(Re)envisioning the Anti-Urban: artistic responses in the Walking with Wordsworth and Basho exhibition

In this chapter, we discuss the exhibition Wordsworth and Bashō: Walking Poets, held at Dove Cottage in the Lake District, UK, in 2014, in the wider context of Romantic anti-urbanism. The main aim of the exhibition was to compare the work of two famous poets in the context of the unique landscape of the English Lake District. In the text that follows, we show how these poets are linked through the agency of walking with the wider context of anti-urbanism and then discuss contemporary artistic responses to the poets. We firstly discuss the relevance of this chapter to the book as a whole and then outline the cultural importance of walking in both the UK and Japan. Next we introduce the walking methods of both of the poets, Wordsworth and Bashō, demonstrating that their work was formally and emotionally structured by their practices of walking. We then discuss the ways in which walking informed the making of the artistic works in the exhibition itself and we conclude by reflecting further on walking and antiurbanism more generally