As a foreign tourist visiting the Lake District ground with the purpose of revisiting
some of Wordsworth’s paths and dwelling places, I was faced at the same time with the desire
to render nature exactly as Wordsworth perceived it and the realisation that it was impossible:
Wordsworth’s nature was not just modified by time and modernisation, it was also idealised.
Arguing that “we can no longer possess Romantic landscape vision” because Wordsworth’s
nature is “obsolete” (Kroeber 131), I propose that through his poetry we can still grasp the
essence of his nature, not by looking at it, but by looking into it. Even though I tried to
conceal obvious objects of modernity and kept the pictures empty of humans in order to come
closer to Wordsworth’s time, signs of either of them still showed. My work therefore
represents the nature of Lake District as it is today, the surface of it, which, like a ruin, bears
the reality of passing time and modernisation, but, while being Wordsworth’s source of
inspiration, it also carries his whole philosophy and thus transcends time. By selecting which
object was worthy of Wordsworth’s idealism, I not only used Picturesque theory on my work,
I was also influenced by his own Picturesque impulse, showing as a critical approach of our
actual world that again a displacement of ideology was necessary in order to recreate an
imitation of Wordsworth’s idealised world.
