Hess 2008

William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity
Author(s): Scott Hess

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 63, No. 3 (December 2008), pp. 283-320
Published by: University of California Press
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William Wordsworth and
Photographic Subjectivity
SCOTT HESS
≥
onnecting William Wordsworth and
photography may at first glance seem
counterintuitive. By the time that Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox
Talbot announced their concurrent discoveries of the photo-
graphic process in 1839, Wordsworth was almost seventy years
old and his poetic career had nearly run its course. Words-
worth’s emphasis in his poetry on feeling and imagination,
rather than mimetic detail, also seems opposite to the spirit of
photography, which impressed nineteenth-century viewers with
its startlingly detailed images. The fixed surface of the photo-
graph, often identified at the time with science rather than art
and with physical reality as opposed to human consciousness,
seems directly contrary to Wordsworth’s emphasis on the trans-
forming powers of memory and imagination.
One possible link is that photography emerged directly
from the picturesque movement and its tradition of linear per-
spective landscape art. But here again Wordsworth seems at first
glance to be opposed to rather than aligned with this develop-
ment. Although he was deeply influenced by the picturesque
early in life, reflected especially in early poems such as An Eve-
ning Walk (1793) and Descriptive Sketches (1793), Wordsworth in
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 283–320. ISSN: 0891-9356, online ISSN: 1067-
8352. © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct
all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University
of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/
rights.htm.
283
C5043.indb 283 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

284 nineteent h -c e n t u ry l it e r at u r e
“Tintern Abbey” (1798) proclaimed that he had matured be-
yond picturesque conventions. Instead of focusing on external
“colours” and “forms” that spoke only to the eye, he claimed
that he had learned to access a deeper truth of feeling that con-
nected him with higher things: “A presence that disturbs me
with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of some-
thing far more deeply interfused.” 1 In The Prelude (1805), too,
Wordsworth claims to reject both the picturesque conventions
by which “the eye was master of the heart” and the time in his
life when it “held [his] mind / In absolute dominion.” 2 This ap-
peal to a vaguely defined “presence” and the primacy of feeling
over vision again seems exactly opposite to photography, with
its astonishing fidelity to mimetic detail as if for its own sake.
For these reasons, critics tend to align Wordsworth with
an opposition to visibility and materiality characteristic of one
version of Romantic imagination, identified by W.J.T. Mitchell
with the Protestant and Platonic position that “the deep truth
is imageless.” 3 This poetic opposition to visuality, Mitchell ar-
gues, is based in part on the distinction between painting and
poetry as media appealing to seemingly different perceptual
structures. In this way of thinking, painting is understood as a
spatial art and poetry (together with other forms of language)
as a temporal art, creating a contrast not just between different
forms of representation but between arts identified with “body
and soul, world and mind, nature and culture” respectively.4
Within these terms, widely accepted during the Romantic pe-
1 William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (1798), in his “Lyrical Ballads,” and Other
Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1992), pp. 118 –19, ll. 80, 95–97. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear
in the text.
2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), in The Thirteen-Book “Prelude,” ed. Mark
L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), I, 299; Book 2, ll. 172, 175–76
(AB-Stage Reading Text). Subsequent references to The Prelude, unless noted other-
wise, are by book and line number from this edition and appear in the text.
3 See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 114; see pp. 114 –17. Mitchell contrasts this
anti-visibility tradition with another Romantic tradition, represented by William Blake,
which foregrounded the materiality of writing and sought to integrate language and
images.
4 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1986), p. 49.
C5043.indb 284 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

w i ll iam wordsworth 285
riod, painting is associated with the visible world and poetry with
“the invisible realm of ideas and feelings,” to whose primacy
Wordsworth appealed (Mitchell, Iconology, p. 48). William H.
Galperin argues similarly that high-aesthetic writers such as
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley tended to oppose the power of imagination against visibility,
privileging ideas over objects in what Galperin calls the repres-
sion of the visible in high-Romantic culture.5 This apparent
opposition to the visible was also informed by the attempt to
define models of deep subjectivity and spiritualized reading
against what critics now recognize as the flourishing and mul-
tifaceted sphere of Romantic spectacle, such as Philip James
de Loutherbourg’s 1781 Eidophusikon, the panorama, and the
pantomime, embedded in many levels of Romantic-era com-
mercial culture.6 As a material, technological, and commercial
medium alike, photography seems in these ways directly op-
posed to the Wordsworthian Romantic imagination.
In this essay I hope to complicate that picture, both by
showing that Wordsworth did not outgrow the influence of the
picturesque nearly as fully as he claimed and by demonstrating
that his tendency to construct discrete snapshots of experience
(or “spots of time”), despite the sparsity of visual detail, has a
surprisingly great deal in common with the perceptual and for-
mal structures of photography. The stationed point of view of
the observer, focusing the scene from a single visual location;
the separation of that observer from the landscape that he or
she observes; the tendency to reduce the multisensory, ambi-
ent experience of a lived environment to pure vision; and the
5 See Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins Univ. Press, 1993), esp. pp. 3, 19 –20. Compare Galperin’s account with that in
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760 –1860
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), which explores the prevalence of visual culture in other
forms of Romantic popular and commercial culture.
6 For a broad treatment of Romantic spectacle, see Wood, Shock of the Real; and Ro-
mantic Spectacle, a special edition of Romanticism on the Net (now Romanticism and Victori-
anism on the Net), 46 (May 2007), ed. John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, available online
at <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2007/v/n46/index.html>. For discussion of
links between this culture of spectacle, the city, and various commercial forms, see the
collection Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780 –1840, ed. James
Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005).
C5043.indb 285 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

resulting general disembodiment of the observer all link Word-
sworth’s main structure of experience to the tradition of the
picturesque and the technology of photography that emerged
from it. While Wordsworth did not focus on mimetic detail in
his landscapes (and in this sense remained decidedly unpho-
tographic), he did produce a visual subjectivity that comple-
mented the objectivity of the photograph and may even have
helped shape the terms for its appreciation. The apparent op-
position between Wordsworth’s poetry and photographic vi-
sion, in this sense, disguises a deeper complementarity: what I
will call Wordsworth’s photographic subjectivity.
It is important to clarify here that I am not arguing that
Wordsworth’s poetry is photographic in terms of its visual
description—which critics have rightly contrasted against the
density of visual detail in photography, pre-Raphaelite paint-
ing, and some Victorian poetry—but rather in terms of the
subjectivity and structures of experience that it constructs.7
Wordsworth’s construction of subjectivity in relation to land-
scape shows marked continuity with what John Barrell identi-
fies as a shared tradition in both Claudian landscape painting
and eighteenth-century poetry.8 In this tradition, the observer
looks out from a hilltop or elevated prospect position over the
surrounding countryside, composing that countryside as land-
scape through his (or, in rare cases, her) gaze and, in so doing,
simultaneously affirms both his own autonomous individual
identity and the harmonious social, political, and natural order
represented in the landscape. The prospect gives the viewer a
position of both cultural and political authority, distinguished
from the “occluded view” of the laborer located within the
7
On connections between photography, pre-Raphaelitism, and Victorian poetry,
see Michael Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1985); Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting, and Poetry:
The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1995); and Helen Groth, “Consigned to Sepia: Remembering Victorian
Poetry,” Victorian Poetry, 41 (2003), 611–20.
8 See Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730 –1840: An Approach
to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972); and Barrell, “The
Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Brit-
ain,” in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Man-
chester Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 19 – 40.
C5043.indb 286 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

landscape, as well as from women, savages, the uneducated, and
the poor more generally—all supposedly lacking in the ability
to abstract and generalize deemed necessary for landscape vi-
sion.9 There is a separation between the bodiless subjectivity
(and resulting power) of the one who sees and the embodied
objectivity of the one who is seen.
This prospect position merely amplifies formal effects im-
plicit in the Western landscape tradition from its beginning,
with the reemergence of linear perspective in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. As Denis E. Cosgrove explores, this tradi-
tion focuses the landscape on a single, stationed point of view,
located outside the composition.10 The viewing subject is by
definition an outsider, not represented within the picture it-
self, and so physically and perceptually removed from what he
or she observes. Yet at the same time, the entire landscape for-
mally focuses and depends on this individual position outside
of it, which defines and composes it as a landscape. The com-
positional unity of the landscape, in this sense, presumes the
unity of the point of view, and hence of the subject observing
it. The viewer is defined in this way as a seemingly disembodied
and autonomous consciousness, taking the paradigmatic “view
from nowhere” of the modern Western subject as he or she
looks on, as if from outside the objective and physical world. Yet
on a deeper level, the individualized subjectivity of the viewing
position and the pictorial objectivity of the landscape are not
separate, but depend on and mutually construct one another.
This sense of individuality, separation, and power over the
landscape, implicit in the entire Western tradition of landscape,
is emphasized by the eighteenth-century prospect position and
the self-conscious imaginative power of the picturesque viewer.
Wordsworth’s models of vision and subjectivity are in turn
deeply shaped by this tradition. Before turning to the specif-
ics of Wordsworth’s poetry, however, I think it is important to
9 Landscape modes in this sense express relations of power. In addition to Barrell,
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, see the collection Landscape and Power, ed.
W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
10 See Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and
Noble, 1984). For another, related discussion of the landscape tradition, see Malcolm
Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
C5043.indb 287 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

begin with a brief overview of the picturesque and its relation-
ship to photography, since the picturesque is the primary point
of contact between Wordsworth and that yet-to-be-developed
medium.
Photography, in this sense, is not just a way to capture light
or produce direct mimetic images of the “real,” but a techno-
logical extension of the tradition of Western linear perspective
in painting and the arts. Despite its apparent realism, the pho-
tograph does not in fact duplicate the effects of embodied hu-
man vision, as Joel Snyder explores in an intriguing essay on
“Picturing Vision.” 11 Whereas human vision focuses on a spe-
cific location and blurs toward the periphery (without sharp
or defining edges), the photograph presents a sharp focus
throughout its entire visual field, surrounded by a definite edge
or frame. Like linear perspective in painting, the photograph
presents the scene from a specific, stationed point of view, from
which it composes and organizes that scene. The photograph
also isolates vision from the other senses and bodily processes
and, like landscape painting, typically removes the observer
from its field of representation. The observer sees, but remains
unseen. In the process, photography tends to separate subject
from object and the observing mind from the world observed,
breaking the link between human vision and the multisensual
and kinesthetic body. Photographic representation is in these
ways structured not by human perception or physiology, but
by a specific technology that duplicates the aesthetic effects
of linear perspective and its version of abstract mathematical
space. Photographic images seem immediately “real” or “natu-
ral,” Snyder argues, only because they match the visual expec-
tations developed through centuries of this linear perspective
11
See Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980), 499 –526. See also Vic-
tor Burgin, “Seeing Sense” (1980), in his The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmoder-
nity (London: MacMillan, 1986), pp. 51–70, esp. pp. 51–53. On the link between pho-
tography, linear perspective, and the picturesque, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with
Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Peter Galassi,
Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1981), pp. 12–22; and Heinrich Schwarz, Art and Photography: Forerunners and
Influences, ed. William E. Parker (Rochester, N.Y.: Gibbs M. Smith in association with
Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), pp. 85–117.
C5043.indb 288 2/6/09 10:10:14 AM

visual culture, and because they record such density of detail.
Photography’s sense of realism disguises its essential continuity
with the Western pictorial tradition.
The photograph in this way stands in a long line of other
visual technologies that allowed artists to produce linear per-
spective views and the illusion of reality in the landscape tradi-
tion. In the fifteenth century, during the rediscovery of linear
perspective in Western Europe, artists such as Leon Battista
Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, and Leonardo da Vinci used different
versions of the drawing machine (or machine à dessiner), such
as a grid of strings set in a frame between the observer and the
view, or a pane of glass painted in a grid pattern, to help them
create perspectival effects.12 Numerous versions of drawing ma-
chines continued to be used in the centuries that followed. The
camera obscura, an even older technology and a direct fore-
runner of the photographic camera, projected light through
a pinhole to cast an image on a screen in a darkened room
or chamber. By the eighteenth century, ever-smaller and more
portable camera obscuras were being built to aid artists, such
as Sir Joshua Reynolds, who carried these devices with them
out into the field.13 The camera lucida, invented in 1806, al-
lowed artists to draw in perspective by using a prism and (of-
ten) a small hole in a brass viewing tube, through which the
observer could see a projected image on a piece of paper for
drafting.14
The picturesque movement, defined as the attempt to
view actual landscapes according to the same conventions as
pictures, used these existing technologies and developed new
ones of its own in order to assist in its central activity of framing.
In the picturesque, as in the linear perspective landscape tra-
dition, the viewer composed the scene from a single stationed
12 See Schwarz, Art and Photography, pp. 97–117; and Doug Nickel, “The Camera
and Other Drawing Machines,” in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine
Art Tradition, ed. Mike Weaver (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 1–10.
13 See the sources quoted in notes 10 and 11 above, esp. Schwarz, Art and Photogra-
phy, p. 113; and see Nickel, “The Camera and Other Drawing Machines,” p. 7.
14 For a description of the camera lucida, see Larry J. Schaaf, Tracings of Light: Sir
John Herschel and the Camera Lucida: Drawings from the Graham Nash Collection (San Fran-
cisco: Friends of Photography, 1989).
C5043.indb 289 2/6/09 10:10:15 AM

point of view. This process usually involved some form of fram-
ing, using a prominent foreground and/or “sidescreens,” such
as trees or hills, to outline and compose the scene. In paintings
and drawings these formal devices composed a characteristic
frame-within-a-frame, self-consciously highlighting the process
of framing. The Claude glass emerged as a distinctively pictur-
esque technology of framing and was another technical cousin
to the photographic camera. Named after Claude Lorraine,
whose visual effects it simulated, the Claude glass consisted of
a convex mirror in a small square frame. To use it, the viewer
turned his or her back on the actual landscape in order to com-
pose its reflection in the mirror, whose convexity tended to sep-
arate foreground, middleground, and background and could
provide tint (from colored foil behind the mirror) in ways that
imitated picturesque painting.15 The mirror composed a scene
about the size of a postcard, held in the viewer’s hand.
The Claude glass is also an example of the general ten-
dency of the picturesque toward appropriation: the desire not
only to compose the landscape, but also to capture or fix it in
more permanent form. Thomas Gray wrote in this respect in
his Journal of his 1769 tour to the Lake District, which would
become one of the canonical works of the picturesque: “I got
to the Parsonage a little before Sunset, & saw in my [Claude]
glass a picture, that if I could transmitt to you, & fix it in all
the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand
pounds.” 16 Artists and writers also attempted to capture pictur-
esque scenes in similar ways in paintings, sketches, and descrip-
tions. As Malcolm Andrews puts it: “The Picturesque artist ‘ap-
propriates’ natural scenery and processes it into a commodity.
With the aid of his ‘knick-knacks’ he converts Nature’s unman-
ageable bounty into a frameable possession” (Search for the Pic-
turesque, p. 81). Wordsworth himself expressed a similar desire
15 For a general description of the Claude glass, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for
the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760 –1800 (Stanford: Stan-
ford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 67–73. Andrews’s book also gives an excellent overview of
the picturesque.
16 Thomas Gray, entry for 4 October 1769, in Thomas Gray’s Journal of His Visit to
the Lake District in October 1769, ed. William Roberts (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press,
2001), p. 59.
C5043.indb 290 2/6/09 10:10:15 AM

to capture picturesque scenes during his 1790 walking tour of
the Alps, writing to Dorothy:
Ten thousand times in the course of this tour have I regretted
the inability of my memory to retain a more strong impression of
the beautiful forms before me, and again and again in quitting a
fortunate station have I returned to it with the most eager avidity,
with the hope of bearing away a more lively picture.17
Wordsworth is a quintessential modern tourist here, wishing

for the not-yet-invented photographic camera.
Photography emerged directly out of this picturesque de-
sire to capture the scene as a frameable possession. It was hardly
accidental, in this sense, that photography was invented dur-
ing the heyday of landscape appreciation by men thoroughly
steeped in the picturesque. Geoffrey Batchen explores this
connection at length, citing the widespread desire for photog-
raphy that led at least twenty different people from seven dif-
ferent European countries to imagine the idea of photography
between 1790 and its actual discovery in 1839.18 Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was one of them, describing John Milton’s “poetic
painting” in the Biographia Literaria (1817) as “creation rather
than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence
of the whole picture flash’d at once upon the eye, as the sun
paints in a camera obscura.” 19 The two concurrent main inven-
tors of the photographic process, Louis Daguerre and Henry
Fox Talbot, were both directly involved in picturesque practices
and technologies. Daguerre was a landscape painter for the-
ater imagery and dioramas before he invented the daguerreo-
type. As an artist, he painted the first public diorama in Paris in
1823, a kind of proto-film experience in which an audience in
17
William Wordsworth, letter to Dorothy Wordsworth, 6 and 16 September 1790,
in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, I: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Er-
nest de Selincourt, 2d ed., rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967),
pp. 35–36.
18 See Batchen, Burning with Desire, p. ix.
19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary
Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols., vol. 7 of The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, and Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1983), II, 127–28.
C5043.indb 291 2/6/09 10:10:15 AM

a darkened theater viewed a landscape painted on a transpar-
ent screen, onto which different colored lights were projected
to create the effects of atmospheric change and movement. Tal-
bot had a less skilled connection to landscape art, claiming that
he invented photography in response to his frustration at being
unable to use the camera lucida to capture picturesque scenes
in perspective during his 1833 honeymoon in the Alps.20
Both Daguerre and Talbot compared photography with
the camera obscura. Photography in this sense actualized the
appropriative instinct of the picturesque, its desire to arrest
or capture the image.21 Hence Daguerre’s exclamation, upon
making his discovery: “I have seized the fleeting light and im-
prisoned it!” 22 Talbot and Daguerre also both used artistic
metaphors for the photographic process, Talbot calling it “na-
ture’s painting” and Daguerre claiming, “I have forced the sun
to paint pictures for me” (L.J.M. Daguerre, p. 47). This meta-
phor of photography as a form of writing or picturesque art was
widely shared in early descriptions of the medium, in common
terms such as “heliography,” “sun drawing,” or “sun painting,”
or in the phrase “the pencil of nature.” 23 Other picturesque
terms, such as “view,” “effect,” and “prospect,” were imported
directly into photography, and early landscape photographers
self-consciously tried to imitate the compositional effects of the
picturesque and were judged by picturesque standards. It is not
surprising, given these expectations, that many early photogra-
20 On the diorama and Daguerre’s involvement, see Stephan Oettermann, The
Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone
Books, 1997), pp. 74 – 80. On Talbot’s formative experience, see Schaaf, Tracings of
Light, pp. 12–13.
21 In On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), Susan Sontag dis-
cusses this appropriative tendency of photography at length: see esp. pp. 3–9, 14 –15,
110, 122–23, 156, 163– 64. See also Batchen, Burning with Desire, pp. 94 –99, which spe-
cifically compares the appropriative tendencies of photography and the picturesque.
22 Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre (1787–1851): The
World’s First Photographer (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), p. 47.

23 For these various terms and references, see Batchen, Burning with Desire, pp. 56,
63; Sontag, On Photography, p. 88; and Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch, The
Photographic Experience, 1839–1914: Images and Attitudes (University Park: Pennsylvania
State Univ. Press, 1994), p. 199.
C5043.indb 292 2/6/09 10:10:15 AM

phers began as painters, and even used the insignia of painting
to advertise their photographic studios.24
Photography, then, was fully immersed in and structured
by the conventions of the picturesque. But what about Word-
sworth? While critics have generally agreed on the formative
influence of the picturesque on Wordsworth’s early writing and
aesthetics, they split on the extent to which he subsequently
outgrew those conventions and left the picturesque behind.
Jonathan Bate presents the more usual account, following
Wordsworth’s own lead in “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude in
claiming that Wordsworth broke from the picturesque in his
shift from an emphasis on visual forms and structures, or the
“mastery of the eye,” to an emphasis on feeling, the mind, and
imagination.25 A few critics, such as James A. W. Heffernan and
John R. Nabholtz, have deviated from this line, claiming that
Wordsworth never really abandoned the picturesque and its
pictorial emphasis.26 This critical disagreement, however, pres-
ents something of a red herring. While Wordsworth clearly left
behind many of the specific formal conventions of the pictur-
esque, as advocated by William Gilpin and other picturesque
theorists, he just as clearly internalized and continued to repro-
duce in his writing many of its basic perceptual structures and
24 See Batchen, Burning with Desire, pp. 69 –72; Henisch, Photographic Experience,
pp. 199, 207– 8; John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s
Imagination (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 17–24; John Wood, The
Scenic Daguerreotype: Romanticism and Early Photography (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press,
1995), pp. 11, 44 – 49; and Jens Jäger, “Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and
National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Picturing
Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R.
Ryan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 123–25.
25 See Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000),
pp. 139 –52. For a few other versions of this position, see also J. R. Watson, Pictur-
esque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1970),
pp. 65–107; Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, ed. John Kerrigan
and Jonathan Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 189 –260;
and John Lucas, Romantic to Modern Literature: Essays and Ideas of Culture, 1750 –1900
(Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 50 – 67.
26 See Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Con-
stable, and Turner (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1985), pp. 19 –22; and
Nabholtz, “Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes and the Picturesque Tradition,” Modern Phi-
lology, 61 (1964), 288 –97.
C5043.indb 293 2/6/09 10:10:15 AM

attitudes. Wordsworth’s outward break from the picturesque in
this sense disguises an essential continuity: his tendency to view
nature as a detached, solitary, stationed observer, situated out-
side the landscape that he contemplates. In composing scenes
from this stationed, individual point of view, Wordsworth typi-
cally ignores or erases his own body, in the process isolating
vision from the other senses and creating a “pure” subjectiv-
ity seemingly detached from its environment, its own embodi-
ment, and other forms of relationship. While Wordsworth’s
poetry does not emphasize visual form in the same way as the
picturesque does, it structures subjectivity and perception in
analogous ways—ways that would also become central to pho-
tography. The photograph offers the image and only implies
the subjectivity of the observer, while Wordsworth’s poetry does
the opposite, concentrating on the subjectivity of the observer
and only broadly gesturing at the landscape observed, but in
both cases the forms and relationships of perception are struc-
tured analogously.
In this way Romantic subjectivity and the modern technol-
ogy of the photograph are not opposed, but in a broader sense
ultimately complement and even produce one another. The
objective world of the photographic image and the “deep” au-
tonomous subjectivity of the viewer come into being together,
in a single complementary relationship in which subject and
object, mind and body, immaterial consciousness and mate-
rial world, are coupled together by their formal separation.
There can be no photograph without this implied autonomous
subject or consciousness, looking on from outside the world
of the image; but by the same token, the autonomous subject
depends on the pictorial perspective and stability of this ob-
jective world in order to construct its own sense of unity and
interiority. The apparent depth and autonomy of the subject
emerges as it is defined outside of the picture it observes, while
its apparent unity is a formal effect of the pictorial composi-
tion, focusing the entire image on one unseen point. It is thus
not only the general nature of form and language, but also the
need to construct a specific kind of subjectivity, that underlies
Wordsworth’s persistent attempts, as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it, to
reach a sphere of “transcendent antiimages” by beginning from
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and returning to “images borrowed from the sensible world.” 27
Wordsworth’s construction of a deep imaginative subjectivity
depends not only on sensible images, but also on a landscape
mode of perception. Physical vision passes into spiritual vision,
at least for the transcendental moment of illumination, but this
transcendence both begins from and inevitably returns to a pic-
torial subject position, in which the central, stationed observer
looks out over a seemingly separate landscape, composed into
unity from his singular point of view.
A quick turn to two of Wordsworth’s most famous short
lyrics, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807) and “The Solitary
Reaper” (1807), illustrates this dynamic. In both poems the nar-
rator records an image of the landscape in memory, which he
then carries within him for future viewings. Both poems pres-
ent this narrator in a stationed prospect position, similar to the
stations from which picturesque viewers composed the land-
scape, and both narrate a protracted moment of vision through
which the viewer fixes this specific image of the landscape and,
for “The Solitary Reaper,” the person in it. The narrators do
not enter into or directly interact with these landscapes, but in-
stead maintain a visual (and, in “The Solitary Reaper,” also an
aural) distance, seeing but unseen, composing the landscape in
relation to their own outside point of view. Through this pic-
turesque or photographic relationship to landscape, they con-
struct their own autonomous subjectivity.
Enacting what Geoffrey H. Hartman has called the “halted
traveler” motif in Wordsworth’s poetry, both poems begin at the
moment when the narrator stops his movement and assumes
this stationed perspective looking out over the landscape. In “I
wandered lonely as a Cloud,” the traveler, initially compared
to a drifting cloud, halts as the picture comes into focus, “all at
once.” 28 While the poem’s title emphasizes the act of wander-
ing, its main imaginative action only begins when the narrator
27 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Diagrammatology,” Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981), 631.

28 William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” in his “Poems, in Two Vol-
umes,” and Other Poems, 1800 –1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983),
p. 207, l. 3. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 12–18; section I is titled “The Halted Traveler.”
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stops, in a fixed position, and it depends on this visual station-
ing. In the lines that follow, the narrator describes a landscape
composed around the central image of the daffodils: “A host of
dancing Daffodils; / Along the Lake, beneath the trees, / Ten
thousand dancing in the breeze” (ll. 4 – 6). While the scene it-
self shows kinesthetic traces, in the “dancing Daffodils” and the
“sparkling waves” (l. 8), the narrator remains outside and apart
from that scene, in a purely visual relationship emphasized by
the poem’s repeated return to and reiteration of the visual act,
as in the repeated phrase “I gaz’d—and gaz’d” (l. 11). Although
the poem presents the daffodils, waves, and other elements of
the landscape in relation to one another, these relationships
all depend on the stationed point of view of the observer, who
composes them into unity from outside, just as a picturesque
artist or a photographer might do.
“The Solitary Reaper” seems at first to emphasize sound
over sight, but the perceptual structure of the poem is in fact
very similar to “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” beginning and
ending with a stationed, visual experience. Although the poem
does not begin with the narrator in motion, it calls out to the
reader in the opening lines to halt and “Behold her, single in
the field, / Yon solitary Highland Lass!” 29 Since the narrator is
later identified as a traveler, this opening implies that he has
already halted at the poem’s vantage point and now calls upon
the reader, as an imaginary fellow traveler, to join him. Once
again the opening establishes a single, stationed point of view
that reader and narrator share, each as separate individuals.
And again, it leads to a protracted experience of gazing, af-
ter which the narrator bears the reaper’s image, as well as her
song, away with him internally as he continues on his journey.
This moment of arrested vision, in which a halted narrator re-
cords an image of a momentarily fixed landscape that he can
then carry away with him in memory for future imaginative
acts, is closely analogous to taking a photograph. This pattern
is typical of many other poems too, such as “Tintern Abbey”
and “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (1802), which I
will discuss later.
29 William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, p. 184, ll. 1–2.
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As in “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” the narrator of “The
Solitary Reaper” remains completely outside of the landscape
he contemplates. He sees and listens to the reaper, but the
poem gives no indication that she recognizes his presence, and
it records no direct interaction between them. Though this
scene in “The Solitary Reaper” is not purely visual, it does iso-
late vision and sound from the other, more proximal senses,
such as touch and smell, that would give the narrator a stronger
sense of embodiment in his environment. The poem stresses
the encounter with the reaper’s song, but this song is located,
even rooted in place by the visual image of her, which is much
more detailed and precise than the aural description. We know
of the song only that it is “melancholy” and “sweet,” and that
the reaper sings “As if her song could have no ending” (“Soli-
tary Reaper,” ll. 6, 10, 13, 26). Other than that, the poem
purposefully withholds the song’s content from us, spending
a whole stanza reflecting on possible themes but leaving its
subject pointedly undetermined. The poem’s visual image, in
contrast, is far more specific and leaves a more definite impres-
sion on the reader’s memory: both in the opening description
of the reaper and in the reiteration of that description in the
final stanza, with the lines “I saw her singing at her work, / And
o’er the sickle bending” (ll. 27–28). This second description
reattaches the amorphousness of the song, in conclusion, to a
precisely stationed visual image. The poem’s emotional impact
depends on this visual stationing: it combines the immediacy
of the song with the detachment of vision, creating a melan-
choly conjunction of human connection and unbridgeable dis-
tance between reaper and narrator. The reaper’s visual image,
combined with her song, evokes the poignancy of a grainy old
photograph, freezing a vanished moment in the haunting way
that caused nineteenth-century viewers to associate photogra-
phy with death more generally.30 In so doing, the poem evokes
the combined sense of participation and alienation that Susan
30 On the early association between photography and death, see Helen Groth, Vic-
torian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), p. 10;
and Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
(New York: Viking, 2003), p. 115.
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Sontag associates with the photographic medium.31 An aural
recording, in contrast, remains more immediately present to its
listeners, less plangent and less definitively located in time.
Both “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” and “The Solitary
Reaper” depend for their power on the narrator’s ability to fix
a single, discrete, visually defined moment of experience in his
mind, to which he can later return in acts of private memory
and imagination. In both cases, the narrator’s stationed point
of view defines the image and provides its compositional unity,
but the narrator remains physically detached from that land-
scape and from any reciprocal forms of relationship. Both po-
ems present a protracted, stationary act of viewing, teasingly
similar to the early photographic process, and in both cases the
narrator uses this protracted vision to capture the image and
carry it away as a kind of portable aesthetic commodity. “The
Solitary Reaper” tells us only that he bears away the reaper’s
“music in [his] heart” (l. 31), but, as I have argued, he also
carries away her visual image. “I wandered lonely as a Cloud”
goes one step further, not only capturing the image but also
dramatizing the narrator’s subsequent re-viewing of it, “on
[his] couch . . . / In vacant or in pensive mood,” as the daf-
fodils and their landscape “flash upon” the poet’s “inward eye”
to create the “bliss of solitude” (ll. 13–16). It is as if the poem
describes the process of taking an internalized photograph,
then viewing it again later in domestic privacy.
This process of capturing, carrying away, and then return-
ing to the image in a more private setting is characteristic both
of the picturesque and of photography. Peter D. Osborne de-
scribes how the consumption of photographs typically took
place inside, in the domestic spaces of the Victorian parlor.
These photographic images were often connected with travel,
offering an experience of the exotic “other” whom the viewer
could observe while at the same time remaining him- or her-
self unseen. In the process, photographs created a sense of dis-
tance that removed the image from its original contexts and
reinscribed it in the contexts of the viewing experience itself,
31 See Sontag, On Photography, p. 164.
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subject to the viewer’s private imaginative appropriation.32 Pho-
tography often provided these viewers—as it still does today—
with an experience of surrogate travel. John Taylor comments:
The [photographic] medium caters for armchair time-travel, in
which the viewer has the illusion of entering some other place
and period through a magical window. At the same time, the
viewer stays safely in place, and the act of time- and space-travel
is purely speculative, encouraging day-dreams and reverie. Trav-
elling in this manner is an imaginative act, an act of memory and
reflection. (Dream of England, p. 11)
The protracted gaze of this imaginative traveler, for Taylor, is

marked by “leisure, education and seriousness” (Dream of Eng-
land, p. 13), just like the ideal gaze of the reader for Roman-
tic writers such as Wordsworth. This gaze fashions a subjectivity
always dreaming itself elsewhere, neither fully here nor fully
there but constructed in the imaginative movement between
here and there, now and then, the present viewer and the fixed
image from the past.
Travel as a search for visual experience, Osborne argues,
helped to construct a new and distinctively modern subjectiv-
ity. Osborne claims that modern travel “is essentially a way of
seeing, a mode of seeing,” constituting the modern subject as
a “mobile eye” in which “by definition, the modern self was a
journey” (Travelling Light, pp. 3, 6, 9).33 This self is defined as
much through imaginative as through physical travel, through
a visual structure that organizes the world from the individual
point of view but leaves that individual autonomous, seemingly
outside of the world that his or her gaze organizes. In this pic-
turesque or photographic relationship, both image and self are
detached from their immediate environmental and social con-
texts to become, in effect, mutually constitutive contexts for one
32 See Peter D. Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture
(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000), see esp. pp. 10, 19, 52–54, 60. On the
relation of photography and travel, see Henisch, Photographic Experience, pp. 396 – 430.
33 The first quotation is taken from Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989).
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another: the “pure” subjectivity of the viewer, taking its “view
from nowhere” on the world as a collection of photographic
objects and landscapes. It is in this sense that Denis Cosgrove
writes that the photograph “underwrote the appropriation of
the visible world to the individual, detached observer while si-
multaneously proclaiming in its constructional conventions the
scientific objectivity and accuracy of this vision” (Social Formation
and Symbolic Landscape, pp. 258 –59). The camera tends to sep-
arate subject and object, the mind of the observer and the body
of the world, but in a way that makes them mutually dependent
on one another. As it does so, it affirms the autonomy of the
subject by giving it a sense of possession over the photographic
object, rendered into a portable commodity—an appropria-
tive gesture that Susan Sontag identifies as a central element
of photography. Photographers, she writes, describe their art
in these terms as “both a limitless technique for appropriating
the objective world and an unavoidably solipsistic expression of
the singular self” (On Photography, p. 122). The photographic
subjectivity of this seemingly autonomous self epitomizes the
“lonely wandering I” of the modern subject— experiencing a
world through vision from which it remains existentially sepa-
rate. Mind and body, consciousness and world are not so much
in opposition to one another as coupled together in formal
separation through their photographic relationship.
This protracted gaze of the traveler and the subjectivity
that it constructs is central to “The Solitary Reaper,” “I wan-
dered lonely as a Cloud,” and many of Wordsworth’s most cel-
ebrated poems. The experience of the halted traveler, fixing
or capturing a specific landscape at a specific moment from
a particular point of view, creates the portable imaginative re-
source from which the self can first build and then sustain its
sense of imaginative autonomy. In poems such as these, Word-
sworth fulfills his youthful wish, expressed during his 1790 trip
in the Alps, of capturing scenes and “bearing away a more lively
picture”— except that now he captures the image internally
rather than externally. In the process, these poems allow him
to construct a photographic subjectivity in exactly the way that
Cosgrove and Sontag describe: through the viewing subject’s
ability to capture and possess specific visual moments, through
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the camera of imagination, while remaining outside and seem-
ingly independent of those scenes. While Wordsworth’s images
in these poems are not as physically detailed as photographs,
they follow the same structural logic—revealing their full sig-
nificance, like a photographic plate, not in the actual moment
of experience but only later, in the act of returning to them
in the Wordsworthian darkroom of memory and imagination.
Image and self become mutually constitutive, constructing the
paradigmatic Wordsworthian subject as a traveler, across both
space and time, and sustaining his sense of autonomy and iden-
tity as he constantly returns to his own portfolio of internalized
visual moments, or “spots of time.” In this way Wordsworth’s
poetics of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” and his charac-
teristic structure of self-construction in The Prelude and other
poems, repeatedly returning in his present imagination to
fixed and spatially discrete memories of the past, resembles a
man recording and then endlessly re-viewing a series of photo-
graphs.34 Like the photographic viewer, Wordsworth does not
construct his subjectivity through immediate relationships, but
rather through the ability to return again and again in pres-
ent imagination to specific subject positions fixed in the past
by moments of stationed vision. His deep autonomous subjec-
tivity emerges, apparently self-contained and self-producing,
through this repeated, private act of imaginative re-viewing.
“Tintern Abbey” provides probably the most famous exam-
ple of this imaginative pattern, as the poet constructs his iden-
tity by returning as a traveler to a precise, stationed point of
view outside and above a landscape picture. From this vantage
point, the traveling self composes (or recomposes) the land-
scape through a protracted experience of viewing that isolates
vision from the other senses and generates a sense of “pure”
and seemingly disembodied subjectivity:
. . . the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
34 See William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1850), in The Prose Works
of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), I, 148.
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In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
(“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 44 –50)
As the body and its “blood” disappear until they become a

purely visual experience, “an eye made quiet by the power /
Of harmony,” the poet can visually “see into the life of things,”
experiencing both his own pure self-consciousness and an an-
swering “presence” (l. 95) with which he communes. He can
feel this transcendence only because his detached prospect
position allows him to contemplate the landscape as if from
outside, independent of other forms of bodily, environmental,
and social relationships (until he summons Dorothy for affir-
mation at the end, projecting her into the future landscape as
a “second self” in what can be read as another, related form
of appropriation). His apparently self-produced autonomy as a
subject depends on this photographic stationing, an initial vi-
sion of a landscape separate from himself to which he can then
return in repeated private re-viewings.
Like that of “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” the central
imaginative process of “Tintern Abbey” depends on the narra-
tor’s ability to record and internalize the landscape as image,
in the landscape mode. The poem literalizes this process of re-
cording an internalized image:
Though absent long

These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration.
(“Tintern Abbey,” ll. 23–31)
In the unspecific “lonely rooms” of the poet’s life, as in the

unspecified room of “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” the poet
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communes internally with his own recorded image, indepen-
dent from all other contexts and relationships. He defines his
identity through a traveler’s visual relationship to landscape,
from a specific point of view, apart from the place where he
actually lives and his daily interactions with the people around
him. The power of “Tintern Abbey” comes from the experience
of returning, in person, to the exact point of view of this mental
image, re-viewing the actual scene in a way that matches the
narrator’s own internalized impression of it, and thus revalidat-
ing the subject position he has constructed and his own result-
ing imaginative power and autonomy. The experience would
not have the same power if he viewed the landscape from even
a slightly different position or angle, because he would not be
returning to the precise point of view of that internalized im-
age, as if a cherished photograph has suddenly reconstituted
itself as reality. The stability and coherence of the narrator’s
identity depends on the stability of this remembered landscape,
against which he can measure his own changes; but the stability
of the Wordsworthian self overall depends more generally on
this mode of landscape vision. Compare, for instance, the ver-
tiginously shifting landscapes of William Blake’s Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790), and indeed all of the prophetic books,
with the correspondingly shifting model of subjectivity and
imagination they produce.35 The stability of the landscape in
Wordsworth’s poetry, with its securely detached subject posi-
tion, ensures the stability, unity, and autonomy of the viewing
self. In Blake’s poetry, by contrast, a constantly transforming
landscape generates an equally dynamic and unstable self.
Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” (1807) demonstrates this
need for visual stability in a different way, in relation to two ver-
sions of a painted rather than an actual landscape.36 The poem
begins with the scene of Peele Castle that Wordsworth would
have painted, before the trauma of his brother’s death, imagin-
ing his identity at that time through this representative image.
35 Saree Makdisi draws this contrast between Wordsworth and Blake, in terms of
subjectivity and visuality (see Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s
[Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003], pp. 239 – 41).
36 See William Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, pp. 266 – 68.
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The poem then shifts to Beaumont’s painted image of the same
castle, beset but holding firm amid stormy seas, as an appro-
priate emblem for the poet’s current spiritual state. Marjorie
Levinson reads the shift between these two images as opening
up a deconstructive aporia, as the narrator’s attempt to reach
“a deeper and more imageless Truth” only substitutes one im-
age for another and cannot establish contact with “a world of
independent otherness” that would support the self’s reality.37
I read the poem somewhat differently: not as demonstrating the
impossibility of establishing an autonomous personal identity
through images, but as showing Wordsworth’s tendency to con-
struct his identity through the landscape mode. In the poem,
the narrator identifies his emotional and spiritual state first with
one image, and then with the other, but in both cases he also
assumes the sense of detachment and security of the landscape
viewer. Even when he identifies himself with the storm-lashed
castle, he does so primarily from the outside, by describing a
picture of it, rather than from within the center of the experi-
ence. His identity is secure and autonomous, not just because
he identifies with the persistence of the castle, but because he
can imagine that castle from the secure detachment of the pic-
torial viewer, which offers a stable haven of subjectivity outside
of every storm. Unlike the narrator in “Tintern Abbey,” the
narrator of “Elegiac Stanzas” shifts in the poem from one im-
age to another, but the landscape mode itself remains constant.
The Prelude describes this process of fixing visual memo-
ries from a specific point of view with its metaphor of the “spot
of time.” Capturing time through the metaphor of place, the
“spot of time” offers a kind of snapshot of experience to which
the poet then later returns, as if to a photograph, to recon-
nect with the moment of heightened imagination and subjec-
tivity that each “spot of time” memorializes. The Prelude overall
can be considered a kind of album or scrapbook of memory
in which Wordsworth has pasted these various internalized im-
ages. As he returns to this scrapbook later in repeated revisions
37 Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 105, 106.
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(both literally and figuratively), he continually reenacts and re-
produces his identity across time.
The Prelude, like “Tintern Abbey,” describes these “spots of
time” by using the language of forms or lineaments impressed
on the poet’s mind, to which he can later return. He writes
about childhood scenes:
. . . they impress’d
Collateral objects and appearances,
Albeit lifeless then, and doom’d to sleep
Until maturer seasons call’d them forth
To impregnate and to elevate the mind.
—And if the vulgar joy by its own weight
Wearied itself out of the memory
The scenes which were a witness of that joy
Remained, in their substantial lineaments
Depicted on the brain, and to the eye
Were visible, a daily sight.
(The Prelude, Book 1, ll. 621–31)
As the “vulgar joy” of bodily participation fades from memory,

the visual lineaments preserved there allow for a purer exer-
cise of imaginative and spiritual autonomy, just as in “Tintern
Abbey,” where the narrator develops from “the coarser plea-
sures of [his] boyish days, / And their glad animal movements”
(ll. 74 –75) to a more transcendental vision (in both senses of
that term).
Wordsworth’s description of the Wanderer’s imaginative
development in Book 1 of The Excursion (1814) abounds with
these same visual metaphors of reading and “lineaments,” cre-
ating the same sense of separation between the observer and
the landscape through which he produces the narrator’s iden-
tity in The Prelude. The Wanderer’s imaginative power devel-
ops as he attains “An active power to fasten images / Upon his
brain; and on their pictured lines / Intensely brooded.” 38 The
38 William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814 version), ed. Sally Bushell, James A.
Butler, and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007), p. 53; Book 1, ll. 163–
65. Subsequent citations of this poem are by book and line number from this edition.
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three hundred lines that follow are full of the vocabulary of
reading the landscape, including a dedicatory experience in
which the body is once again swallowed up into pure vision and
subjectivity:
O then what soul was his, when, on the tops

Of the high mountains, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked—
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touch’d,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live. . . .
(The Excursion, Book 1, ll. 198 –210)
From this high vantage point the world turns to spectacle, puri-
fied of sound, sensation, and even the Wanderer’s own body,
as visual communion with the landscape leads directly, in the
following lines, to communion with God. The Wanderer, like
Wordsworth himself in other poems, internalizes this transcen-
dental experience of self-presence and spiritual communion as
a visual memory, a kind of inner mental photograph. This vi-
sual scene is not an end in itself, but rather the necessary situa-
tion from which the poet’s imaginative power can then exercise
its power. In all of these poems the visual image grows more
powerful as it sheds its associations with the body and the other
senses, as the “animal being” is “swallowed up” into pure vision
and a correspondingly pure or disembodied subjectivity.
Other spots of time in The Prelude also record experiences
from specific, stationed points of view. Immediately after he
defines the “spots of time,” Wordsworth illustrates his defini-
tion with two stationed visual memories. The first culminates in
the sight of a pool, a beacon, and a woman with a pitcher bal-
anced on her head, describing the landscape from a specific,
stationed point where the younger Wordsworth halts tempo-
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rarily (The Prelude, Book 11, ll. 303–16). The second memory
describes Wordsworth as a boy stationed in a prospect posi-
tion, from which he awaits a messenger on either of two roads,
but it describes him as part of the landscape, the object rather
than the subject of the view, as if Wordsworth sees himself
in memory from the outside: a boy sitting in the grass, “half
shelter’d by a naked wall” between sheep and hawthorn, strain-
ing his eyes for the horses that will take him home (Book 11, ll.
358 – 60).
Not all the spots of time in The Prelude are as rooted in
specific, stationed points of view as the ones I have been de-
scribing. Many, especially in early childhood, involve a more
kinesthetic sense of embodiment in an ambient environment
of continuous processes, rather than an arrested moment of
vision. When he describes himself hanging from a cliff above
a raven’s nest, the poet evokes the physical feeling of the wind,
as he holds on “Suspended by the blast which blew amain, /
Shouldering the naked crag” (Book 1, ll. 346 – 47). In the boat-
stealing incident, the cliff seems to rise up as he paddles out
onto the lake, and he turns around without pausing, in a single
continuous process rather than a stationed or arrested view-
point (Book 1, ll. 373– 428). The skating scene ends not with a
stationed image of the landscape, but with the cliffs seeming to
“[Wheel] by [him], even as if the earth had roll’d / With visible
motion her diurnal round” (Book 1, ll. 486 – 87)—a beautiful
evocation of embodied vision, in which the body’s arrested mo-
tion carries over into the continued whirling of the sight. In all
of these moments, the narrator presents himself as physically
and perceptually immersed in his environment.
Even in these more embodied moments, however, the
sense of intense physical immersion tends to give over into
an experience of equally intense self-consciousness in which
the landscape dissolves into reverie or dream. Often this self-
consciousness emerges as the narrator stops, as in the Winander
Boy episode, suddenly stationed as observer in a landscape
where he had before been a participant. This shift into self-
consciousness accompanies a shift into the landscape mode of
vision, in effect removing the narrator from the scene in which
he had been immersed. As he gets older, Wordsworth’s “spots
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of time” in The Prelude become even more stationed, and they
begin to separate the body from the mind and vision from the
other senses even more rigorously. The climactic news of the
death of Robespierre, for instance, is connected to a specific
viewpoint, as the poet crosses the Lancashire sands at low tide
and sees the Lake District mountains with their pastoral valleys
among the clouds and gleaming sky: “On the fulgent spectacle /
Which neither changed, nor stirr’d, nor pass’d away / I gazed”
(Book 10, ll. 486 – 88). A moment of powerful but unspecified
“dedication” in Book 4 focuses similarly on the memory of a
visual spectacle from a stationed point of view:
. . . Magnificent
The Morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious than I ever had beheld;
The Sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid Mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drench’d in empyrean light;
And, in the meadows and the lower grounds,
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And Labourers going forth into the fields.
(Book 4, ll. 330 –39)
Both the moment of crossing Simplon pass and the final tran-
scendental vision atop Snowdon similarly anchor their revela-
tions in a specific visual image and point of view, again of the
halted traveler, which the poet records as a kind of internalized
photographic image (Book 6, ll. 525– 48; Book 13, ll. 35– 65).
In the 1850 version of The Prelude, he even characterizes his
relationship to the poem, and to his own life, as that of a halted
traveler looking back from a prospect position over the land-
scape through which he has just traveled:
Or as a Traveller, who has gained the brow
Of some aerial Down, while there he halts
For breathing-time, is tempted to review
The region left behind him; and if aught
Deserving notice have escaped regard,
Or been regarded with too careless eye,
Strives, from that height, with one, and yet one more
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Last look, to make the best amends he may,
So have we lingered.39
In this passage, the poet places himself as a kind of picturesque

or photographic observer of his own life, objectifying and sta-
bilizing his own past in relation to his present writing self in
much the same way, and with much the same effect, as he else-
where pictures the landscape.
Many of Wordsworth’s other poems share this same photo-
graphic structure of the spot of time. “Composed Upon West-
minster Bridge” looks out with a protracted gaze onto a tem-
porarily frozen landscape in an almost photographic way. The
unpublished “St. Paul’s” (written 1808) resembles a grainy Paul
Strand photograph, as the poet raises his eyes and sees a famil-
iar city street transformed into a “visionary scene,” described in
purely visual terms behind a “sacred veil of falling snow.” 40 In
such poems, the narrator seems separate from the landscape
he observes—Wordsworth’s typical position as a “spectator ab
extra,” as Coleridge put it.41 The description of St. Paul’s, for
instance, reads as if the snow falls only in the pictured scene
and not on his own body as well.
Other poems record individual people in a landscape
or cityscape, arrested in striking visual positions similar to
nineteenth-century picturesque photographs of the poor.42
From the shadows, the poet observes the discharged soldier in
The Prelude propped up on a milestone, where he “could mark
him well, / [Him]self unseen” (Book 4, ll. 404 –5). In London
he observes first a blind beggar and later the counterbalancing
image of a man bent over his sick child, while in both cases re-
39
William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book “Prelude,” ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cor-
nell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 179; Book 9, ll. 9 –17.
40 William Wordsworth, “St. Paul’s,” in his “The Tuft of Primroses,” with Other Late
Poems for “The Recluse,” ed. Joseph F. Kishel (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), p. 59,
ll. 15, 28.
41 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entries for 21 July 1832 and 16 February 1833,
in Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols., vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), I, 306, 342.
42 On these picturesque photographs of the poor, see Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in
the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1999), pp. 95–96.
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maining himself unseen (Book 7, ll. 608 –23; Book 8, ll. 844 –
59). And in the Lake District he contemplates a shepherd and
his dog framed by mist, or cast in visionary splendor against
the backdrop of the mountains (Book 8, ll. 81–119, 390 – 410).
In the discharged soldier passage, the narrator eventually steps
out from his hiding place and interacts with the soldier, en-
tering the landscape he has observed, but in such scenes he
typically remains outside of the picture, sheltered behind an
invisible intervening lens.
Other poems combine picturesque appropriation with is-
sues of gender, in ways similar to “The Solitary Reaper.” In The
Ruined Cottage (1799), the narrator views and reviews the cot-
tage repeatedly before, during, and after the Pedlar’s story, as
he learns to “read” its image properly and in the process affirms
his own imaginative power and autonomy. The poem ends with
a final image that the Pedlar offers him out of his own past
experience: “those very plumes, / Those weeds, and the high
spear-grass on that wall, / By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d
o’er.” 43 This haunting, almost photographic image, internal-
ized in the Pedlar’s memory, reconciles him to Margaret’s death
by allowing him to construct his own autonomous identity in
relation to the remembered image. He can carry this internal-
ized memory like a photograph, anywhere, and so it frees his
identity from specific places and relationships. The Wanderer
shifts in the course of the poem from an embodied participant
at the scene of the cottage, in an ongoing interactive relation-
ship with Margaret, to an outside observer, internalizing his re-
lationship through a single stationed image—then asking the
narrator to do the same, as if sharing that image with him. “To
a Highland Girl” (1803) also begins and ends with a specific
visual scene that the poet claims to internalize for future imagi-
native purposes:
For I, methinks, till I grow old,
As fair before me shall behold,
43 William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, MS. D, in his “The Ruined Cottage” and
“The Pedlar,” ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 75, ll. 513–15.
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As I do now, the Cabin small,
The Lake, the Bay, the Waterfall;
And Thee, the Spirit of them all!44
Similar to “The Solitary Reaper,” the poet here places the high-
land girl in the landscape as an imaginative sounding board for
his own identity without having to come into any direct interac-
tive relationship with her—again as if he has captured her as
an internalized image.
An 1811 poem, “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture,”
praises painting for its ability to fix and capture the moment as
a visual impression:
Praised be the Art whose subtle power could stay
Yon Cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape;
Nor would permit the thin smoke to escape,
Nor those bright sunbeams to forsake the day;
Which stopped that Band of Travellers on their way.45
Describing the scene at length, Wordsworth wants this photo-

graphic power in order to give “To one brief moment caught
from fleeting time / The appropriate calm of blest eternity”
(ll. 13–14). By freezing the landscape in this way, he can also fix
the viewer as outside that landscape yet imaginatively sustained
by it, separate from his own more immediate social and envi-
ronmental contexts. As in his 1790 letter from the Alps, Word-
sworth essentially wishes here for the medium of photography,
in order to capture the fleeting images. The “appropriate calm
of blest eternity,” in this sense, suggests again the calmness of a
purely visual subjectivity, standing outside the scene it contem-
plates. This calmness of the photographic viewer translates into
the general calmness, security, and autonomy of the self.
Although images sometimes flash upon his eye all at once,
Wordsworth’s photographic poems typically offer a protracted
44 William Wordsworth, “To a Highland Girl,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, p. 194, ll.
72–76.
45 William Wordsworth, “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture,” in his Shorter Poems,
1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), p. 76, ll. 1–5.
C5043.indb 311 2/6/09 10:10:18 AM

gaze, like the long exposures of early photographic cameras,
as if such a gaze is necessary to imprint the lineaments of the
scene firmly in the gazer’s memory—lineaments that then re-
veal their full value and significance later, as in “I wandered
lonely as a Cloud.” Wordsworth’s imagination can be described
as a kind of darkroom in part because it remains rigorously pri-
vate, separated both from his immediate environment and from
other people—a gallery of images developed and stored in the
privacy of his own mind, which he then makes available as well
to the private imaginations of his readers. In the process, his
poetry promotes a sense of reverie that Susan Sontag ascribes
to photographic vision, “both a pseudo-presence and a token
of absence,” an attempt “to contact or lay claim to another real-
ity” without fully participating in it (On Photography, p. 16). This
sense of reverie, combined with a securely stationed distance, is
central to the subjectivity that Wordsworth’s poetry constructs.
Identified with private consumption, Wordsworth’s visual
and imaginative structures are in this way specifically photo-
graphic, in contrast to the more public Romantic-era spec-
tacles of museums, theaters, panoramas, dioramas, and the
like, which Wordsworth and other high-cultural romantic writ-
ers typically reacted against.46 In these public spectacles, as in
Wordsworth’s nightmare vision of Bartholomew Fair in Book 7
of The Prelude, there is no detached or privileged point of view
from which to observe, and so the viewer himself is swept up,
both bodily and imaginatively, into the picture. This immer-
sion, without a protective distance to separate the viewer from
the objects of his view, forces Wordsworth into the field of re-
lationships and disrupts the stable boundaries of perception
through which he constructs his self. In contrast to the claims
of Gilbert D’Arcy Wood in his recent study of Romantic-era vi-
sual culture, Wordsworth did not so much fear the “shock of
the real” in such spectacles as the shock of his own embodi-
ment, with the interactive relationships that such embodiment
46 For some versions of Wordsworth’s reaction to this popular culture of spectacle,
see Galperin, Return of the Visible ; Wood, Shock of the Real, pp. 99 –120; and Ross King,
“Wordsworth, Panoramas, and the Prospect of London,” Studies in Romanticism, 32
(1993), 57–73.
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would bring. Wordsworth’s problem is that he has no place in
such spectacles to position his imaginative camera, no way to
remove his subject position from what he observes. In Word-
sworth’s version of subjectivity and the imaginative hierarchies
it supports, the poet needs to see but remain unseen: identify-
ing himself with the point of view from the top of Helvellyn
at the start of Book 8, for instance, rather than as one of the
bodies in the Bartholomew Fair crowd at the end of Book 7. He
wants to define his identity solely as viewing subject, looking on
from outside the picture, not in interactive reciprocity as the
object also of others’ gazes.
For this reason, the poet in Book 7 distances himself not
only from the commercialism of London’s spectacles—what
James A. W. Heffernan calls the city’s “whirl of pleasure” 47 —
but also from its intermingling of subjectivities and lack of a
securely detached viewing position. Wordsworth lodges his nar-
rator in the Bartholomew Fair description in the prospect posi-
tion of a “Show-man’s Platform” (The Prelude, Book 9, l. 659),
creating as much sense of separation as he can find from the
crowd; but this separation is unstable, because as a “show-man”
he is revealed to the crowd (for whom he too must perform)
even as he observes them. As a result, as in Book 7 generally, the
poet can find no secure ontological grounds of spectatorship,
and his description spills over into a jostling crowd of sights
and people and an equally jostling grammatical jumble. In the
end he rejects the whole fair (and with it London generally)
as “one vast Mill” of humanity (Book 7, l. 693), monstrously
blending subjectivities together and threatening to extinguish
all possibility of self or imagination. For similar reasons, Word-
sworth rejected the public display of the pantomime and the
panorama, which tend to dissolve individual subjectivity either
in multi-sensual ambient experience (in the theaters) or in the
shared experience of the crowd (in the panorama). In contrast,
I believe, he would have embraced the realism of the photo-
graph, with its secure separation between individual viewer and
the represented scene and its invitation to private reverie.
47 See Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s London: The Imperial Monster,” Studies in Ro-
manticism, 37 (1998), 437.
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Wordsworth’s poetry is also similar to photography in how
it disguises and naturalizes the perceptual structures of the pic-
turesque. Early photography seemed to nineteenth-century
viewers to replace the fabrications of the picturesque, for bet-
ter or for worse, with a direct window onto reality, as if nature
were representing itself.48 Yet even as it claimed to offer the
unmediated real, photography subtly structured that “reality”
in terms of picturesque vision, creating a framed image in lin-
ear perspective with a perceptual separation between subject
and object, just as the picturesque does. Wordsworth’s poetry
too constructs its subjectivity in picturesque modes, while at the
same time disguising and naturalizing those modes through
Wordsworth’s direct appeal to nature, emotion, and personal
experience. The discourse of the picturesque self-consciously
foregrounds the process of framing, and in that sense renders
its own artifice apparent. Photography continues to frame the
visual field, but its mimetic detail and sense of realism render
the frame largely unnoticed. In a similar way, Wordsworth re-
creates the perceptual structure of framing without imposing
an actual, physical frame, and so constructs a picturesque sub-
jectivity even without a specifically picturesque object of vision.
In photographic terms, it is as if he is always looking at the land-
scape through an invisible lens that organizes his perception
but remains itself unseen. In these different but related ways,
both Wordsworth’s poetry and photography naturalize the au-
tonomy and separation of the picturesque subject. They per-
petuate the visual structures and subjectivity of the picturesque,
even as they disguise those structures under their appeals to
the immediacy of nature and the real.
No one is likely to identify Wordsworth’s sparse physical
descriptions, further blurred by imaginative activity, as photo-
graphic in the mimetic sense. And, given their temporal rela-
tionship, it does not make much sense to argue that Wordsworth
was directly influenced by photography. Comparing Word-
sworth’s perceptual structures with those of photography, how-
48 See Batchen, Burning with Desire, pp. 56 – 68; and Scott McQuire, Visions of Mo-
dernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage
Publications, 1998), pp. 27–36.
C5043.indb 314 2/6/09 10:10:18 AM

ever, reveals striking analogies through their common kinship
with the picturesque. These analogies provide a new dimension
to Wood’s claim that modern visual culture precedes the ori-
gin of photography.49 Wordsworth’s deep personal subjectivity
depends on positioning his subject in what is essentially a pho-
tographic relationship to the surrounding scene or landscape:
viewing from a securely stationed position outside, then cap-
turing the image for future re-viewings and internalized imagi-
native activity. Removed from the landscape he observes, first
by spatial and then by temporal distance, Wordsworth isolates
his subjectivity from all forms of relationship and embodiment,
until he seems to become a pure autonomous consciousness,
unifying and producing itself, as in the famous epiphany of self-
presence on the top of Snowdon in Book 13 of The Prelude —a
paradigmatic image of the modern subject, with its combina-
tion of absolute independence and limitless internal depths. Yet
this final, culminating self of The Prelude, as in so many places
in Wordsworth’s poetry, originates out of and depends on a sta-
tioned vision of nature as landscape: an essentially photographic
relationship in which the poet captures an internalized image of
a landscape focused upon himself from which he remains out-
side, then carries away that image for future private re-viewings.
It would be too large a claim to hold that Wordsworth— or
even Romantic writers in general— created the subject position
that allowed for the invention and appreciation of photogra-
phy. Like every other technology, however, photography origi-
nated not only out of technical capacity, but also out of social
desire: for a mobile, individualized subjectivity, defining itself
apart from immediate social and environmental relationships.
It seems no accident, in this sense, that photography was in-
vented when it was, or that Wordsworth’s poetic subjectivity, al-
though developed before photography was invented, turns out
to be so photographic in its basic modes and structures. The
modern subject often places itself in apparent opposition to
the social, material, technological world, but a more nuanced
analysis shows its complementarity: the deep autonomous sub-
ject as a necessary complement to the apparent objectivity of
49 See Wood, Shock of the Real, p. 14.
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the photographic image, the required but invisible viewer. It
is no accident that Wordsworth seems to long for or imagine
photography in so many passages of his writing, because even
before the technology existed he had already constructed a
version of photographic subjectivity.
It is fitting, in this respect, that one of the earliest pub-
lished books with photographic illustrations, Our English Lakes,
Mountains, and Waterfalls, as Seen by William Wordsworth (1864),
combined thirteen photographic prints with what is basically
an anthology of passages from Wordsworth’s poetry. The intro-
duction claims:
By this arrangement it is believed that not only will the Reader be
able, with the assistance of the Photographic Illustrations, which
have been taken by Mr. T. Ogle, specially for this work, to appreci-
ate the more fully Wordsworth’s wonderfully true descriptions of
the beauties of Nature; but the Tourist will have the additional
pleasure of identifying with his own favourite spot any of the Po-
et’s verses which refer especially to it.50
This book is not an isolated incident. Photographically illus-

trated anthologies of verse began to appear regularly in the
1860s; the first one, William Morris Grundy’s Sunshine in the
Country: A Book of Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from
Nature, was published in 1861. Such anthologies, Helen Groth
writes, encouraged readers not just to read but also to re-enact
the poet’s experiences, such as “Wordsworth’s reflective wan-
derings through the Lake District or Scott’s mythic encounters
with the ancient inhabitants of the Scottish Border” (Victorian
Photography and Literary Nostalgia, p. 8). Photographers, both
professional and amateur, flocked to photograph sites associ-
ated with literary figures and their writing, and photographic
albums, such as those of the English Photographic Club,
abounded with quotations from poets such as Byron, Walter
Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, and William Cowper.51 In these
50 [Anon.], introduction to Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, as seen by
William Wordsworth: Photographically Illustrated (London : A. W. Bennett, 1864), pp. v-vi.

51 See Groth, Victorian Photography, pp. 8, 16 –17, 43– 45; and Jäger, “Picturing Na-
tions,” p. 125. Helen Groth, “Literary Nostalgia and Early Victorian Photographic Dis-
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albums, photography reveals its kinship with Romantic poetic
subjectivity; but none of the above-listed poets, I would argue,
produce this position of photographic subjectivity as fully as
Wordsworth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s July 1861 essay in the Atlantic
Monthly, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” provides a fitting
epilogue on Wordsworth’s photographic subjectivity, present-
ing a version of the Wordsworthian viewing subject that turns
Wordsworth’s own sites at Grasmere into photographic objects.52
Holmes is known today mainly as a minor American literary
figure, a member of the Boston “Brahmins” and author of the
much-anthologized lyric “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858).
In the 1860s Holmes was also one of the leading popularizers
of a now marginal visual technology that at the time seemed
ready to supersede photography as a dominant visual mode:
the stereograph. Stereographic cameras took two simultaneous
photographs, separated by a few inches, in order to imitate the
binocular quality of human vision. Seen side-by-side through a
special viewing device that isolated these images from the sur-
rounding visual field (a device on which Holmes himself made
an important technical advance), the stereograph produced a
three-dimensional effect. If ordinary painting was “sun paint-
ing,” then stereography was, by extension, “sun sculpture,”
because it offered the viewer a three-dimensional visual expe-
rience. Invented in 1850, stereography quickly swept the West-
ern world. The London Stereoscopic Company, founded in
1854, had sold half a million viewing devices (or stereoscopes)
by 1856, as its motto, “A stereoscope for every home,” became
more or less true for middle-class culture.53
course,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 25 (2003), 199 –217, describes also William Sam-
uel Wright’s The Loved Haunts of Cowper (1867), another photographically illustrated
book that encouraged readers to imagine themselves into Cowper’s landscapes (see
“Literary Nostalgia,” pp. 208 –9).
52 See [Oliver Wendell Holmes], “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture; With a Stereo-
scopic Trip across the Atlantic,” Atlantic Monthly, 8 (1861), 13–29.

53 See William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, Pa.: W. C. Darrah,
1977), pp. 3– 4. The London Stereoscopic Company alone had a trade list of one hun-
dred thousand stereoscopic images for sale by 1858. For an overview of stereographs and
stereographic culture, see William Culp Darrah, Stereo Views: A History of Stereographs in
America and Their Collection (Gettysburg, Pa.: Time and News Publishing, 1964); Darrah,
C5043.indb 317 2/6/09 10:10:19 AM

By creating a three-dimensional effect, stereographs
seemed to contemporaries even more realistic than photo-
graphs. Yet overall, stereography merely extended the struc-
ture of the photographic experience, still presenting a framed
view from a single stationed point that left the viewer outside
the scene he or she contemplated. If anything, stereography
even increased the sense of isolation and disembodiment of
the viewer, as the viewing device or stereoscope further framed
and blinkered the viewer’s vision from his or her immediate
surrounding environment. Disconnected in this way from his
or her own place, the viewer seemed fully present at the repre-
sented scene, yet also disembodied and outside of it, in a purely
visual experience that many found uncanny.
Holmes’s 1861 essay takes the reader on an imagined tour
of the world in the privacy of Holmes’s own domestic parlor, us-
ing his stereoscope and his private collection of stereographic
views. Through the stereograph, he writes,
the cream of the visible creation has been skimmed off; and the
sights which men risk their lives and spend their money and
endure sea-sickness to behold,—the views of Nature and Art
which make exiles of entire families for the sake of a look at
them . . . —these sights, gathered from Alps, temples, palaces,
pyramids, are offered you for a trifle, to carry home with you,
that you may look at them at your leisure, by your fireside, with
perpetual fair weather, when you are in the mood, without catch-
ing cold, without following a valet-de-place, in any order of succes-
sion,—from a glacier to Vesuvius, from Niagara to Memphis,—as
long as you like, and breaking off as suddenly as you like.
(“Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” p. 16)
Appropriately for an American writer, Holmes’s stereographic

tour begins with Niagara Falls and the “picturesque tour” of
the northeastern United States; glances briefly at the sites of
the still-young American Civil War; then crosses the Atlantic to
Britain, where, after some time in London and a visit to Shake-
speare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, Holmes takes his reader to the
World of Stereographs; and Points of View: The Stereograph in America: A Cultural History, ed.
Edward W. Earle (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979).
C5043.indb 318 2/6/09 10:10:19 AM

Lake District, stopping at Rydal Mount and at Wordsworth’s
grave. Holmes’s tour goes on, through other parts of England
and Scotland, then across the channel to Paris, the Alps, Rome,
back up the Rhine (recapitulating the traditional grand tour),
and further into Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Lands, where
it ends.
Holmes’s essay is a kind of Romantic tour-de-force of in-
dividual imaginative travel, a photographic grand tour that
skims off the cream of the world’s visual imagery and culture
for the domestic armchair traveler. The stereoscopic tour not
only shows the world, but also encourages the viewer to possess
it through vision, and in so doing it constructs that viewer as
completely self-contained and autonomous. During this grand
tour, the “free” subject remains isolated in the private space of
imaginative reverie, present through vision but without a body,
seeing but unseen. It is only fitting that Holmes’s tour should
stop in Grasmere, paying homage to the poet who, as much
as anyone, helped to fashion this distinctively modern subjec-
tivity of travel and photographic vision—and in the process
ironically turning that poet’s own home and final resting place
into yet more images for the photographic viewer/traveler to
appropriate.
Earlham College
abstract
“William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity” (pp. 283–320)
This essay argues that William Wordsworth’s poetry constructs a subject position analo-
gous to that of the photographic viewer: hence, a photographic subjectivity. Critics
have often read Wordsworth’s writing as opposing imagination against visibility and
mimetic realism. Many of the visual structures of his poetry, however, continue the
structures of the picturesque, whose desire to capture the landscape as framed image
culminated in the technology of photography. These structures of perception include
the stationed point of view of the observer, focusing the scene from a single location;
the tendency to reduce the multisensory, ambient experience of lived environment
to pure vision; the separation of the observer from the landscape; and the resulting
general disembodiment of that observer. Much of Wordsworth’s poetry positions the
observer in these ways in order to capture images that can then be viewed in private
isolation (as in the “spots of time”), like a series of internalized photographs. These
structures of visuality construct what would emerge, after the invention of photogra-
phy, as a photographic subjectivity, complementing (rather than opposing) the objec-
tivity of the photographic image. They define the viewing subject, in the manner of
C5043.indb 319 2/6/09 10:10:19 AM

photography, as a mobile, seemingly autonomous self in an appropriative relationship
to landscape—the paradigm of the modern self, taking a “view from nowhere” on a
world captured as image. The stability, unity, and autonomy of the Wordsworthian self
ultimately depend on these photographic relationships.
Keywords: William Wordsworth; photography; subjectivity; visuality;

landscape
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William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity

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9 Landscape modes in this sense express relations of power. In addition to Barrell,

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Wordsworth is a quintessential modern tourist here, wishing

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20 On the diorama and Daguerre’s involvement, see Stephan Oettermann, The

World’s First Photographer (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), p. 47.

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27 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Diagrammatology,” Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981), 631.

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31 See Sontag, On Photography, p. 164.

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The protracted gaze of this imaginative traveler, for Taylor, is

York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989).

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As the body and its “blood” disappear until they become a

Though absent long

In the unspeciﬁc “lonely rooms” of the poet’s life, as in the

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37 Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 105, 106.

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As the “vulgar joy” of bodily participation fades from memory,

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