Abstract
Wordsworth is eminently a poet of place and has brought Hawkshead and its environs close to us in some of the most vivid poetry in our language. The Free Grammar School at Hawkshead was both a major institution in a particular locale and a major example of one of the most important cultural institutions in the West, the English classical grammar school. Because Hawkshead School had been revitalized not long before Wordsworth’s coming, both its ancient character and renewed academic discipline stimulated Wordsworth as a student. Later on he would say of his years at Cambridge that he felt ‘a strangeness in the mind, / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place’ (14-Bk 3.80-2). In contrast, of the summer before taking his degree, he speaks of France and really himself also as though both were ‘standing on the top of golden hours’ (6.341). But if ever there were a place and an hour aureate in their beauty and forever present to him, that place and that hour were at Hawkshead when he was a boy.
Published Version
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