During his career, William Wordsworth wrote literally hundreds of poems in the genre known variously as "memorials," "tour poems," or "itinerary poems"--as seen in such titles as Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820, and Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837. As both genteel experience and literary genre, the "tour" was popular in the eighteenth century, but Wordsworth radically developed it in both form and significance: he took ostensibly aesthetic or moral conventions--viewing sublime or picturesque scenes in nature, reflecting upon their divine creator, commenting occasionally on political or economic analogies between the human and the natural environments--and internalized them, adapting a rhetoric of travel (excursion, preamble, itinerary) to what he calls "the mind's excursiveness."
In 1833, when he was 63, Wordsworth went on a tour with his son John and his friend Henry Crabb Robinson to the Isle of Man and parts of Scotland, upon which he composed a series of forty-eight poems, mostly sonnets, published in 1835 as "Itinerary Poems" in the volume Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems. While we know a great deal about Wordsworth in France, in Wales, in London and, of course, in the Lakes, we have considerably less scholarly familiarity with his experiences in the Isle of Man. Wordsworth's Manx poems have not received attention to their local and critical contexts, though scholars have shown interest in reconstructing some of Wordsworth's other walking tours. The Manx poems thus raise questions which invite addressing in literal or "pedestrian" ways as much as in figural or interpretive terms. Briefly put, how do these late memorials stand as topoi--that is, both literal places and figural commonplaces--in Wordsworth's imaginative itinerary? To begin with historical curiosities, why, at age 63, did Wordsworth decide to go on this tour? We know the various places he saw--Douglas, Ballasalla, Ramsey, Tynwald, Rushen Abbey, and Snaefell--and for comparison we have his sister Dorothy's journal of her Manx trip five years earlier, in 1828. But what image of "Mona" or the Isle of Man emerges from Wordsworth's literary account of his visit? And how does the notion of physical place fit into Wordsworth's imaginative conception of the tour as a genre? For a poet as peripatetic as Wordsworth, in whose work a sense of place is so closely related to the process of poetry, it is particularly important with the Isle of Man poems to relate genre and geography, place and politics, topos and the topical.
Based on research that I have carried out in the Isle of Man, I argue that for Wordsworth the Isle of Man represented a politically idealized and imaginatively exotic place--as exotic as the mythological Wales in Milton's "Lycidas," which influenced Wordsworth's 1835 "Itinerary Poems"--whose landscape and history compared happily with his own native Lake District, the literal and imaginative source of so much of his poetry. Studying the local inspiration and political moment of the Manx poems adds previously unexamined historical and critical knowledge to our reading of Wordsworth's later poetry.
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