SOURCE: Davis, Robert Con. “The Structure of the Picturesque: Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals.” The Wordsworth Circle 9, no. 1 (winter 1978): 45-49.

In the following essay, Davis finds that Wordsworth's journals investigate some of the philosophical implications of the picturesque.

Essentially an eighteenth-century aesthetic, the picturesque was eventually rejected by most Romantic poets. Relying heavily on the picturesque in the Alfoxden-Grasmere journals, Dorothy Wordsworth raised two important questions about its meaning. What does the picturesque say about man and nature, about the phenomenal world? And, why does it collide with Romantic sensibility? While praised for their descriptive power, her journals are regarded usually as embroidery with some small influence on William Wordsworth's poetry; whereas, as nature literature, the journals place man in nature, and in so doing show their own compositional integrity. It is, then, as literary texts in themselves that they probe the picturesque and reveal its structure.

For instance, in...