Wordsworth, Constable, and the claim of personal geography

Striking yet underinvestigated similarities exist between Wordsworth and Constable: each made a conscious decision, against popular opinion, to recognize in his art the importance of his personal landscapes. In focusing on his home places each converted the common truth of local attachment into a morally significant artistic subject to which he could dedicate himself and vowed the resulting art would benefit future generations. The claiming of place validated a creative independence, a deliberate turning away from accepted patterns of artistic practice.; A return to the security of a familiar setting seems the opposite of a revolutionary act, yet for both Wordsworth and Constable such a point of return grounds creative revolution. After a period of dissatisfaction with his artistic education, Constable developed a program which asserted the value of a "natural painture" and claimed that Bergholt, his childhood home, was the place to develop it. Wordsworth's return followed an isolated winter spent in Goslar; there he came to realize the part his claimed places had played in the education of his mind and spirit and so announced the decision to return to England's North to locate his creative center.; This study investigates first the backgrounds which led Wordsworth and Constable to acknowledge the importance of their claimed places, then the results of their conscious decisions to do so: that is, how each artist's focus on personal geography shaped his career. Neither man was limited by his connection to place; paradoxically, by focusing on their local connections both attempted to create a universal art. For each, his sense of self was bound with his sense of place. Their success can be measured by the part an intimate connection of artist to landscape plays in the complex pattern we recognize as Romanticism. The Afterword considers what happened to this particularly Romantic tendency as the century progressed: Tennyson's stringent denial that his poetry represented his home ground suggests that the personal meaning of place is countered by an increasing public designification of landscape.