Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry

Reading early Wordsworth through Adorno, this article suggests that Romantic walking entails the subjugation of external objects through the exercise of an imperial and elevated perception. It then considers Dorothy Wordsworth’s influence over her brother and the possibility that a Romantic ‘eco-poetic’ emerges from the ‘feminine’ perspective below the mountain, and within the domestic landscape. I argue that this gesture away from walking and mountaineering as the demonstration of physical prowess, or as the pursuit of a real or ideal goal, is taken up by three contemporary women poets of landscape. Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Helen Macdonald offer different ways of walking, which dispense with goal-orientation, explore the ethical choices available to perceptual beings, and attempt a more immersive, embodied engagement with the land. Their contribution to contemporary ‘radical landscape poetry’ combines the feminist discourse of ‘situated knowledge’ with an implicitly enactivist approach to human encounters with the environment.

which Terry Gifford has called 'UK avant-garde ecopoetry'. 5 The scope of this article does not allow me to consider the significance of walking across the work of these poets, although it is clear that walking and other outdoor pursuits play an important role in their wider practice. Whilst I draw on one or two works that appear in their individual collections, my main concern here is to account for a particular vein that runs through their contributions to The Ground Aslant, on the basis that there is much remaining to understand of the genre it represents.
Indeed, the theme of walking is only one aspect of landscape that the anthology addresses, but interestingly, those poems that deal with it most explicitly are by women. Tarlo's selection points towards a deeper engagement with walking amongst the women poets represented, for whom she says ' [w]riting about the body in and of landscape is a particular strength'. 6 According to Tarlo, women poets 'have only relatively recently thrown off an objectified position as part of an idealised landscape in favour of a speaking one'. 7 Interacting and engaging with landscape in this more involved and informed way continues to provide a source of poetic 'radicalism' for these women poets.
As I have suggested, Ammons uses the idea of the 'fictive walk' metaphorically, suggesting that movement and processuality define the poetic experience primarily in the sense that a poem 'journeys' through ideas, images, memories, and so on. I want to take up his acknowledgement of the '"physiology" of the poem,' 8 as a way of understanding the way in which poetic form relates to walking as embodied experience in the work of these three poets. Where their thematic involvement with walking continues the political discussion Tarlo mentions, their formal experimentation reflects current discourse on visual perception and object relations, overlapping in important ways with Donna Haraway's 'situated knowledges' 9 and enactive theories of perceptual experience. I suggest that, rather than serving to provide either opportunities for 'inward seeking', in Ammons's sense, or affirmations of subjectivity, the walking represented in the works of Tarlo, Presley and Macdonald instead explores ways of relating to the external world, or to be more precise, moves towards reconciliation of the interiorexterior dichotomy through an enactive understanding of the body in its environment.
Presley's 'Stone Settings' 10 sequence converts the Romantic affirmation of physical prowess and goal-oriented mountaineering into an embodied and goal-less experience of breath and pace. In particular, 'White ladder' 11 enacts the physical movement it describes, offering itself to a kind of embodied reading, and revealing a phenomenology based on what Lucy Lippard calls 'perceptual and physiological sensations'. 12 Tarlo's 'steady yourself on a grass' 13 evolves as the movement of the head and eyes on a walk reveals the possibility of intentional and ethical exercises in perception.
In 'Walking', 14 Helen Macdonald acknowledges danger and harm as potentialities particular to women's participation in outdoor walking, but also reinvigorates pathetic fallacy so that it denotes the interactivity of emotional and perceptual experience. With reference to philosophies of visual perception after Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, and recent developments in cognitive science, I will show how the poetics of walking for these poets expands the possibility of accessing alternative perceptions by entailing changes in perspective, and responds to the need for situated knowledges.
All three offer an account of walking in which the Romantic subject is replaced by a subject who recognizes the limited authority, significance or precedence of her own experience, not in any way as an admission of inferiority to the male subject, but in a demonstration of equality with the objects of perception. Linked to this is their understanding of visual perception as an act that can be carried out consciously, in different ways, and as an embodied activity. The ways of walking and looking represented in these poems constitute eco-ethical gestures inherited from Dorothy Wordsworth, whose intervention in the walking and looking of her brother produced a change in his poetics of nature and environment. Although, as Gifford points out in Green Voices, we cannot demand 'an engaged modern green agenda' 15 from poets of the past, positioning Wordsworth in relation to contemporary eco-poetics helps us avoid presentism in the context of our response to current ecological challenges. Integrating understandings of historically changing perspectives into accounts of our current relationship to the world foregrounds the focused attention that has been given to such issues for at least the last two hundred years, and allows us to see more clearly the innovations of contemporary voices.

The wanderer as emperor
Wordsworth's early poem, Descriptive Sketches, published in 1793, closes with a statement of intent in the language of sublime conquest: when, at break of day, On the tall peaks the glistening sunbeams play, With a light heart our course we may renew, The first whose footsteps print the mountain dew. 16 Here, in spite of an evident tenderness for such scenes, the poet expresses a desire not only to be 'the first' but also to leave a mark of this achievement by 'printing' it on the surface of the mountain. The notion that some kind of proof or some material result must be obtained attends his excursion into nature. As Rebecca Solnit expresses it in her history of walking, '[b]eing first up a mountain means entering the unknown, but for the sake of putting the place into human history, of making it known'. 17 Where the footprints in the dew will inevitably dry up, the evidence of his foray will continue to exist in the form of the poem; the satisfaction of being first comes, therefore, not only with the action itself, but in the subsequent (implicit) declaration, 'I conquered'. Whether or not this desire is problematic in itself has long been debated; after all, footprints do no lasting damage. Rather than intervening in the landscape itself by erecting a monument on the spot, say, Wordsworth commemorates his achievement in poetry. Just as Solnit notes in her history of walking, '[m]ountaineering has often been seen as a pure form of the imperial mission, calling into play all its skills and heroic virtues, with none of its material gains or oppositional violence '. 18 Even in the 'pure' form, however, imperialism by definition subjects external objects to its own agenda. At its most violent this means coercing less powerful peoples to uphold a particular political regime through enslavement or the threat of death (a form of violence which the poem of course addresses). But even in this pure -according to Solnit, skilled and virtuous -form, the imperial subject exerts a coercive force over its objects, in the very fact that it objectifies them, shapes them into meaning something other than themselves. As Adorno has it, this 'preoccupation with setting new records,' and the impulse toward ' quantification' is no less than a 'reflex of bourgeois megalomania,' and does irrevocable imaginative damage even if no physical violence is inflicted. 19 In spite of all that comes before the conclusion of Descriptive Sketches -and despite his sense of horror at the conquering impulse of the political elite -Wordsworth's narrator expresses his own desire to literally make his mark on virgin territory, committing imaginatively the same violence that is committed actually by the French army.

Down from the mountain, into the view
Later, as is well known, Wordsworth was to repudiate his youthful tendency towards what Jonathan Bate calls ' ecological imperialism'. 20 In The Prelude, Wordsworth remembers how he began to value different things in nature -indeed to renounce the idea that nature might be 'valuable' (in Adorno's sense of quantification) at all.
Although, he admits, 'As we grow up, such thraldom of that sense | Seems hard to shun,' he is inspired to do so by the examples of his friend, and subsequently his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and of his sister, Dorothy. 21 Rather than greedily roaming in search of 'new combinations of forms,' Mary and Dorothy teach him to attend to 'Whatever scene was present,' and to treat every visible thing as though 'That was the best'. 22 In her journal entry on 16 April 1802, Dorothy writes after a walk around Brothers Water, close to the Grasmere home, 'I was delighted with what I saw'. 23 A certain passivity of tone contrasts her description with that of her brother; she does not say, for example, 'I sought out sights that would delight me.' Indeed, throughout her journals, sitting in the landscape appears almost as frequently as walking in it does. On 14 May 1800 she writes, 'Sate down very often, tho' it was cold'. 24 For Dorothy, allowing nature to come to her is important enough that she will do it even when inclement conditions mean physical activity might generate a much needed and more pleasant warmth.
'Wholly free' of ' appetites' like his own, 25 Mary similarly occupies a totally different position from Wordsworth. Where his rapacious ' appetite' sees him gain the heights of hills and rocks, Mary, 'Through her humility and lowliness,' inhabits a space that is literally lower. 26 He acknowledges that, 'I too exclusively esteem'd that love, | And sought that beauty, which, as Milton sings, | Hath terror in it'; Mary ' didst soften down | This over-sternness'. 27 In 'softening down,' Mary lowers Wordsworth from the heights of the masculine sublime, from the hard rocks to the soft 'birds' and 'flower[s]'. 28 Instead of surveying nature from an imperial vantage point on top of a mountain, she is an 'inmate' of nature. 29 As Bate observes, however, Wordsworth's generalization of the 'wis[dom]' of 'Women' 30 has problematic implications. 'Orthodox feminists,' Bate writes, 'would say that to praise woman thus is to condescend to her, to strip her of reason and speech, to entrap her. Does not "inmate" suggest a prison cell?' 31 The OED tells us that in fact only modern usage of 'inmate' has the negative connotation of incarceration. 32 Given that its original meaning is ' one of several occupants of a house,' Wordsworth's use could simply be an acknowledgement of Mary's ' dwelling' in nature. As Jacqueline Labbe shows, however, these relative positions with regard to landscape are always already gendered. Whilst her male peers enjoy vast prospects from the top of sublime eminences, Dorothy reportedly meets with 'reprimands by relatives and strangers' when she attempts to 'roam the Grasmere hills,' and so she ' dutifully plants, picks and walks in the little hillside garden behind Dove Cottage'. 33 That Wordsworth describes Mary as 'wholly free,' proves for Bate, however, The experience proves deeply unsettling, not only because he runs headlong into the wretched Martha Ray where he expected to find a vacant shelter, but because of the implicit challenge to his ' direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision'. 43 He is forced to acknowledge that the 'wandering eye' or 'traveling lens' 44 of the unmarked master subject must in fact be situated in the world, and subject to all the same elements that afflict the 'marked' and visible body of Martha Ray. Indeed, it is his own situated experience, in the driving rain, and not his telescope, that discloses to him the nature or content of the immediate environment. Just as for Haraway, 'partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims,' 45 for Wordsworth it is the embodied experience he has on the mountain, and not the telescopic view from it, that become the subject of his poem.

Enactive perception and aesthetic seeing in Tarlo's 'steady yourself on a grass'
Harriet Tarlo takes from Dorothy and the later William Wordsworth this attention to the act of looking. Gesturing, in 'Steady yourself on a grass' towards the ethical possibility of renouncing desire or motive in encounters with landscape, she implicitly draws attention to the unavoidable intentionality of acts of looking carried out by ' organic' beings, as Haraway puts it, with ' active perceptual systems' and 'specific ways of seeing'. Dorothy emphasizes the importance of approaching nature 'Without an object, hope, or fear,' suggesting that the hidden isle of the poem 'Floating Island' is most likely to appear to perception when unlooked for, 'Perchance when you are wandering forth | Upon some vacant sunny day'. 46 Tarlo The walker devotes a moment to each object she perceives, perhaps registering some quality, but easily detaches herself from deeper involvement in order to move on in the progress of the walk and in the chain of available percepts:

Error, contingency and pleasure in embodied perception
Tarlo's walker experiences just this sense of accessibility through exploration, of the ability to problem-solve through movement. She describes a cloud as 'not against sky but it is' 62 ; here she acknowledges that the sky is not a flat blue plane over against which the cloud sits, but that this is how it appears to her. This echoes Merleau-Ponty's claim that 'there are of course confused spectacles, such as a landscape in the fog, but even so, one still admits that no real landscape is in itself confused -it is only confused for us'. 63 She demonstrates a conscious kind of double vision, switching between her immediate sensory experience of the cloud and the knowledge she has acquired that the sky is not a flat surface -just as sighted people are able to blur and unblur their eyes in quick succession in order to produce an uncanny perceptual effect. Her perception is different to her knowledge of what is really there because, according to Noë, we do not develop a ' detailed internal model of the world' through contact with it, to which we refer every time we perceive. 64 We do not need such a model, because 'the world is right there'. 65 In other words, we do not force our experience of the world into correspondence with a pre-existing mental model; rather we access the world-model on a constant, moment-by-moment basis, modifying present perceptions with any remembered information that might be available or necessary.
Most of the time this is sufficient to allow us to make sense of our environment so that we are able to guide our actions in it appropriately. But this momentby-moment interaction can also result in errors of judgement. These errors can be unconscious, like walking into a glass door that appears not to be there, or adopted consciously in the service of a particular aesthetic sensibility, like Tarlo If, as enactivism suggests, perceivers and environments emerge as distinct entities through interaction, perceivers have the implicit feeling that they ' actively make objects appear' as they move around in space. 68 Samuel Todes claims that, 'through movement we do not merely notice but produce the spatiotemporal field around us, our circumstantial field, the field in which things appear to us and in which we feel alive'. 69 Different decisions about how we move will therefore make different objects appear, giving rise to the feeling of creating or structuring those appearances. 'Of course', he goes on, we know that 'what appears to us in this field is not produced by movement' (my emphasis); we know this because ' objects may surprise us in their appearance'. 70 The surprise of learning that the perceptual system upon which we rely has failed can be pleasurable because we know that in most circumstances we are able to correct the error by moving or looking from a different perspective. Errors do not usually signify the total failure of the system; nor do they compromise the general ability of perceivers to cope with their environment. Mistaken impressions are not experienced as disempowering because perception is not understood to be a power over things; rather it is an ability to engage with spatiotemporal fields as they arise according to movement. Surprise and error can be pleasurable because they in fact reinforce the fact that we have this ability. We can enjoy the sensation of perceiving something we know to be an impossible aesthetic 'semblance', as Tarlo's walker does, and as our longstanding fascination with optical illusions surely proves. Similarly, we can enjoy an unexpected encounter with an object we previously believed to be a The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,

Mountains and clouds, from that which is indeed
The region, and the things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is cross'd by gleam Of his own image, by a sunbeam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet. 73 We must read his claim that he ' cannot' part the 'shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, | Mountains and clouds, from that which is indeed | The region,' as an exaggeration or deliberate misstatement. He knows that the mountains and their reflection simply appear to him at that moment to be indistinguishable. The reflections of the landscape and his own face in the water distort his perception of the objects actually in the water, but he knows that his face is not among them. As in Noë's hypothesis, he is not deluded as to his own delusions; he understands that his own perception can 'impede' rather than facilitate access to the reality of a situation, but that this can be 'sweet'.
Although not a walk, it is the fact that he is moving in the boat that enables him to experience this type of perceptual error, and then to attempt to correct it.
According to Noë's account of enactivism, the understanding that we are always at risk of making such errors causes us to move our bodies and our eyes in order to experience a more detailed perception. For Noë, this proves that humans have an implicit practical understanding that they are coupled to the world in such a way that movements produce sensory change. It is this implicit practical understanding that forms the basis of their readiness to move about to find out how things are. 74 In other words, humans implicitly understand their perceptual experience to be contingent upon a range of factors which are more or less under their controlincluding the independent movement of objects and the movement of objects (from the perceiver's point of view) according to bodily movement.
This reveals an ethical dimension which I believe is also present in Tarlo's poem.
Wordsworth here has a 'task', which is to overcome those impediments, and make true ' discoveries' of the eye. The truth of these discoveries is validated rather than undermined by the contingency of his perceptual experience, as Haraway argues it should be. Whether or not the discovery of 'truth' is possible is not necessarily the point -the important thing is the ongoing attempt and the validation of situated knowledge. In 'steady yourself on a grass', Tarlo 'plunges' herself into the objects that surround her, as Merleau-Ponty expresses it, 75 exploring the alternative modes of perception which a walk enables. Not only is she attentive to the objects that constitute her particular route, but also to the activity of her own perceptual system and its specific ways of engaging with the environment. In both there is a commitment to perception as an embodied process, and to the contingent relationship between the perceptual system and the appearance of the spatiotemporal field. Tarlo's contribution follows from a late Wordsworthian and Dorothean mode of walking in which looking around has replaced looking down upon nature, and in which experimental poetic form reflects the saccadic and bodily movement understood in contemporary philosophy to structure perceptual experience. If, as Bate claims, Wordsworth is 'the exemplar of how to look,' 76 Tarlo's poem is exemplary of the movements and decisions we make in order to see. In 'White ladder', two widely-spaced but parallel columns of text render the 'white' page a topography, corresponding to the remains of the 'metalled' Roman road which the poem references; the eyes (and/or breath if read aloud) progress across and along it as do the strides over the ' double row' of 'sandstone slabs'. 81 The strong rhythm of this poem is generated less by the choice of words or punctuation than by its spatial presentation. The large gaps between words act like the poet's 'natural breath-length', 82  with the eyes, the words being positioned much further apart than is usual. This eye movement, whilst relatively small, generates a sense of 'internal haptic space,' and the poem becomes ' a vehicle for intuiting our own body'. 91 In other words, reading this radical form is a physiological experience that shares aspects of Presley's own.

Breath and embodiment in Frances Presley's 'Stone Settings x3' and 'White ladder'
It draws attention to 'the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities,' which are themselves ' embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context'. 92 If Tarlo's poem exemplifies the idea that 'through movement we do not merely notice but produce the spatiotemporal field around us,' 93 Presley's adds to this the recognition that our bodies are in turn also determined by the perceptual fields in which we find ourselves; the landscape might ' dictate' the 'formation' of the movements by which we produce our perceptual fields.

The feats and failures of walking women
I have so far suggested that these poets resist the invocation of power in their interactions with the natural landscape. In some senses, though, the questing or mountaineering impulse is taken up by contemporary women poets, as indeed it was by Dorothy Wordsworth, whose taste for testing her own endurance is evident in her journal entry of 14 May 1800, in which she writes, 'I walked as long as I could'. 94 Even Tarlo's attentive walker climbs a hill. Presley explains in the interview with Hardy how she often composes her work out of doors, even when the weather makes this a laborious task. She describes how she set about 'Stone Settings' by 'writing on site,' on an exposed Devon moor, recalling also that '[u]nfortunately due to bad weather and the remoteness of sites this proved a more difficult technique than expected!' 95 In fact, she goes on, ' conditions were rarely ideal,' but this allowed her to variously experience 'the sheer physical pleasure, or discomfort, of exploring the layout of the stones.' 96 Clearly women have been physically exerting themselves in order to explore and experience their environment for as long as men have, a brother and sister jointly inaugurating the practice of walking for recreation, as Solnit points out. 97 Many women number among the walkers whose journeys Solnit describes in her Indeed, failure to conquer is integral to Presley's project. She admits that she was 'wholly unable to find the double quartz stone row of "White ladder", even with the help of the Exmoor archaeologist!' 100 But that failure became a 'strength' when it was acknowledged as a testament to 'the impurity of being' and the inability to impose order in a landscape that is ' complicated by being peopled' ('peopled' in the widest sense including non-human beings). 101 The reference to the metalled road, which Oliver Rackham describes as a Roman construction technique, evokes the militaristic determination to create order out of disorder, and to force upon those who walk it a particular set of experiences. 102 The to group and to authority,' negating the vital and embodied experience of walking. 105 Presley's failure to find order in the stones therefore preserves the 'impurity' of a landscape that is littered with the evidence of past interactions, and over which 'we are not in charge'. 106 In her own words, it acknowledges 'the multiplicity of voices that exist in any landscape, in any discourse, and our responsibility to listen to those voices, as well as the recognition of our own very limited line of sight.' 107 Implicit in the enactive account of perceptual experience is that each perceiver structures their own environment. Presley's recognition of the other entities that exist in the landscape opens it up as a space in which no one perspective takes precedence over any other, and in which objects are themselves ' actors and agents'. 108 Being satisfied with no result, treating whatever one finds in the landscape as though 'that was the best' is, as Wordsworth acknowledges, the special ability of Mary and Dorothy. Presley and Tarlo do not seek to demonstrate mastery over their environment, like the relentlessly linear course of Roman roads, nor to use the experience of walking to 'inwardly seek' in Ammons's masculine Romantic sense, but to engage with external objects of nature through embodied perception.

The hostile landscape
Macdonald's poem also raises an important issue in a gendered account of walking.
The final line, 'wherever the ground is, blood,' alerts us to the fact that walking outdoors has been and continues to be dangerous for women in particular ways.
In prose-poem 8 of Somerset Letters, Presley similarly reminds us of the first rule of walking, that 'you should never go anywhere on your own or without telling someone that you've gone'. 135 Macdonald's walker, her head bowed, 'Shielding the harm from further harm,' perhaps resembles less stout Dorothy Wordsworth than, say, Tess Durbeyfield, who disguises herself in the hope of attracting as little attention as possible on her long tramps through the countryside. 'Still alive, still hurt,' like Macdonald's walker, Tess experiences the particular dangers to which lone, disenfranchised women are exposed when walking. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is littered with instances in which the unseen threatens: 'As she walked [. . .] some footsteps approached behind her, the footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was close at her heels.' 136 Presley's rule is of course an acknowledgement that the rural landscape is sometimes hostile to all human exploration, regardless of gender; that it must not be approached as if it were simply there for people to enjoy. The Ordnance Survey map reference in Presley's 'Blurred passage', alludes to the equipment which must accompany any excursion into even the most familiar or benevolent-seeming of landscapes, if the walker is to avoid ending up 'under powered | water whipped | hair stranded | foot turned', or worse. 137 The poem voices the tension between these dangers and a It also references the 'Right to Roam', 139 celebrating the consolidation of efforts to conserve British countryside for public enjoyment but also problematizing the implicit assumption of the walker-adventurer that the land belongs to them, that it is for them, by highlighting the potential hostility of the landscape.

Conclusions and implications
At the same time as they explore the possibility of 'structural coupling' in organismenvironment relations, Tarlo, Presley and Macdonald also address the sense of ' externality' that persists in contemporary understandings of landscape, nature, reality, and so on. On a practical level this relates to the spaces in which we actually walkhow do we protect or conserve areas such as National Parks without implicitly treating them as a 'screen', 'ground' or 'resource' for our inward seeking? 140 In