Writing the Poetry of Place in Britain, 1700–1807

A. This is the first book systematically to examine the intrusion of personal voice into the poetry of landscape in Britain in the long eighteenth century.

B. The argument of the book proceeds from the premise that strong conventions, such as those that inhere in topographical verse of the period, stimulate original writers to overstep those bounds, resulting in verse that engages issues and energies far deeper than those of pictorial description.

C. The book makes a strong claim for the autobiographical emphasis of much eighteenth-century poetry of place.

D. The book hews to close readings as the soundest way to identify the often subtle shifts of tone and structure that betray the workings of agendae that may be operating under cover of conventional landscape poetry.

E. The book supplements traditionally aesthetic and political readings of eighteenth-century British landscape poetry, suggesting not only that the autobiographical impulse is a distinctive and innovative feature of much great eighteenth-century poetry of place but also that the correlation of self and place, a topic of current interest to humanist geographers, is powerfully manifested in the landscape poetry of this period.