Wordsworth's American Connections: Emerson at the Gate, an Editor in Philadelphia and a Nation of Readers

American guests sometimes apologise for their enthusiasm on our Wordsworth days, as if the poet were on loan to them from England. The history says otherwise: Wordsworth conquered America early, deeply and permanently – visited at Rydal Mount by Emerson, championed to the American public by a devoted Philadelphia professor whose story ends in tragedy, absorbed into the very foundations of American nature-writing, and collected today in one of the world's great Wordsworth libraries, which happens to sit in upstate New York. The transatlantic thread runs right through the story we tell on the road. Here it is in full – the chapter that belongs, in a real sense, to our American visitors themselves.

Emerson at Rydal Mount: 1833 and 1848

The most famous American ever to climb the hill to Wordsworth's door was Ralph Waldo Emerson – twice. In 1833, a young unknown of thirty on his first European tour, Emerson worked his way through Britain's literary lions (Coleridge in London, Carlyle in Scotland) and finished at Rydal Mount, where the sixty-three-year-old poet received him with gruff hospitality, held forth freely – and, in the encounter's unforgettable moment, offered to recite his newest sonnets, then declaimed them from memory as the two men paced the garden walk: the greatest living poet, performing for an audience of one future great. Emerson, half-amused and wholly moved, set the scene down in English Traits, his 1856 book on the English – preserving for posterity both the poet's greatness and his magnificent crankiness (Wordsworth's opinions that day ranged freely over the deficiencies of most things modern, America included). Emerson returned in 1848, established and famous himself, for a mellower second audience. Through him, the direct current flows: Wordsworth's doctrine of nature as moral teacher passes into Emerson's essays, thence to Thoreau at Walden and into the bloodstream of American environmental thought – a lineage running, quite literally, from a Rydal garden path to the national parks movement.

Henry Reed of Philadelphia: the editor who never met his poet

The tenderest American connection is the least known. Henry Reed, professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, produced in 1837 the first complete American edition of Wordsworth's poems – a landmark of devotion, carefully arranged to the poet's own principles – and from then until Wordsworth's death the two men sustained a rich correspondence across the Atlantic, the busy Philadelphian serving as the poet's advocate, adviser and unofficial ambassador to the American public (Wordsworth valued him enormously, and American readers' esteem, channelled through Reed, warmed his old age). The two never met. In 1854, four years after the poet's death, Reed finally made his pilgrimage to England, visited the Wordsworth country and the family – and drowned on the voyage home, lost with hundreds of others in the sinking of the steamship Arctic. Philadelphia mourned him as a national loss. Guests who have followed our literary series will notice something uncanny here: Beatrix Potter's great American champion and the Brontës' great American collector were Philadelphians too – the City of Brotherly Love is, on the evidence, the unofficial American capital of English literary devotion, and Wordsworth's Reed completes the trilogy.

An American library of Wordsworth

The scholarly thread crosses the ocean as well: Cornell University in upstate New York houses one of the world's foremost Wordsworth collections – books, manuscripts and association copies gathered over a century – and the monumental scholarly edition of Wordsworth's poetry that modern readers rely on was produced under Cornell's imprint: the definitive texts of England's landscape poet, edited in America. Meanwhile the manuscripts' mother-lode remains at home in Grasmere, where the Wordsworth Trust's museum (wordsworth.org.uk) displays the working drafts and Dorothy's journals – and where American accents, we can report from long experience, are heard at least as often as English ones. The wider Romantic manuscript heritage can be explored through the British Library at bl.uk.

Why Wordsworth speaks American

It is worth asking why the poet of one small English district took such deep root across the Atlantic. Part of the answer is doctrinal: a young republic suspicious of Old World pomp found in Wordsworth a great poet who located the sublime in common people, plain language and wild landscape – democratic aesthetics, ready for import. Part is practical: Wordsworth's celebration of nature as sacred text arrived just as America was deciding what to make of its own wilderness, and his ideas – via Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir's generation and the conservation movement – helped tip the answer toward reverence and protection; the American national park idea and the English Lake District's own protected status (the poet's Guide to the Lakes had imagined the region as "a sort of national property" as early as 1835) are branches of one tree. And part is simply the poems: memorised by generations of American schoolchildren, the daffodils and Tintern Abbey became furniture of the American mind. Our guests did not adopt Wordsworth; they inherited him.

Completing the pilgrimage

All of which explains a pattern we see weekly: American visitors arrive in the Lakes carrying school memories of the daffodils, and leave having discovered that the whole landscape – cottage, schoolroom, grave, golden field – was waiting for them like a family property they had never visited. Our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside, with a maximum of seven guests, tell the full story with the American thread woven in where it belongs – Emerson at the garden gate, Reed's parcels from Philadelphia, the ideas that sailed west and built national parks. Wordsworth never crossed the Atlantic. His readers cross it the other way, every week of our working year – and we consider showing them home ground to be, quite genuinely, the best job in England.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.