Place and human being

Abstract

One of my favorite passages regarding the idea of the sense of place occurs in one of the poet Seamus Heaney's discussions of Wordsworth. Referring to the Westmoreland landscape that figures in Wordsworth's poem 'Michael', Heaney writes that the landscape is both 'humanised and humanising'. The landscape, or more generally, the place, is thus seen as itself having a human character, while it also makes human those who live within it. The mutuality between place and human being that is suggested here has been a fundamental theme in much of my own work, and, if we take it that such mutuality is a real feature of the relation between places and persons, it goes a long way to explaining why it is that place, and the sense of place, takes on so much importance in human life and experience - an importance attested to by the essays in this volume.