Viewless Scenes: Vividness and Nineteenth-Century Ideals of Reading in and through Gertrude of wyoming

Scholarship on Thomas Campbell's "Gertrude of Wyoming" (1809) has tended to group the poem's geographical errors with its representational errors of real persons. While both errors traffic in New World exoticism, recognizing a difference between such errors allows us to analyze nineteenth-century reading practices to understand the cultural logic of the poem's popularity. Campbell figures Gertrude as a reader, and nineteenth-century readers embraced this figure, framing Wyoming as a locus for contemplating readerly belief. Further, Campbell's inaccurate geographical descriptions prompted American poets to idealize Wyoming on their own terms, creating a topos grounded in the forceful impressions of reading.