In fact, his sister, Dorothy, though not a poet, was herself an outsider to the male-dominated poetry world of the time; she left an extraordinary journal comprised of entries that should be called prose poems. In a way, being on the periphery allowed her a sense of freedom that led to her unique text. If we look at her entry of October 3, 1800, we find the basis for Wordsworth’s poem, “Resolution and Independence.” We should note here that Wordsworth used many of his sister’s observations in his poems, often having her read them to him in order to recall particulars of scenes. This is Dorothy’s strength while William’s concern was with the transcendental, the horizons, the big picture, a concern that sometimes led to pomposity, and which in fact he mildly satirizes in “Resolution and Independence.” Dorothy’s account of the incident with the leech gatherer which forms the basis for Wordsworth’s poem shows us the poor man in all his particulars: we see the picture of the individual we miss in Wordsworth (a fact Wordsworth himself satirizes when he shows how it takes him three glances to recognize the man not as a monster or a rock, but merely as a man). Dorothy, after describing the man, his occupation, the economic hardships, ends her account with these three sentences:

Everything here contributes perfectly to the final effect. Within an almost casual observer’s style the poem runs a whole gamut of emotions. The first sentence is really four short sentences fused together with a minimum of punctuation, the effect being an intensification of the feeling. There is a sense of almost overwhelming and relentless agony, moving from simply “hurt” to the fractured skull. Then the second sentence pulls back from the idea of pain momentarily before revealing its magnitude; one senses an almost stoical heroism on the part of the man. Finally, in the third sentence, a somber and melancholy tone is counterbalanced by the mention of the last bit of light that holds on, like the last bit of life in this old man. The last sentence becomes an emblem for the whole scene. By focusing on the simple descriptive powers of language, on her own world at the periphery of Romantic literature, she ironically achieves an effect as transcendent as William’s, and at least as memorable. It is only on that periphery, away from the influences of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their circle, that she can thrive. In essence, she has taken an out-of-the-way experience and transformed it into an heroic vision. Schiller, the German Romantic critic, in On The Aesthetic Education seems to define Dorothy’s strength: “The person must therefore be its own ground, for the enduring cannot issue from alteration; and so we have in the first place the idea of absolute being grounded in itself; that is to say of freedom.”

We might also consider the case of Coleridge, who in his “Eolian Harp” transforms that simple, peripheral image into a central one for understanding the transcendent nature of reality that transcends the static religion the poem confronts. Or his “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” where, having injured his leg, he sits detached from his friends, including Charles Lamb, who have gone off to explore the countryside, leaving him alone and isolated. He begins: “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, / This lime-tree bower my prison!” But instead of simply lamenting his situation at the margin, he imagines what their sojourn must be like, imagining, from his memory of the area, where they must be, how they must approach a bower like his with a similar tree — an image that begins to link the two places:

The imaginative bridge is the sense of unity between the place where he is imprisoned and the place where the friends probably arrive. But the aim of the poem is not simply to notice two centers, or a center and a periphery; rather, in the typical way the Romantics had of making the poem enact within its dynamics its very theme, the poem begins to expand the horizons available to Charles as it has Coleridge’s. The scene thus shifts to a “wide landscape” where Coleridge recalls how Charles has escaped the confines of London for the open spaces of the country so that Charles can view a whole panorama, can, as Coleridge says, “stand as I have stood,” experience what Coleridge now does imaginatively. At this point in the poem, both Charles and Coleridge remain at centers for which the other is at the circumference. The final resolution of the poem occurs when Coleridge sees a rook fly over, imagines it heading towards Charles, blesses it, and then, in a gesture of inclusiveness reminiscent of the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces everything, making all that can be seen or imagined both center and circumference: