Romantic emphasis: Wordsworth's poetry and the marks of culture, 1750--1850

William Wordsworth turned his back on worn poetic diction and classical rhetorical figures, authorizing his poetic project rather by an appeal to a geographically determined vernacular: a "plainer and more emphatic language" as spoken by "humble" people in "rural" regions. This dissertation situates Wordsworth's project in a matrix of representational grammars not traditionally considered part of the Romantic canon: namely, the mapping of the English terrain and the notating of the English voice by cartographers, grammarians, and elocutionists. I reconstruct these Enlightenment attempts to discern and encode the "great Outlines of the Country" (William Roy) and "the great Outlines of pronunciation" (John Walker) in order to produce a more historically accurate context for practices of textual emphasis (i.e., grammatical and rhetorical punctuation, apostrophe, metrical accenting, iconic pointing, italics); and to gauge the appeal of Wordsworth's writing to an eye newly trained in the era's spatial, temporal, acoustic, and affective notations. The literature of the period emerges within a charged notational milieu and is rendered legible by modes of national literacy in which non-verbal marks play increasingly prominent affective and cognitive roles.; To show this, I isolate concrete textual convergences: in Part I, tourist maps of the Lake District with metrical, poetic experiments on their faces; Wordsworth's cartographic self-positioning in his 1790 letter from the Alps and his assimilation of map language and dilemmas into the Prelude account of the tour; the poet's unstable lexicon of lines and points that registers British debates over modes of rendering the third dimension. Part II treats the contested promotion of passion and time notations---pause points, emphasis signs, and the exclamation mark---and explores arguments for their importance in carrying ideas between and into a broadening national community of minds. I trace the anxious inscription of such marks and themes (e.g., "gentle shock of mild surprize,""pauses of deep silence") in the poetry.; My approach to this verse of "nature" and "mind" exposes its semiotic and ideological circumstances while revealing the aesthetic significance of typographic and topographic notation to blank verse, a non-stanzaic form organized through a spatio-temporal system of emphasis. Despite its reputation for approaching the rhythms of English speech, blank verse clearly registers the period's inscriptional practices and grammars. This view challenges the received reading of blank verse---the quintessential English measure---as a Miltonic legacy shaped by a lineage of male poets. Now, the nation's most prestigious metrical form can be grasped in its dynamic interactions with emerging measures of English land and language.