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The idea of the west is fertile in the poetic imagination:

To the ancient Greeks, from, Odysseus onward, the West was the place of the Hesperides, those mystical islands located at the furthest western boundary of knowledge, where the golden apples of the Sun are found. For the English Romantic Poets, the idea of the West is truly an idea in the Coleridgean sense: it is utterly concrete, yet inscrutably complex, self-contradictory, and endlessly generative of new knowledge and activity. Wordsworth’s poem ponders the archetypal significance of traveling westward, “through the world that lay/ Before me in my endless way.” Such contemplative wandering into the boundless realm of the West comprises one of the most characteristic and distinctive themes of English Romantic Poetry…(James C. McKusick) read more