Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700-1830

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Crawford focuses on the gradual change during this period when the British taste for open space gradually gave way to a preference for confined space, so that by the beginning of the Regency period contained sites, both topographical and poetic, were perceived to express authentic English qualities. In this context, Crawford discusses the highly fraught parliamentary enclosure movement, which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. Crawford takes enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualisation of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity, and sets explicit images, such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.