Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700-1830

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. She discusses the highly contested parliamentary enclosure movement which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. She considers enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualization of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity. She then examines explicit landscape imagery--such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden--within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.