The Visionary Eye: Wordsworth’s Antipicturesque Excursion

Abstract

Wordsworth’s 1814 Excursion, firmly embedded in the classical tradition of place ecphrasis that informed Milton’s Eden, self-consciously explores the Greco-Roman rhetorical theory of image and emotion that underpins that tradition. But Wordsworth surely contributed as much to the tradition as he takes from it. The very word loco-descriptive (now usually written without the hyphen) was coined by Wordsworth in his Preface to the 1815 Poems (374), after he had utterly assimilated and transformed the species of classical ecphrasis to which he gave this now-standard English name. The Excursion melds the allusive blank-verse nature poem as developed by the eighteenth-century Miltonists, the graveyard meditation as practiced by Young and Gray, the descriptive-didactic georgics of Thomson, the British pastoral in modern dress that Ambrose Philips tried to make respectable, and the picturesque travel essay as popularized by Gilpin. While Wordsworth retained many of the salient features of all these genres, he firmly relocated the center of discourse away from the place being described to the human minds perceiving and participating in the place, as inhabitants or visitors.¹

An author’s paramount charge is the cure of souls, to the subjection, and if need be to the exclusion, of the picturesque.

—Henry James, Miss Prescott’s “Azarian”