The metaphorical correspondence between land and text is such that authors regularly allegorize the acts of reading and writing by walking us over hill and dale. For instance, in what is a watershed moment for British literary landscape description, John Milton's Paradise Lost concludes its justification of God's ways to men as Adam and the archangel Michael ascend "a Hill / Of Paradise the highest, from whose top / The Hemisphere of Earth in clearest Ken / Stretcht out to the amplest reach of prospect lay" (XI.377-80), and from this point survey Old Testament history episode by episode, as if they were leafing through a Bible. At the other end of the long eighteenth century, William Wordsworth parses the Wye Valley's "steep and lofty cliffs" for "the language of [his] former heart" ("Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" 6-8, 119). And John Keats likens the experience of reading Homer to commanding a "wide expanse" and traveling through "realms of gold," wherein—"like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken," or some "stout Cortez . . . with eagle eyes" staring at the Pacific, somehow "Silent, upon a peak in Darien"—one may descry "many goodly states and kingdoms" ("On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" 5, 1, 9-10, 11-12, 14, 2).

Such associations between land and text highlight emergent poetics of place in the literature of landscape circa 1674, 1798 and 1816. Yet, insofar as we may invoke the term "landscape" in a conceptual or figurative sense, they indicate as much about the landscape of literature. These versified scenes are themselves significant features in the grand topography of British literary history. As environmentally elaborate coordinates of a wider literary imagination (traces of which they model in miniature), they are opulent cairns along the trail of literary tradition and prominent points of interest on our canonical roadmap. In reading them for some semblance of the contexts in which they appeared—or for the literary hinterlands to which they serve as gateways—we enjoy means of survey that, like the modes of landscape vision they describe, afford comparisons between foregrounds and backgrounds, primary and secondary foci, and generalities and particulars, all depending upon our scope and coincident prospects. In a word, the vantage points from which readers contemplate such poems and corresponding canons enable sweeping perspectives on literary tradition. As the poets suggest, from the highest hills of Paradise or the confines of our homes, the literary imagination permits us to see into the past, perhaps as far as ancient Egypt or the pre-historic Pacific Ocean.[1]

This rich legacy of literary landscape vision is invaluable for teaching Romanticism because, in promoting personal perspective, it encourages readers to explore. After all, landscape appreciation is at once an inspiration for the Romantic imagination and an allegory of interpretation, a tried and true means of exacting order from chaos in the visual field. It helps us make sense of what we see by inciting awareness of the so-called "bigger picture" and the relationships that occur within it. As such, it can be a powerful, contextually informed means of seeing the forest and the trees, as it were—particularly when students are confronted with vast tracts of unfamiliar literary territory laid out in dense anthologies and ambitious survey courses. Indeed, many students count such methods of academic overview among the inexplicable abstractions by which literary history operates. This occurs partly because too few survey courses account for all the complex contextual negotiations that students perform as they reconcile the past with the present. To counteract this effect, instead of leaving the modus operandi of surveying implicit, we might, as Michael does for Adam atop that great hill, exploit the spatial trappings of this otherwise temporal concept to cultivate powers of vision, so that students comprehend the landscape of anthologies and syllabi and develop the kinds of critical omniscience for which such materials are intended. The idea of landscape, in this respect, can serve as a guiding metaphor for conceptualizing the textual economies of individual works and the canons of which they are part.

In observing that the concept of landscape vision and the politics of place can apply to both physical and textual environments—not to mention the historical, ideological and educational environments that influence our experience of them—this essay will examine the pedagogical implications of reading Romantic literature ecosystemically, in terms of intersections between depictions of place, their positions in literary history, survey courses and anthological infrastructures, and hence their status vis-à-vis the politics of the canon. Such a meta-environmental approach befits the study of Romantic literature because reading it often involves negotiating among natural, historical, literary, psychological and educational contexts, and finding cues in each for interpreting its counterparts (as we must do to fully appreciate the above selections from Wordsworth and Keats). To elucidate instructional means of addressing these interrelations, I will devote this essay to describing the rationale behind my undergraduate course "Placing Romanticism"—which, in surveying representations of place from Blake and the Wordsworths to Keats and Hemans, highlights aesthetic trends that place certain writing in the category "Romantic," so as to define Romanticism's place in literary history and identify its influence over literature and culture of the past two hundred years. I hope to suggest that, by calling attention to the contexts in which Romanticism exists for us, we can promote a kind of historical reflexivity that helps students visualize their studies, examine positions in the landscape of interpretation, and assess the topography of literary tradition for themselves.

Anatomizing Anthologies

Because attaining this degree of perspective can be challenging—especially over the course of mere ten- to fourteen-week terms during which we tour college students through some fifty years of intensive literary production—we must find ways to extrapolate our learning to wider contexts by working closely with what we have. The process of "placing" Romanticism requires that students engage course materials critically as they enhance their cultural literacy. More often than not, the way toward this kind of awareness leads through a literary anthology, and the basic focus of the course becomes how to read it for the era that it represents.[2] Despite the incongruity of compressing such massive literary output into the space of a thousand pages, as a means of covering the Romantic period in relatively short order, anthologies such as Jerome McGann's New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak's British Literature 1780–1830, David Perkins's English Romantic Writers, and Duncan Wu and David Miall's Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM have become indispensable in identifying the era as a formative historical context for contemporary culture. Inevitably, the further we venture into the future, the further the Romantic era recedes into the past, the smaller its half-century window becomes in the course of literary history, and the less distinct it may appear to the untrained eye. The importance of marking this rich yet finite literary terrain is further underscored by Romantic writers' and readers' supposed penchant for "escaping" history, and by the ease with which the Romantic ethos may be absorbed into other, less particular literary traditions.[3]

Its material limitations notwithstanding, the fitness of the anthology form for instilling historical awareness in modern readers becomes especially evident when we consider that the idea of the anthology was intrinsic to the rise of Romanticism. Romantic audiences were well acquainted with literary miscellanies and collected editions, and Romantic poets frequently presented their work in anthology form.[4] Moreover, literary works themselves are implicitly anthologic, insofar as they collect and arrange ideas and images according to overarching narrative ideologies. In learning to see literary epochs through the filter of anthologies we thus witness literary history in action: we become privy to the literary process of creation, the vicissitudes of audience reception, the politics of editorial selection, and hence the formation of the canon. Furthermore, in a practical sense, anthologies include a greater variety and number of works than might be presented via a selection of collected editions—a strategy that curtails historical coverage by emphasizing the work of too few authors.[5] In the end, the anthology is a serviceable textual environment that stands for a distinct era of literary production, a time capsule that houses a culture in miniature. As a veritable atlas of literary production, its means of mapping Romanticism can teach us as much about ourselves and our world as it does about the literature we read.[6]

If anthologies efficiently demarcate eras and provide useful windows into the past, teaching with them entails getting students to see them as something other than bulky tomes for which we may feel we've paid too much, and with which we often dispense at term's end. Of course, this is to say nothing of counteracting students' tendency to treat textbooks, as James Sosnoski reminds us, as "apparatuses of orthodoxy" (75).[7] To promote critical interaction with anthologies we might instead emphasize their utility, the extent of overview they afford, the wealth of material they present for our comparative inspection, and hence our freedom of choice in perusing their contents. Because an anthology shapes a hodgepodge of sources into a coherent vision of an aesthetic tradition, like a landscape its form is as instructive as its content. In characterizing the genre as "a theoretically interesting form whose potential for opening up discourse has yet to be sufficiently explored" (47), Sarah Lawall observes that

an anthology's various constituent parts—its visibly constructed table of contents, preface, and editorial apparatus (footnotes, headnotes, extended essays, ancillary materials); its self-reflexive identity (always aware of its situation vis-à-vis the audience); and finally its virtual reality as a paradigm enacted differently in each classroom—bring to the surface a web of communicative relationships that might otherwise remain obscure. (48)

Lawall's emphasis on the anatomy and situation of anthologies underscores the range of topoi they can present and the variety of audiences they can reach. In cultivating an understanding of their form we thus gain important insights into the historical imagination of the eras they represent. In other words, just as we learn a lot about poems or paintings by the kinds of landscapes they depict, so we can study literary movements in greater context by viewing anthologies as intertextually intricate fields whose features signify in context and alone.

That said, because readers tend to be more concerned with what texts convey than with the shapes they take, to facilitate critical engagement with anthologies we might draw upon the kind of visualization we usually associate with the interpretation of maps and pictures. Indeed, as pictorial manifestations of narrative operations to which texts in general subscribe, landscapes are allegories of anthologization. As Alan Liu has shown in his meticulous analysis of the picturesque aesthetic tradition, a relatively orthodox Romantic prospect such as the one in Claude Lorraine's 1646 painting Landscape with Hagar and the Angel is a veritable anthology of treasured images and competing narratives.[8] Striking a pose that simultaneously dramatizes the Angel's counsel to Hagar as she flees Abram in Genesis 16, evokes paintings of the Annunciation by the likes of Fra Angelico, models means of perspective that would become the hallmark of British landscape poetry, and presages depictions of tourists in picturesque sketches such as William Gilpin's view of Tintern Abbey, the titular characters survey a lush river scene replete with mountains in the distance, an ancient castle on a cliff, and an equally aged arched bridge toward which two boatmen drift—all of which is framed by vine-laden oaks that stretch to the sky. This palimpsest of environmental, literary, artistic, secular and religious tropes thus contains any number of narratives present and past, from biblical legends to subjects for eighteenth-century locodescriptive poetry, picturesque travel writing, and gothic fiction, not to mention histories of landscape painting and portraiture. Its anthology of images spans out in all historical directions, indicating grander meta-narratives simultaneously beyond the scope and within compass of the scene at hand (given its finitude of imagery yet depth of prospect).

Approaching Romantic Anthologies

Applying such a multidimensional visual perspective to the textual landscape of an anthology helps readers discern meaning in the features and form of the book, so as to set our sense of the literary climate circa 1800 and 2005 in stronger relief. It invites us to gauge the relationships between the anthology's constituent parts, to conjecture as to the significance they assume in context, to compare the authors and works that are included therein, and to measure them against those that are not. Of course, because anthologies are creatures of the same textual environments that they survey, we also must consider the vantage points that they construct and the contexts in which they arise. To call attention to such characteristics, I like to begin Romanticism courses by having students read and discuss the editorial principles behind our anthology, to treat such commentary as a "legend" for the "maps" that follow it. This activity helps demystify the anthology and put things in perspective by elucidating ways in which its careful presentation of the Romantic era reflects—or, as is sometimes the case, belies—tensions affecting the canon then and now. As students engage editorial politics that they are usually prone to ignore, they take the first step in the process of familiarizing themselves with their textbook—which, of course, is a medium that effectively plays Virgil to their Dante, or, in terms perhaps more Romantically pertinent (if somewhat despairing), Rousseau to their Shelley—and the age through which it tours us.

All things being equal, my Romantic anthology of choice is Mellor and Matlak's British Literature 1780–1830. Its inclusive, unassuming approach to such a vibrant era of diverse literary production allows us to examine the concept of Romanticism contextually, without immediately overdetermining the term. Indeed, as they assert in their "General Introduction," the editors deliberately avoid "using the terms 'Romantic' or 'Romanticism' to describe [this] historical period" (2). Hence, rather than privilege poetry to the extent that other genres are only lightly represented—as McGann, Perkins, and Wu do—Mellor and Matlak include a broad sampling of poetry, prose, fiction, drama, letters, and journals, in hopes of illustrating that "each genre has its own literary merits" and that "such generic variety more accurately reflects the literary culture of this period" (vii). This selection of genres provides a more comprehensive inventory of the era's textual environment and hence a more variegated representation of Romantic writers' fascination with the physical environment.[9] Furthermore, in presenting works according to their order of publication (rather than that of composition)—and prefacing the collection with "Historical and Cultural Context Sections" on such topics as the French Revolution, the rights of woman, slavery, abolitionism, the political economy, aesthetic theory, and science and nature—the editors "highlight the ways in which literary works functioned within a public literary sphere" whose aesthetic concerns dovetail with its political ones (vii). Such a revisionist rationale enables students to approach the movement from the ground up (so to speak). It allows them a more objective overview of the period—insofar as this is possible—so that they can entertain the idea of Romanticism without laboring as much under the weight of its cultural baggage.

Given the unfortunately prohibitive cost of Mellor and Matlak's anthology in current markets, I have also used Wu's Romanticism, which is relatively comprehensive yet suffers from some traditional blind spots in showcasing the work of the so-called "Big Six"—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats. While it includes just enough alternative genres and "non-traditional" authors to contextualize the movement more generally, it also undercuts such genres and authors by effectively damning them with faint praise—particularly by denying adequate representation to women writers who published as much if not more than the Big Six, and in editorial apparatus referring to them on a first-name basis while addressing male writers by surname. Nevertheless, I have found that students who have used Wu's anthology are often attuned to its sexism; in remarking upon it they manage to see around it sufficiently. (In fact, some classes became such seasoned critics of Wu's policies as to actively seek out the writings of female Romantic poets elsewhere, thus exercising the kinds of extended scholarly inquiry that anthologies are designed to inspire.) Whatever is lost in Wu's text is recouped somewhat in his and Miall's compendious CD-ROM, whose graphics-rich, context-oriented contents I often juxtapose with those of the paper anthology and those of such electronic resources as the British Women Romantic Poets project.[10] In this respect, both British Literature 1780-1830 and Romanticism are subject to similar critical treatment: we "deconstruct" the presentation of each anthology and pursue reflexive versions of Romanticism.

While thus assessing the editorial rationale governing our anthology, we also sample broader contexts from which its selections are culled, the "bigger picture" of Romanticism that the anthology presents in miniature. Such a panorama is of course only a few clicks of a mouse away. Because it operates much like a website, Wu and Miall's CD-ROM represents something of a gateway to the wealth of Romantic material currently online in virtual libraries. Amidst the spacious pastures of the Internet are such diverse resources as Romantic Circles, Romanticism on the Net, the Romantic Chronology, the William Blake Archive, the Artcyclopedia Romanticism page, the Romantic Natural History site, the Regency Fashion Page, and of course the English Romanticism collection on the Voice of the Shuttle, to name but eight portals to this wider world.[11] I also encourage students to subscribe to the NASSR-L and C18-L Internet discussion groups, so that they are exposed to the kinds of things that scholars in the field are currently discussing and discovering, and can join in the conversation if they like. Such scholarly sampling and participation informs students' work for class, which revolves around response writing—wherein they nurture their ideas by informally exploring their reactions to the reading—and longer, more developed essays born of their initial responses.

These broader contexts and focused exercises are designed to enrich modern readers' understanding of Romantic literature by introducing them to and including them in its ever-evolving history. Yet we must be careful that these scholarly horizons do not distract us from engaging with the anthology, so that the politics and nuances of its complex textual environment are sufficiently explored. Hence, after contemplating the aforementioned collection of electronic resources, we return our gaze to the landscape of the anthology, to see how it applies editorial rationales and reflects the dynamism of the field. Guided in part by Aidan Day's provisional, pithy and ultimately plastic characterizations of Romantic literature (1-6), we size up the terrain by opening our anthologies, identifying a "mini anthology" of six relatively familiar poems, and analyzing them comparatively. Among these "Greatest Hits of Romanticism" are Blake's "The Tyger," Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."[12] These poems serve as coordinates in the landscape of Romanticism that guide our tour of the movement by momentarily representing it in toto, then operate as familiar landmarks to which we return when we read each author's work in greater depth.

Odds are that students recognize at least one of these poems in some form, and we begin our examination of them by discussing where we've seen them. Most who know them studied them in high school or college, usually in the context of British literature or poetry surveys. Others also recognize the legacy of these poems in different cultural contexts, such as popular music. In impressing upon students that this miniature canon reverberates in contemporary culture much as it does in literary history, I take this as my cue to play DJ, and produce such recordings as Allen Ginsburg's recitations of "Nurse's Song" and "The Tyger," Jah Wobble's The Inspiration of William Blake, Julian Cope's interpretation of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Rush's "Xanadu," and, for good measure, Iron Maiden's rendition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."[13] Bruce Dickinson's enunciation of "water, water everywhere" usually causes a few heads to nod (not just from headbanging), and sets us searching for other familiar phrasings that have entered the grand "anthology" of popular parlance. Keats's "Ode" often scores highest with the kinds of sentiments it expresses, but lines from the other poems often resonate as strongly (particularly if students are familiar with films such as Dead Poets Society or Gothic).

Having placed these poems in terms of the class's collective knowledge, we then examine the place at which each occurs in our anthology. Perhaps because Romanticism anthologies tend to be organized by author—and the Big Six in particular—we usually find that the six poems occur at regular intervals and as such underpin the Romantic canon, as structuring devices of sorts. A cross-sectional perspective bears this out. Viewing our anthologies from the side, I have students bookmark each of the poems and measure the text block for the distances between them. Indeed, whereas Blake's "Tyger" occurs relatively early on in both British Literature 1780–1830 and Romanticism (roughly a half inch from Wordsworth's poem)—most likely because of the historical gap between Blake's Songs of Experience (1794) and Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes (1807)—the other five poems are all roughly equidistant (about a quarter inch) from one another, and span the anthology accordingly. I like to think that this seeming coincidence dramatizes the centrality of these poems in the anthology, the canon, and the cultural consciousness. In staking out the literary and cultural terrain of Romanticism in our textbooks, this mini anthology of "Greatest Hits" thus foregrounds sustained inquiries into the canonical situation of these major authors and their contemporaries.

Figures in the Anthological Landscape

Of course, literature in general—from the shortest of poems to the mightiest of canons—is shot through with such structurally determined referential dynamics. Hence our next focus involves investigating the anthologic nature of literary works relative to historical context. Though it lies beyond the scope of Romanticism as defined by conventional anthologies, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750) is an excellent touchstone for such an inquiry, as it is something of a crash course in British literary tradition and hence a valuable demonstration of canonical politics. In his excellent analysis of the Elegy's literary anatomy, John Guillory has shown that Gray's work is an anthology unto itself—in much the same way as Claude's Landscape with Hagar and the Angel is. The Elegy is a "tissue of quotations," a harmonic convergence of treasured images and rhetorical commonplaces, a transhistorical greatest hits collection whose "phrases sound familiar even in the absence of identified pretexts, as though it were the anonymous distillation of literary sententiae" (Guillory, "The English Common Place" 8). Of course, it is also a landscape poem, and like most landscape poems, it is richly intertextual; it situates its scope of allusion within the landscape at hand and with respect to the broader landscape of poetic tradition. Thus, via the organizing trope of landscape, the Elegy can be read as an exercise in recitation and indoctrination, a rehearsal of the kinds of cultural capital and personal politics to which anthologies are usually tied, and a means of placing them in a given rhetorical context.

Putting Guillory's thesis into action, I have students read the "Elegy" aloud. Then, drawing upon Roger Lonsdale's impeccable annotations in his edition of Gray, I distribute a miniature library of collected editions containing poetry to which Gray alludes in his first thirty-six lines, and ask students to read flagged passages in a designated order. This orchestration produces something very much like the "Elegy" itself. For instance, where Gray has "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" (1-2), student readers in possession of the requisite volumes respectively recite "I hear the far-off Curfew sound" (Milton, "Il Penseroso" 73); "A sullen bell / Remembered tolling a departing friend" (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV I.i.102-103); "That tolls the knell for their departed sense" (Dryden, Prologue to "Troilus and Cressida" 22); "It is the Knell of my departed Hours" (Young, Night Thoughts I.58); and "As from fresh pastures and the dewy fields … / The lowing herds return" (Pope, Odyssey X.485-87). As students read snippets from Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Young, Pope, Gay, Petrarch, Virgil, Warton, Akenside, Horace, Lucretius, Dryden, Collins, Spenser, Thomson and Blair, and hear these soundbytes echoed in the "Elegy," they witness Gray's iterative genius and anthologic method. In so doing they also practice the kind of close reading that Romantic poetry demands, and learn that there is more meaning in literary landscape than meets the eye.

The clincher here is that the version of the "Elegy" with which I provide students is William Blake's illustrated edition of Gray's poetry. Blake's illustrations incorporate Gray's vaunted landscape, but foreground individuals within it—a move that perhaps replaces the poem's apparent neoclassicism with nascent Romanticism. Whereas Gray's landscape represents an Augustan means of figuring a world, Blake's illustrations suggest that such a world is also the province of thinking, feeling beings living within it. The same might be said, of course, for Blake's own poetic endeavors, in particular the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, two poem sequences—indeed, anthologies—that bring many other thinking, feeling beings together in conversation via their suggestively interrelated lyrical meditations. The world of the Songs is replete with valleys wild, echoing greens, merry sparrows, gamboling lambs, and infant joy. At the same time, it is also home to tigers "burning bright," destitute chimney sweeps, lost boys and girls, sick roses and poison trees. To constructively complicate this picture further, the Blake Archive allows us to see the poems in their "native environs," as words and pictures that amplify tensions between innocence and experience in the complex anthological structure of the Songs. For instance, though the contrast between Blake's "Tyger" and his "Lamb" is suggestive enough, students often observe that the tiger's "fearful symmetry" is also tempered by the seeming "cuddly kitty cat" quality of Blake's illustration.

Such a paradoxical landscape of cryptic poetic utterances in vibrant pictorial contexts invites plenty of conjecture, and its many pregnant juxtapositions can yield an entire semester of material. But since we've more ground to cover and larger contexts to consider, we are usually left to ponder how lambs and tigers can coexist in the same landscape of stark divisions and strange harmonies. The consensus is often that such startling contrasts represent Blake's attempt to elucidate a wider, more psychologically complex and realistically vexing world than Gray's purely memorial one. After all, the worst fate "some Village Hampden" may face in the "Elegy" is the anonymity of the grave, whereas in the Songs he could meet with thorny jealousy, "fearful symmetry," poison fruit, and pointed economic or racial oppression—in sum, everything from a "Heaven in Hells despair" to a "Hell in Heavens despite" ("The Clod and the Pebble" 4, 12). This does not necessarily mean that we are the worse for Blake's world. Instead, the deceptively simple anthological scope of the Songs challenges pastoral idealism of poetic tradition so as to open the Romantic canon to a broader range of experience. In other words, whereas Gray shows us what's in the literary landscape, Blake illustrates how much we've yet to see.

Situating Romantic Landscape

Blake's and Wollstonecraft's productive problematizations of nature inform our approach to the writings of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, of course, looms large in the landscape of Romanticism as a founding father for the movement, mostly because of his explicit recourse to the natural world. A contextually intensive assessment of his poetry that attends closely to his environmental vision can help place the extent of his influence and open his oeuvre to discussion, so that his instructive articulation of the Romantic ethos doesn't eclipse the work of contemporaries who pursue comparable agendas. Wordsworth's writing provides good test cases for the Romantic imagination because, given that he achieves what is for many readers a more familiar literary balance of aesthetics and politics, his poetry can be an interesting mix of rhetorically intriguing phenomena and vivid landscapes mellowed by memory. Despite his seeming advocacy of "quitting one's books," students usually recognize that Wordsworth's art isn't just about getting back to nature—it also entails a fair amount of "drink[ing] the spirit breath'd / From dead men to their kind" ("The Tables Turned" 3; "Expostulation and Reply" 7-8). It is both a recovery of poetic tradition as Gray conceived of it—indeed, in such tracts as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the Essay Supplementary to Poems (1815), Wordsworth celebrates such poets as Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Thomson, and elsewhere acknowledges the influence of such predecessors as Warton, Cowper and Smith—and an extension of its reach into newer, more "realistic" fields of focus. Put another way, although Wordsworth often achieves innovation in landscape depiction—particularly by concerning himself with otherwise peripheral places such as the Lake District, the South Downs, Wales and Scotland, rather than with the neoclassically charged Thames Valley scenes that pervade the works of Pope and Thomson—the landscapes he describes are nevertheless part of the same island that gives British literature place.

In this respect, Wordsworth's literary intervention is an expressly anthologic gesture toward re-collecting poetic tradition, an attempt to clarify the fount of poetry by reorienting it toward the landscape of everyday life. This project finds its expression in anthology form—the co-authored compilation Lyrical Ballads, which features a complex social landscape whose moral scope is not unlike that of Blake's Songs and whose elaborate imagery and experiments in style enrich its presentation. In his Preface to the work, Wordsworth cultivates an emphatic "earthiness" which is designed to democratize the literary imagination by "grounding" it in the popular parlance, so that poetic expression might yet overcome the "gross and violent stimulants" agitating the cultural consciousness, take root in everyday experience, and fulfill its potential as "the image of man and nature" (575, 578). Indeed, he justifies his focus on "low and rustic life" by asserting that, in such a condition, "the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" (574-75). Landscape, in this formulation, becomes a common denominator of sentiment, psychology, character and society; it stages these things in the British countryside and collects them into poetic tradition.

Nevertheless, lest the Lyrical Ballads' strong human element overwhelm our sense of landscape's powers of organization, as a class we take this opportunity to assemble a collection of perspectives on Wordsworth's poetic geography. Based on the idea that sketching is tantamount to commenting—just as paintings are often regarded as "interpretations"—we explore intersections between the physical, personal, and rhetorical environments in the third of his five "Poems on the Naming of Places" by drawing the landscape it elaborates. This work features Wordsworth's poetics at their most fundamental, insofar as the landscape it describes assumes something of a personality that permeates and transforms the place.[15] In groups, students discuss what they see in the poem, record majority and minority perspectives, reach a consensus about their vision, and draw what they see.[16] When all groups are finished, each presents its picture and discusses the making thereof. Then we comparatively analyze the pictures, observing relationships between the human and natural worlds in each interpretation with respect to position, depth, size, color, style, inclusion and exclusion. Whereas most illustrations include a prominent mountain, setting sun, stars, clouds, groves, fields, a house and sometimes people, no two are ever alike, such that in concert they represent the range of imagined worlds that proceed from one poem, a veritable anthology of interpretations born of one literary landscape. Landscape in this instance is both subject to and source of creative readings that infinitely re-incarnate Wordsworth's vision by selectively emphasizing its natural and psychological components. Such is perhaps the ultimate outcome of "conversation poetry," as Coleridge termed the form: presented familiarly, lyrical landscapes address literary moments