworth Circle, 22.2 (1991): 92–100, 94.
36.
Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, 13.
37.
Karen Swann, ‘Suffering and Sensation in The Ruined Cottage’, PMLA, 106.1 (January 1991): 83–95, 93; Bate, Romantic Ecology, 18.
38.
Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, 75.
39.
Joseph Gerrald, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us From Ruin (London: D. I. Eaton, 1793), 20.
40.
Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 210, 213.
41.
Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral, 213.
42.
William Paley, Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (Stirling: F. Jolie, 1792), 16–17.
43.
Hannah More, Village Politics, 3rd ed. (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1793), 18.
44.
More, Village Politics, 10–11.
45.
Gerrald, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us From National Ruin, 84.
46.
Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 325.
47.
Sheats, ‘Cultivating Margaret’s Garden’, 27.
48.
David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 262.
49.
William Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ MS. B, in The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. J. Butler (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 9–12. Subsequent references to this edition are incorporated in the text.
50.
Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 86.
51.
K. E. Smith, ‘“A Pile of Better Thoughts”: Margaret, Silent Suffering and Silent Blessing’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 145 (2009): 40–50, 45.
52.
Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 322.
53.
Fairer, Organising Poetry, 263.
54.
Fairer, Organising Poetry, 272, 282.
55.
Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 85.
56.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 143.
57.
William Frend, Scarcity of Bread (London: J. Smith, 1795), 7; Thomas Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France (London: J. Debrett, 1797), 2.
58.
Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, p. 84.
59.
Fairer, Organising Poetry, p. 264.
60.
Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, Originally Presented to the Right Hon. William Pitt in the Month of November, 1795 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1800), 32, 42–43.
61.
William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. R. Osborne (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982), 3.3.122–3.3.123, 3.4.146, 4.1.6, 5.2.70.
62.
Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 132–134.
63.
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, in William Wordsworth, ed. S. Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 145; ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, in William Wordsworth, 9–10.
64.
Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), 5, 23.
65.
David Fairer, ‘“Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air”: The World of Eco-Georgic’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 40 (2011): 201–218, 207, 209; Organising Poetry, 263.
66.
Fairer, Organising Poetry, 260.
67.
Mountain Accidents 2015 (Cumbria: Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association, 2015), https://www.ldsamra.org.uk/documents/LDSAMRAAnnualReport2015.pdf/, 3.

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University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Elias Greig

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English Literatures & Creative Writing, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
Anne Collett
Department of English, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Olivia Murphy

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Greig, E. (2019). Wordsworth in the Tropics of Cumbria. In: Collett, A., Murphy, O. (eds) Romantic Climates. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16241-2_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16241-2_3
Published: 29 June 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16240-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16241-2
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