‘Spain! Most Pleasant were my wanderings’: Robert Southey's Pedestrian and Mountaineering Writing in the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in ‘a land of strangers’.