Epilogue: Immediacy

Abstract

My topic has been the imagined place in European literature, illustrated by a necessarily restricted selection of examples. I have emphasized the self-conscious psychological valency that place description took on for the British Romantics, but I would not like to leave readers with the false impression that the poetics of immediacy that is so well developed in descriptions of significant places is either uniquely European or that it died out with a last efflorescence during the Romantic period.

Description is revelation. It is not The thing described, nor false facsimile.

—Wallace Stevens, “Description without Place”