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A Molehill for Parnassus: John Clare and Prospect Poetry

Topographical poetry in the wide sense is as old as poetry itself, for poets have always felt the need to celebrate their environment, thereby giving their emotions 'a local habitation and a name.' Drayton's Poly-Olbion and Jonson's To Penshurst are important poems in this tradition. But the publication in 1642 of Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill inaugurated a special type of topographical poem, the hill- or prospect-poem, which had its full flowering in the eighteenth century and which was, in its decline, part of the Romantic poets' inheritance. In this tradition, analogous to the pictorial tradition of the bird's-eye view, the poet climbs a hill, sweeps his eye round the panorama, focuses his attention on the most interesting prospect, and paints a careful word-picture. It did not need much of an effort for eighteenth-century minds to associate the hill in question with Parnassus, but it was also Denham who had domesticated Pamassus for them, as he makes clear in the first eight lines of Cooper's Hill: