Before the Romantics, poets rarely referred to their journeyings in their work. Chaucer, Marvell and Milton all spent long periods on the Continent and absorbed European influences, but the impact on their writing was subtle. It was the Romantics, with their love of nature, emotional response to place and sense of life as a journey, who first treated travel as an end in itself. But even they were less camera than psychoanalyst's couch.
Wordsworth travelled widely in France, Germany and Switzerland in his twenties, and those experiences - as well, of course, as his Lakeland childhood - were transmuted into the works by which he is remembered. His wanderings left a residue which his poetic imagination could later mould, as he explains in his description of the Alps in The Prelude:
"Like a breeze
Or sunbeam over your domain I passed
In motion without pause; but ye have left
Your beauty with me, an impassioned sight
Of colours and of forms, whose power is sweet."
As well as a stock of memories and images, travel also provided perspective.
"I travelled among unknown Men,
In Lands beyond the Sea;
Nor England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee."
If Wordsworth, the youthful radical, was for a decade an emotional exile, Shelley was for the last decade of his short life an actual one, living first in Switzerland and then in Italy, which in Julian and Maddalo (an account of his friendship with Byron), he called a "paradise of exiles". He spent the summer of 1816 with Byron at Lake Geneva, where he wrote Mont Blanc, with its pantheistic sense of the power and unity of nature.
"The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
The way Shelley is moved by Mont Blanc to a rumination on the invisible forces at work in nature is typically Romantic. He is not describing the scene, but exploring the emotions it evoked.
Don't be misled by the success of WH Auden and Louis MacNeice's jaunty Letters From Iceland. Poets are thoroughly unreliable travellers. Robert Browning, widely travelled and much influenced by Shelley, settled in Florence in the 1850s but wrote virtually nothing while there. DH Lawrence undertook his own "savage pilgrimage" to Italy, Ceylon, Australia and New Mexico, but was more interested in sensuousness than scenery. In Italy, he was chiefly fascinated by the luxuriance (and sexual suggestiveness) of fruit, and contrasts the loveliness of pomegranates with the listlessness of Venice,
"Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes."
As for TS Eliot in The Waste Land, all cities seemed the same:
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal."
Some poets are explicitly doubtful about the benefits of travel. The resolutely immobile Philip Larkin once expressed an interest in visiting China, but only if he could come back the same day. Travel broadens the mind, but great poetry is often the product of narrow obsession, the neurotic cultivation of a tiny plot.
Plus, Byron's Rhineland
