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Human life has been said to resemble the situation of spectators in a theatre. . . . It is only when the business is interrupted . . . that [each] begins to consider at all, who is before him or who is behind him, whether others are better accommodated than himself, or whether many are not much worse. —William Paley, Reasons for Contentment1 In the tumultuous years between 1793 and 1795 Wordsworth was a republican under stress, living in a London convulsed by political, social, and economic crises, now including war with France. By autumn of 1793 he was also watching the horrifying specter of the Terror destroying the very ideal of universal fraternity that he had embraced during his first visit to France in 1791. As a restorative to his confused and often melancholy feelings of being “cut off / And toss’d about in whirlwinds” (13P 10.257–58), he, like a good many of his disaffected and fearful English contemporaries, sought solace and, eventually, rural “retirement.” Regina Hewitt’s The Possibilities of Society, following much the same critical path as John Williams’s Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics, claims that many such “sympathizers with the French Revolution and other critics of British government policies periodically retreated from London when prosecution seemed imminent, biding their time or revising their strategies in the relative safety of the countryside.”2 It was a countryside that in England as in France had come to symbolize republicanism, as is evident in Wordsworth’s pro-republican “descriptive sketch” of Swiss alpine communities and in his later depictions of English rural communities in Guide to the Lakes. 67 3 Genre, Politics, and Community in the Salisbury Plain Poems Seeking solace for his acute political and social despair, and perhaps seeking as well to revise his strategies, Wordsworth undertook a West Country walking tour in July 1793 with his Hawkshead school friend (and semi-pupil) William Calvert. Salisbury Plain (1793–94), revised as Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795–96, 1799), was an important result of that tour.The poem arguably took its start when, according to Dorothy Wordsworth, Calvert’s horse “began to caper one day in a most terrible manner, dragged them and their vehicle into a Ditch and broke it to shivers” (EY 109). Calvert rode the horse to friends in the north while Wordsworth oddly elected to cross the waste of Salisbury alone, passing its Cathedral and the ruins of Stonehenge en route to a friend in Wales (WL 74).3 It was a fortuitous decision. By Wordsworth’s estimation the impressions formed by that “lonesome Journey” (13P 12.359) across Salisbury Plain rekindled his smoldering creativity and remained with him throughout his life.4 Indeed, according to Paul Sheats that waste’s ruined monuments sparked the poet’s desire “to compare past and present societies” in Salisbury Plain.5 Kenneth Johnston in turn reminds us that the plain was and still is, moreover, “one of the most desolate open spaces in England, with . . . few human habitations of any kind.” Gilpin called it “‘one vast cemetery,’ full of ‘mansions of the dead’” (HW 346–47). It was a fitting place to contemplate homelessness and the absence as well as the basis of community. As Stephen Gill states, the plain provided Wordsworth’s pensive imagination “with a focusing image through which he could express much of what he had been feeling so impotently about the nature of man in society”(SPP 5).6 That vast waste offered a topography in which he could examine and stage the social exchanges of a specific place, on the margins of Britain’s political world. The “Advertisement” to Guilt and Sorrow, the final version of Salisbury Plain, describes the original poem as having been written with the “American war” and “revolutionary France” “still fresh” in its author’s memory, but also as having been inspired by those “monuments and traces of antiquity” scattered across the plain (PW 1: 94–95). Mary Jacobus calls Salisbury Plain the “most impressive protest poem of its time,” but argues against those who would reduce it merely to polemical pamphleteering.7 In so doing, she follows in the tradition of critics like Geoffrey Hartman, who has found the poem to be “haunted” more “by a concern for a specific place” than by “humanitarian or political concerns,” although Hartman has acknowledged these as being significant forces in the text (WP 118). Recent criticism has, with some justification , set its sights on the poem’s implicit and explicit politics, and...

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