“And what if I enwreathed my own?” Literary Tourism as Transplantation in Wordsworth’s Yarrow Poems

Abstract

This article, focusing on William Wordsworth’s poems about the Scottish river Yarrow, investigates the English poet’s creative refashioning of the Scottish broadsheet balladry tradition. It throws light on Wordsworth’s literary tourism and demonstrates how his Yarrow poems displaya complex interplay between seeing a site, reading literary texts about it, and writing new significance onto it. The article thus argues that Wordsworth frames his literary tourism as an “enwreathing”, where the wreath isametaphor of his creative re-organization and re-collection of elements derived from literary tradition and his own experiences as a tourist. Not only elucidating the relatively early poems Wordsworth wrote about this river, I also discuss the late and rarely analyzed poem “Musings near Aquapendente, April 1837”, showing how, bymeans of his poetics of imagination and memory, motifs from the Scottish ballads are grafted on (or “transplanted” to) a classical landscape, thereby creating “another Yarrow” in Italy.