Monster Rallies

Abstract

The poet travelling across Westminster Bridge in the early dawn on that quiet September morning in 1802 was a man with a murky past. William Wordsworth had fled France during the Terror leaving a pregnant girlfriend and revolutionary idealism behind him. Wordsworth was one of a new breed of artists whose ‘Romanticism’ matched the democratic fervour of the European Continent. His sonnet ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ recorded the city one early autumn dawn as a ‘mighty heart’ on the brink of fulfilling another day’s potential. For Wordsworth, as for the revolutionary artists he inspired, men such as North Londoner John Keats, the city was a living entity suffused with the life of the multitude.