‘Mountains, glowing hot’: The Radical Volcanic Aesthetics of Wordsworth's Early Poetry

Abstract

Wordsworth's early poetry was criticised by contemporary reviewers for its ‘obscurity’ and ‘harshness’, and even Coleridge, recalling Descriptive Sketches (1793) in Biographia Literaria (1817), describes a ‘harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow’. Coleridge also claimed, however, to have perceived ‘the author's genius as it was then displayed’ in apocalyptic lines describing a stormy Alpine sunset evoking a volcanic eruption, with its ‘mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire’. This essay argues that, in addition to exploring Wordsworth's millennial hopes for post-revolutionary society, the poem's sublime volcanic imagery reveals an interest in geological processes and related religious and political allegories tied to the controversial debate between ‘Neptunian’ and ‘Plutonist’ theories of earth formation. Volcanic metaphor furnished Wordsworth with an aesthetic and epistemological framework within which to explore the human condition and the mind's relationship to the natural world at a time of seismic shifts in the European political landscape.