Wordsworth’s Re-entry into London with Improved Visual Awareness

This essay examines the development of Wordsworth’s favorable relationship to visual culture after his visual failure in Book 7 of The Prelude within the context of the metropolitan visual culture in the early nineteenth century. With a specific focus on the poet’s visual tours during his occupation of Dove Cottage, this essay argues that the friendship between Wordsworth and Beaumont decisively affected not only the poet’s advanced visuality, but also his re-entry into London. First, it explores how Beaumont stimulated the alienated Wordsworth’s visual sense, which consequently caused Wordsworth to resume his visual journey to London in 1806. Subsequently, it goes on to investigate how Wordsworth’s entry into Beaumont’s visual society at Grosvenor affected not only the poet’s visual experience in London by improving his visual awareness and judgment of works of art, but also his poetic enterprise by stimulating his poetic inspiration. Although there are limitations in attempting to fully understand Wordsworth’s visuality, this essay can be considered as a foundation that could pave the way toward rethinking the poet’s complex relationship to visual culture. This will allow us to expand the restricted context of Wordsworth’s literary works in relation to the Romantic literary aesthetic culture.