Why Wordsworth Still Matters — And Why the Lake District Is Where You Understand It

People sometimes ask — usually people who are not sure they want to take the Wordsworth tour — whether Wordsworth is still relevant. Whether a poet who died in 1850 has anything to say to someone living in Britain today.

The answer is yes, and I can tell you why precisely, because I have spent years working with his poetry in the landscape where it was written.

What Wordsworth was arguing

Wordsworth was not arguing that nature is pretty. He was arguing something considerably more radical and considerably more useful: that sustained attention to the natural world develops in a person the particular qualities of mind — patience, depth of feeling, the capacity for genuine reflection — that make a good life possible.

This argument is not less relevant in an age of constant distraction and accelerating information. It is more relevant. The Prelude was written against the grain of an industrialising society that was already beginning to reduce human experience to productivity and consumption. That society is now complete. Wordsworth's argument about what gets lost in it has not been superseded.

Why the Lake District is where you understand this

You can read the argument in a book. You can understand it intellectually at a desk in London or Leeds or anywhere else. But you understand it differently — more completely, more permanently — when you are standing in the landscape he was writing about.

The fell above Dove Cottage, the view down the Grasmere valley from the garden summerhouse where he paced and composed, the particular quality of the light on Rydal Water on an October afternoon — these are not decorative additions to the poems. They are the substance of the argument. The case Wordsworth is making is not abstract. It is rooted in this specific place.

When you stand in it, the poems change. The abstractions become concrete. The argument becomes something you can feel rather than merely understand.

What guests tell us afterwards

The thing guests most often say after the Wordsworth tours is that they understood something about the poetry that they had not understood before — and that they are going home to read it again.

That is, for us, the right outcome. The tours are not an alternative to the poems. They are an introduction to them, or a deepening of an existing acquaintance. The Lake District is where Wordsworth becomes clear. We are just the people who take you there.

The Wordsworth Morning Tour and Wordsworth Afternoon Tour are led by Gillian. £79 per person. Maximum seven guests.