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Article: Wordsworth, Arnold, and the maritime matrix of culture.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Wordsworth Circle
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
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Wordsworth's Britain was a self-consciously maritime nation, and Wordsworth's own relationship to the sea and to seafaring was longstanding and complex, literary and personal. Wordsworth was strongly invested in the nation's nautical affairs, in his own various channel crossings, and (both emotionally and economically) in his brother John's career at sea--hence the life-defining shock of John's death in the wreck of the Abergavenny in 1805. In many crucial passages, Wordsworth avails himself of what W.H. Auden long ago called (with particular reference to Wordsworth) "the Romantic iconography of the sea," and his evocations of the maritime world influenced his ...