A quote that makes sense of my personal history:

"At school, many New Zealand children found Wordsworth fanciful, though they were forced to read and rote memorize his poetry as part of the curriculum. They did not understand his poetry because they did not appreciate the local topography and landscape of the Lake District, which is much more manicured, man-made over many generations, and “tame” compared to the relatively wild and uninhabited New Zealand land and seascapes. Clearly, the set of relationships between place, poetry, and region generates a further set of questions about the construction of the canon and the curriculum, the role and representation of Nature in the formation of national and cultural identity—in defining a people through representing their relationship to the (home)land—and pedagogy.14 Within this set of relationships it is easy to see how a particular representation of Nature became mainstream."

When I eventually saw photos of the Lake District I shrugged. Give me the New Zealand alps any day, I said to myself.

I never did much connect to the English Romantics.