'Poor Susans!’: Wordsworth and the ‘single(s) in the wide waste'

The essay discusses William Wordsworth’s experience of late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Through an analysis of some of Wordsworth’s earlier poems to his most renowned description of London in The Prelude, the paper illustrates the ways in which the poet – both as a writer and as the protagonist of his autobiographical poem – and the characters of his pomes interact with the urban reality. The essay intends to demonstrate how in Wordsworth’s early poems on London the perception of the urban is often filtered by an active imagination that transmutes actual perception. The natural landscape, thus, becomes a constitutive part of the urban experience. However, this filter becomes with time less and less effective. In the poet’s later description of the city the urban reality assumes realistic tones that the poet is no longer able to transform through his imagination. The creative power of the poet, anesthetised by the jarring urban reality, is only able to associate the city with horrific and infernal worlds, in which people are entrapped and their imagination impaired.