Topographical poetry or loco-descriptive poetry is a genre of poetry that describes, and often praises, a landscape or place. John Denham's 1642 poem "Cooper's Hill" established the genre, which peaked in popularity in 18th-century England. Examples of topographical verse date, however, to the late classical period, and can be found throughout the medieval era and during the Renaissance. Though the earliest examples come mostly from continental Europe, the topographical poetry in the tradition originating with Denham concerns itself with the classics, and many of the various types of topographical verse, such as river, ruin, or hilltop poems were established by the early 17th century.Aubin, Robert Arnold. Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1936, p. 3. Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" (1713) and John Dyer's "Grongar Hill" (1726/7) are two other often mentioned examples. In following centuries, Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar Gipsy" (1853) praised the Oxfordshire countryside, and W. H. Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" (1948) used a limestone landscape as an allegory.
Subgenres of topographical poetry include the country house poem, written in 17th-century England to compliment a wealthy patron, and the prospect poem, describing the view from a distance or a temporal view into the future, with the sense of opportunity or expectation. When understood broadly as landscape poetry and when assessed from its establishment to the present, topographical poetry can take on many formal situations and types of places. Kenneth Baker identifies 37 varieties and compiles poems from the 16th through the 20th centuries—from Edmund Spenser to Sylvia Plath—correspondent to each type, from "Walks and Surveys", to "Mountains, Hills, and the View from Above", to "Violation of Nature and the Landscape", to "Spirits and Ghosts".Baker, Kenneth, ed. The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry. New York: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Common aesthetic registers of which topographical poetry make use include pastoral imagery, the sublime, and the picturesque. These latter two registers subsume imagery of rivers, ruins, moonlight, birdsong, and clouds, peasants, mountains, caves, and waterscapes.
Political and social themes Though predicated on the description of a landscape or piece of scenery, topographical poetry often, at least implicitly, addresses a social or political issue or the meaning of nationality in some way. The description of elements in the landscape thus becomes a poetic vehicle through which a personal interpretation is delivered. For example, in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill", the speaker discusses the effects of religious intolerance in a poem published at the start of the First English Civil War:
The chapel and abbey in ruins on top of a nearby hill were the result of the reformist zeal that led to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Now the religious spirit unleashed under royal auspices had come to question the constitutionality of the Divine right of kings which had allowed the dismantling of those ancient institutions in the first place.Bruce Boeckel, "Landscaping the Field of Discourse: Political Slant and Poetic Slope in Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill", Papers on Language & Literature 34.1, 1958 Later in the poem, the historical perspective is widened to include the signing of Magna Carta. In fact the poem has been credited since as a major influence on the landscape's cultural history, especially in establishing the site of Runnymede in the national consciousness.Naomi Howell and Philip Schwyzer, "Cooper's Hill and Runnymede as Sites of Memory", in Sir John Denham Reassessed: The State's Poet, Routledge 2016, p.179ff
For decades the poem served as the admired loco-descriptive model, earning for Denham an accolade from Alexander Pope in his own youthful imitation, "Windsor Forest":
Later critics, however, were to deprecate in such poems and their successors "the complete subordination of the beauties of Nature to ethical and political reflection".J. Churton Collins, "Sir John Denham and Cooper's Hill" in The Poet's Country, London 1907, p.132 Such judgements, though, grew up in the wake of the new taste for Romanticism at the end of the 18th century. Until then landscape poetry appealed to Classical models. Besides Denham's poem, Pope's "Windsor Forest" modeled itself on the Mosella of Ausonius, which had its own political agenda.Tim Richardson, The Arcadian Friends, Bantam Press 2011, p.499, note 7 For a purer celebration of country crafts there was the precedent of Vergil's Georgics behind John Philips' "Cyder" and "The Fleece" by John Dyer. Romantic regard for the latter, who was also the author of the topographical "Grongar Hill", is evidenced by William Wordsworth's sonnet in his praise, preferring him to those for whom "hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled/ For worthless brows"."To the poet John Dyer"
James Thomson's long poem The Seasons provided an influential new model using Miltonic blank verse in place of the couplet. But it appeals to a class-specific social ideology by placing the landed gentry's authority on a level with the order of nature. The fierce snowstorm in "Winter", for example, is awe-inspiring but only dangerous for the generalized rustic shepherd struggling through it rather than reading about it, and the sympathy engendered through the former only serves to reaffirm the sensibility and political righteousness of the gentry. Thus, the importance and inevitability of submitting to the authority of nature is connected to the importance of maintaining social order, which the landed classes can do from their relatively safe position in the schema of the poem. In later editions of The Seasons, Thomson becomes increasingly explicit about his political message, using the language of the sublime in nature to flatter Whig politicians, a move based in the dedication or compliment to a patron common to topographical poetry in the early 18th century.Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 18–38 The prospect-view was central in the early 18th century to the landed estates' relationship with poetry. It suggested that the natural scene corresponded with political dominance, and the presentation of a disinterested but shared value, a non-threatening aesthetic one, socially legitimized this dominance.Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 3.
Yet for this same implicit social and political message and the way it was connected to nature, landscape poetry became a vehicle for William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the later Romantics to offer new ways of understanding the landscape's relationship with poetry and politics. Indeed, Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" marks a change in the course of the genre. Increasingly, the landscape and the issues implicit in it, once registered by the poet's external sight, become internalised and subject to inward contemplation
Recent criticism has used close readings of the poem to question the efficacy of such internalisation in that it seems deliberately to avoid evidence of the human interaction with the landscape that was the focus of earlier poets. For example, Marjorie Levinson views him "as managing to see into the life of things only 'by narrowing and skewing his field of vision' and by excluding 'certain conflictual sights and meanings'".James Castell, "Wordsworth and the 'Life of Things'" in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, OUP 2015, p.740 Nor was Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' much admired by the next generation of Romantic poets. The Radicalism espoused by Percy Bysshe Shelley invades his contemplation of landscape in "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills" and is everywhere apparent in Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
The transition, even in their case however, has been to a subjective viewpoint. Where the Classically inspired poets claimed to draw their idea of order from the landscapes they contemplated, from 'Nature', the poets of the 19th century bring their private preoccupations with them into the landscape. This is so even when there is an appeal to the Classical past. Matthew Arnold on "Dover Beach" calls to mind lines by Sophocles on listening to the sound of the sea but goes on to apply a modern religious lesson; it is "The Sea of Faith" of which "now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar". The operative emphasis here is on the personal pronoun."Dover Beach"
In the Romantic era
A change in the perception and evaluation of landscape was one mark of the entrance into the era of British Romanticism. Visual and literary art as well as political and philosophical prose recorded this change. Especially after William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye was published in 1782, the idea of the picturesque began to influence artists and viewers. Gilpin advocated approaching the landscape "by the rules of picturesque beauty,"Gilpin, William, quoted in Baker, Kenneth, ed. The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry. New York: Faber and Faber, 2000, p. xxvi which emphasized contrast and variety. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was previously an influential text. The notion of the sublime in language, marked by elevated rhetoric or speech, dates to Grecian Late Antiquity, Longinus' On the Sublime, which was translated into French in the late 17th century. Shortly thereafter in England, John Dennis brought attention to Longinus' argument for the emotive power of figurative language in poetry. From this time, and into the mid-18th century, a taste for the sublime in landscape emerged with the sublime in language. An earlier topographical poem that influenced the romantics, James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–30), reveals the influence of Longinus via Dennis.Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 21
Some scholars argue that the crystallization of the picturesque and the sublime as aesthetic categories coincided with a social trend toward "presumptions of unity" based on an increasingly consolidated national identity in the second half of the 18th century. Almost every community, according to Robert Aubin's catalogue, merited landscape poetry. Thus, this argument connects the prominence of the aesthetic viewpoint that the genre maintained to "the formation of a national culture." Because the picturesque conventions of landscape poetry strengthened the middle class's relationship to an aesthetic paradigm, the emerging class consciousness unified itself around a shared perception of nature.Waters, John. "Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772–1820, p. 233, in Romantic Generations, ed. Batten, Guinn, et al. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2001. In his preface to Llangunnor Hill: a loco-descriptive Poem, John Bethell announces his awareness of his participation in a well-established and critiqued genre meant for public appraisal: