Biographia Literaria

William Gilpin published his influential Observations on the River Wye in 1782. In this and other works he expounds an aesthetic theory based on his training in landscape painting. Gilpin’s travel journals circulated among his literary friends, popularizing the connection between the travelogue and the aesthetic or literary. Gilpin most valued the “peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” (Gilpin, William. Essay on Prints. 1768.) The influence of the picturesque on Lyrical Ballads is pervasive. Wordsworth went so far as to make the link between walking and thinking essential to his poetics. “Poems on the Naming of Places,” for example, opens quite literally in Gilpin’s footsteps, following a river that carries associations with the Lethe of the Greek underworld:

“It was an April morning; fresh and clear

The rivulet, delighting in its strength,

Ran with a young man’s speed” (Lines 1-3)

Like other Wordsworth poems, such as “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” the poem flows in tandem with the stream, a literal precursor to Modernist stream of consciousness literature.

Coleridge was no less impacted by Gilpin. In outlining his reasons for writing Biographia Literaria in Chapter 1, he recounts his “friendless wanderings” on leave days: “For I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London” (5).