William Wordsworth’s Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty: the poems about Basque mountaineers

Abstract

At the time of the Peninsular War, William Wordsworth wrote three sonnets urging the Basques to react against the Napoleonic invasion of their land. This essay aims to interpret these intriguing poems, which are approached from a comparative perspective. Basque Studies and the multidisciplinary field of Mountain Studies, particularly research concerned with mountaineering and its literature, constitute the main areas of reference for the analysis. Contrasting Wordsworth’s poetic view with our insight of the Basque cultural inheritance will display the extent and character of the Romantic transference of ideas as well as the interrelation of the historical events in a European framework.