‘Master[s] of the prospect’?

This chapter explores how William Wordsworth and John Keats invested their climbing exploits and the mountain-top position with symbolic significance. Placing the poets’ work within the context of the period’s wider mountaineering literature, it examines how the new ways of seeing gained through mountain-climbing became linked to new ways of being. It investigates how elevation was seen to offer self-transformation and place the climber in a position of power, an idea both Wordsworth and Keats called upon in their definitions of poetic identity. The omniscient position of the summit view, with what Wordsworth termed its ‘visual sovereignty’, raised significant questions about the politics of ascent. The chapter argues that even as both poets made mountain ascent crucial to their poetic identities and missions, they came to adopt a more nuanced response to climbing that challenged the simple equation of the summit with a position of unqualified authority.

Mountaineering and British Romanticism

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognized, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity’s evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture, and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with twenty-five images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering’s power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms ‘visual sovereignty’), the relationships between different types of ‘mountaineers’, and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.