Topographical poetry

Topographical poetry or loco-descriptive poetry is a genre of poetry that describes, and often praises, a landscape or place. John Denham's 1642 poem "Cooper's Hill" established the genre, which peaked in popularity in 18th-century England. Examples of topographical verse date, however, to the late classical period, and can be found throughout the medieval era and during the Renaissance. Though the earliest examples come mostly from continental Europe, the topographical poetry in the tradition originating with Denham concerns itself with the classics, and many of the various types of topographical verse, such as river, ruin, or hilltop poems were established by the early 17th century.^[1] Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" (1713) and John Dyer's "Grongar Hill' (1762) are two other oft-mentioned examples. More recently, Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar Gipsy" (1853) praises the Oxfordshire countryside, and W. H. Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" (1948) uses a limestone landscape as an allegory.

Subgenres of topographical poetry include the country house poem, written in 17th-century England to compliment a wealthy patron, and the prospect poem, describing the view from a distance or a temporal view into the future, with the sense of opportunity or expectation. When understood broadly as landscape poetry and when assessed from its establishment to the present, topographical poetry can take on many formal situations and types of places. Kenneth Baker identifies 37 varieties and compiles poems from the 16th through the 20th centuries—from Edmund Spenser to Sylvia Plath—correspondent to each type, from "Walks and Surveys," to "Mountains, Hills, and the View from Above," to "Violation of Nature and the Landscape," to "Spirits and Ghosts."^[2]

Common aesthetic registers of which topographical poetry make use include pastoral imagery, the sublime, and the picturesque. These latter two registers subsume imagery of rivers, ruins, moonlight, birdsong, and clouds, peasants, mountains, caves, and waterscapes.

Political and social themes

Though predicated on the description of a landscape or piece of scenery, topographical poetry often, at least implicitly, addresses a political issue or the meaning of nationality in some way. The description of the landscape thus becomes a poetic vehicle through which a political message is delivered. For example, in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," the speaker discusses the merits of the recently executed Charles I:

Here should my wonder dwell, & here my praise,

But my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays,

Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late

A Chappel crown'd, till in the Common Fate,

The adjoyning Abby fell: (may no such storm

Fall on our times, where ruine must reform.)

Tell me (my Muse) what monstrous dire offence,

What crime could any Christian King incense

To such a rage? (ll. 111-119)

The chapel and abbey in ruin on top of a nearby hill, referenced spontaneously such that the speaker appears to articulate what the landscape first speaks to him, leads to the contemplation on the righteousness of Charles I and monarchy in general.

Later, Alexander Pope infused pastoral with political in "Windsor Forest." He contrasts pastoral language, the "green Retreats" of pre-Norman England, with the "gloomy Waste" of post-Conquest England suffering the "Despotick Reign" of rulers like King William I. The combination of political argument and pastoral language underscores the Tory allegory of Windsor Forest.^[3]

Frontispiece to James Thomson's The Seasons

James Thomson's long poem The Seasons (1726–30) appeals to a class-specific social ideology by placing the landed gentry's authority on a level with the order of nature. The fierce snowstorm in "Winter", for example, is awe-inspiring but only dangerous for the generalized rustic shepherd struggling through it rather than reading about it, and the sympathy engendered through the former only serves to reaffirm the sensibility and political righteousness of the gentry. Thus, the importance and inevitability of submitting to the authority of nature is connected to the importance of maintaining social order, which the landed classes can do from their relatively safe position in the schema of the poem. In later editions of The Seasons, Thomson becomes increasingly explicit about his political message, using the language of the sublime in nature to flatter Whig politicians, a move based in the dedication or compliment to a patron common to topographical poetry in the early 18th century.^[4] The prospect-view was central in the early 18th century to the landed estates' relationship with poetry. It suggested that the natural scene corresponded with political dominance, and the presentation of a disinterested but shared value, a non-threatening aesthetic one, socially legitimized this dominance.^[5] Yet for this same implicit social and political message and the way it was connected to nature, landscape poetry became a vehicle for William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the later romantics to offer new ways of understanding the landscape's relationship with poetry and politics.

Indeed, Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" marks a change in the course of the genre. Increasingly, the landscape and the issues implicit in it once registered by the poet's external sight become internalized and subject to inward contemplation of the poet's soul.

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with any eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. (ll 44-48)

Charlotte Turner Smith's "Beachy Head" is an example of a topographical poem that constantly shifts from the external views inspiring national pride and the internal views to which they give way, bringing thoughts on slavery, identity, differing voices.

In the Romantic era

Edmund Burke's writing on the sublime influenced the Romantic era of topographical poetry.

A change in the perception and evaluation of landscape was one mark of the entrance into the era of British Romanticism. Visual and literary art as well as political and philosophical prose recorded this change. Especially after William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye was published in 1770, the idea of the picturesque began to influence artists and viewers. Gilpin advocated approaching the landscape "by the rules of picturesque beauty,"^[6] which emphasized contrast and variety. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was also an influential text. The notion of the sublime in language, marked by elevated rhetoric or speech, dates to Grecian Late Antiquity, Longinus' On the Sublime, which was translated into French in the late 17th century. Shortly thereafter in England, John Dennis brought attention to Longinus' argument for the emotive power of figurative language in poetry. From this time, and into the mid-18th century, a taste for the sublime in landscape emerged with the sublime in language. An earlier topographical poem that influenced the romantics, James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-30), reveals the influence of Longinus via Dennis.^[7]

Some scholars argue that the crystallization of the picturesque and the sublime as aesthetic categories coincided with a social trend toward "presumptions of unity" based on an increasingly consolidated national identity in the second half of the 18th century. Almost every community, according to Robert Aubin's catalogue, merited landscape poetry. Thus, this argument connects the prominence of the aesthetic viewpoint that the genre maintained to "the formation of a national culture." Because the picturesque conventions of landscape poetry strengthened the middle class's relationship to an aesthetic paradigm, the emerging class consciousness unified itself around a shared perception of nature.^[8] In his preface to LLangunnor Hill: a loco-descriptive Poem, John Bethell announces his awareness of his participation in a well-established and critiqued genre meant for public appraisal:

The opinions of many learned men on the subject of descriptive poetry, and its occasional embellishments, having differed considerably when their abilities were exercised in examining the productions of authors of the first literary eminence, presented a difficulty of choice in regard to the plan and execution of the subsequent undertaking. It has been the object of the writer to profit by the sentiments of professed critics, given on the works familiar to his own, and by avoiding either extreme, to pursue, as far as his judgment enabled him, an intermediate course. How far he has succeeded in that endeavor, is humbly submitted to the decision of a generous public…^[9]

Another average poet in the topographical poetry of the late 18th century, John Grisborne, canvasses many of the conventions of the genre in only the first canto of his poem The vales of Wever, a loco-descriptive poem, inscribed to the Reverend John Granville, of Calwich, Straffordshire:

ADDRESS to Wotton.—Noontide Clouds.—Scenery from the Terrace at Wootton.—Eaton Woods.—Mr. Mundy.—Address to Hygeia as Guardian of the Scene.—Different Trees growing in the Vale below Wootton.—Scenery by Moonlight.—Melna and Ghost of Hidallan.—Norbury.—An aged Oak : Insects living under its Bark.—The Spider.—Hygeia entreated to preside over Wootton in all the Seasons.—A Digression.—Pillars of Ice during the Winter from the Rocks.—Frost, his Threats.—Triumph of Flora.—Empress of Russia. –Her Threats.—The Fall of Poland. –Probable Triumph of Poland.—General Washington on the Temple of Virtue crowned by Liberty and Peace.—Wootton under the Influence of Snow-storms and Wind at Midnight : Effects of the Storm on the Hare, Fieldfare, and Village Dog, &c.—Sun-rife.—Return from the Digression.—Local Scenery near Wootton.—Mr. Gilpin.—Scenery in the New Forest.—Accent up Wever Hills.—Address to the Clouds and Breezes.—Wever : Scenery from his Summit.—River Dove.—Grindon.—Thor's Cave.^[10]

Gisborne utilizes a number of characteristic conventions, "the invocation to a lord or patron, the stationing of the lord or poet, the ordering of subjects according to a visual plan, the comparison with a classical or contemporary political or aesthetic ideal," such that he supports the idea of landscape poetry as an imitable type of "social praxis" thus belonging to "a specifically political and social dynamic."^[11] He relates the minutiae of living nature and the effect of the seasons, makes a politically charged digression, takes on a prospect-view, represents different times of day, caves, and rivers, and alludes to classical guardianship.

Both Bethell and Gisborne include extensive footnotes that elaborate on the particular places mentioned throughout their poems. In these notes, they often address the reader by presuming his or her response, belief or disbelief in the scene. These annotations, while perhaps distracting from the verse's force in its own right, show how the genre was conscious of its readership's potential to either actually witness the scenes as a tourist or be able to vicariously witness them through the efforts of the poet.

The argument for the picturesque's connection to a unifying national identity in England could not be successfully translated into Irish topographical poetry. Historical references often account for more than one culture and negotiate the tension between local situations and imperial prerogatives, and thus tend toward an explanatory narrative of Irish institutions which distinguishes the Irish topographical poetry from the British. At times these explanations subordinate aesthetic description. Furthermore, Ireland experienced an "anxiety with respect to its own national audience," and the poets often intervened to remark on their negotiation of Irish land's clear aesthetic and economic appeals and the reality of its impoverishment. One prime example of these complications is John Leslie's Killarney, a Poem (written in Dublin 1772). The Lakes of Killarney and the Giant's Causeway were the two most common sites that inspired Irish topographical verse: Patrick O'Kelley's Killarney: A Descriptive Poem and The Giant's Causeway, Joseph Atkinson's Killarney: A Poem, W.A. Bryson's "Moonlight Scenes at Killarney," Rev. Charles Hoyle's Three Days at Killarney, Rev. William Hamilton Drummond's The Giant's Causeway, a Poem, John McKinley's Poetic Sketches, Descriptive of the Giant's Causeway, and the Surrounding Scenery are some other examples, all published between 1803 and 1809.^[12]

Subgenre: the prospect poem

John Wilson Foster defines the term "prospect" in the poetic understanding of spatial and temporal meanings:

"A prospect is a view into the distance (space); it is also a view into the future (distance in time), often with the suggestion of opportunity or expectation: in each case, a prospect is a view of something beyond, yet to be achieved or satisfying merely in the spectacle. Understood in both its spatial and temporal senses, the prospect was a frequent culmination of traditional allegory…" ^[13]

The early topographical poems of the 17th century and 18th century centered on urban locales of power and often described aspects of the city such as buildings, major rivers and parks. Later topographical poems written during the romantic period moved away from cities and into the provinces. Romantic poets also rejected the scientific and informative approach employed by the early topographical poets. Instead of being scientific observers, the romantic poets who wrote prospect poems tried to create a sense of a presence and emotion that gave life to the landscape.^[14]

Topographical poetry, especially the prospect poem, moved from the scientific and geographical description to become a venue for personal, historical and meditative thought.^[15] Brigitte Peucker describes that "nature in the topographical poem is not a medium of human transcendence or transformation but rather an emblem or mirror of the perambulatory figure in the foreground—of man as man".^[16] The prospect when seen through the muse or imagination provides an escape from time and reality.^[17] Shifts in tenses are often a regular characteristic of prospect poems.

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