’Paths to Freedom and to Childhood Dear’: Walking and Identity in a Time of ’Stopt’ Paths

Abstract

ABSTRACT In early 19th-century England and Europe, the primary cultural meanings of walking expanded from destination-bound ‘travail’ compelled by material or spiritual necessity into theoretically unbounded, deliberately chosen travel producing pleasure and artistic opportunity. English Romantic poet John Clare staged his walker’s identity as daily sojourns through the landscape of his ‘childhood dear’, his leisured walking enacting his freedom from labour and poverty. But Clare’s walker also finds his ambulatory resistance ‘stopt’ as privatising enclosures of common lands cut him off from his memories and reinforce class oundaries. This essay looks through the lens of Clare’s poetry into another time of stopt paths, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to ask whether we can or should anchor identity in specific material locality traversed by the free walker. Does the walker’s placed identity empower personal transcendence and resistant action, or does the materiality of the local inevitably constrain the walker’s freedoms?