Poetic Identity, Aesthetics and Landscape in Wordsworth's Poetry

In this paper I seek to do two things. First of all, I trace, roughly, the history of Wordsworth's representation of landscape in his poetry from his early poems, such as ”An Evening Walk”, to the 1805 completed version of ”The Prelude”. Secondly, I examine the poet's concerns about poetic identity as reflected in this history. In his early poems, Wordsworth, when describing nature, adopts eighteenth-century aesthetics such as the picturesque, but as his poetry moves toward the meditative mode, landscape-rather than being mere external objects-begins to symbolize the poet's imaginative mind. Such a development is most prominent in ”The Prelude”, and can be seen in passages such as the Simplon Pass and the Climb up Snowdon. This development also shows how Wordsworth, in his poetic career, attempts to reconcile empiricism and transcendentalism.