Nature’s Mathematics

Abstract

Chapter 1 explores the geometrical quality of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s imaginative commitments. Focusing principally on The Pedlar, the Guide to the Lakes, and Coleridge’s Notebooks, the chapter locates the origins of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s geometric visions in a divinely relational language of shapes which they intuited as children to describe the world about them and which moulded their shared Pedlar consciousness in the 1790s. It proposes that Wordsworth and Coleridge sustained the mathematical expressions of the Pedlar’s ethico-theological vision in their dealings with nature and the mind, perceiving in the material world a language of geometric forms which held it together.