Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are

Description

This book revises accepted views of William Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or—more recently—political repression, the author redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading. He argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes “our widest commonality” in the simple fact that “we are” in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in the presence of being is what makes him original, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called “the hiding place of his power.” Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction: Wordsworth’s Originality Chapter 2: Wordsworth in the Rime Chapter 3: Jeffreyism, Byron’s Wordsworth, and the Nonhuman in Nature Chapter 4: Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth Chapter 5: The Novelty of Wordsworth’s Earliest Poems Chapter 6: Hoof After Hoof, Metric Time Chapter 7: The Poem to Coleridge Chapter 8: The Pastor’s Wife and the Wanderer: Spousal Verse or the Mind’s Excursive Power Chapter 9: Intimations Revisited: From the Crisis Lyrics to Wordsworth in 1817 Afterword: Just Having It There Before Us Notes Index