1. Emily Brontë and Wordsworth

Wordsworth was by Emily Brontë's time the grand old man of the Romantic movement; Branwell wrote to him as such for advice (though he did not receive any); and versions of the Lyrical Ballads were lisped in nurseries and drawing-rooms. The influence of the early Wordsworth permeates Emily's work, sometimes — despite their total difference in character and principles — on the lines of Heathcliff and Catherine, ‘more myself than I am’. Wordsworth's character led him always towards enshrining the vision or the poetic principle in a search for permanence, making poetry (though in fact a present experience) into a past experience, thereby ultimately losing it; Emily's whole cast of mind and inner struggles led her into the principle of change and the vision of futurity. But before these differences of character take over, during the moments of poetic reverie or ‘mysticism’ or reception of vision through a certain use of nature, the poetic process in both has an essential similarity. Their identification with nature as an initial stage in poetry, is equivalent; Wordsworth's Vale, Emily's Moor is the landscape of their being, with no sense of a gap for simile or symbol or the pathetic fallacy. As Charlotte said of Emily, her native hills were not a ‘spectacle’, but ‘what she lived in, and by’;2 and as Wordsworth of Michael, ‘these hills/ Which were his living Being, even more/ Than his own blood’.

Michael is Wordsworth's image of the essential poet, who — once his younger self (his son) has left and been corrupted by city values — remains a part-ruined but permanent aspect of nature like his unfinished sheepfold, the pile of rocks by Greenhead Ghyll, a record for future poets ‘who among these hills/ Will be my second self when I am gone’, as Wordsworth describes his own tale. Despite the difference in development between this tale, for example, and Wuthering Heights with its final picture of rocky tombs sinking into the landscape, the initial setting for a poetic experience