Abstract
Abstract Place-Names are used in an interesting way in most accounts of Wordsworth’s poetic development. Writers on, say, Dickens or Yeats, when identifying moments of artistic growth, refer to books—to the transitional form, for example, of Martin Chuzzlewit, or to the self-conscious maturity of Responsibilities. Lovers of Wordsworth might do likewise, pointing to An Evening Walk, or Lyrical Ballads, or The Prelude, as key writings, but they are at least as likely to mark out the poet’s spiritual odyssey by referring to ‘Windy Brow’, ‘Racedown’, ‘Alfoxden’, ‘Dove Cottage’, ‘Rydal Mount’. These were places, it is understood, in which self-discovery or achievement or consolidation occurred, whose particular nature, which may or may not be in evidence in specific poems, can be evoked by naming that one special place.
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