Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology Why are rocks and landforms so prominent in British Romantic poetry? Why, for example, does Shelley choose a mountain as the locus of a "voice...to repeal/large codes of fraud and woe"? Why does a cliff, in the boat stealing episode of Wordsworth"s Prelude, chastise the young thief? Why is petrifaction, or "stonifying," in Blake"s coinage, the ultimate figure of dehumanization? Noah Heringman main... Full description