Wordsworth’s Spain, 1808–1811

Abstract

William Wordsworth’s interest in Spanish affairs arose with the news of the Spanish Bourbon abdications at Bayonne in May 1808. Those events quite negatively affected his feelings for Spain. He was on the point of completing his reproachful poem ‘Pelayo’ when the much more promising news of the Madrid ‘Dos de Mayo’ uprisings reached him. Sincerely concerned with the new state of affairs in the Iberian Peninsula, he then set aside ‘Pelayo’. Later, he began compiling his tract Concerning the Convention of Cintra. a work whose complex engagement with Spain has yet to be definitively explored. The third and last token of the writer’s interest in the country was his series of sonnets created between 1808 and 1811 and inspired by contemporary Spanish events and characters. By analysing ‘Pelayo’, Cintra and his Spanish sonnets as a unified corpus, this chapter shows how Wordsworth’s initial anger with Spanish matters soon evolved into fascination and eventually ended up in oblivion.