Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel begins by characterizing The Recluse project as an attempt to combine travel writing and moral philosophy. Unlike many travel writers of the time, however, whose writings moved back and forth between the particular and the general in constructing universalizing histories of humanity, natural law, and the state of nature, Wordsworth was never able to produce ‘an overarching and structural analysis of “Nature, Man, and Society”’ (p. 6). While this inability to universalize impeded Wordsworth’s completion of The Recluse, it also generated a different kind of poetic power that marks his early poetry: a stubborn resistance of particularity, materiality, and strangeness, out of which a kind of alien language of unassimilated otherness speaks forth. Offord describes this voice at one point as the ‘“language of the ancient earth” whose referent has been withheld from us, that may not even exist. Like a foreign tongue that we do not know, its articulate patterns or murmuring rhythms are heard as immediately meaningful yet unintelligible’ (p. 18). The strange encounters that proliferate in Wordsworth’s early poetry, with figures such as the Solitary Reaper, the Discharged Soldier, the Old Cumberland Beggar, and the characters in Salisbury Plain—together with Wordsworth’s own encounters with nature in The Prelude and other poems—generate experiences of singularity and uncanniness out of which such alien languages can emerge, resisting the universalizing categories and narratives of modernity.