Wordsworth William - Wordsworths poetic collections, supplementary writing and parodic reception

This book has benefited greatly from the continual support of Jessica Munns, who has lent a keen eye to several chapters and has provided helpful advice about my professional development. Initial thoughts on this project grew out of conversations with Jeffrey Robinson, Andrew Franta and Douglas Wilson. Jeff Cox has generously offered helpful suggestions about shaping this project into a book manuscript as well as providing insightful feedback on several chapters. During the book's preparation for press, I was fortunate to work with Stephina Clarke whose careful attention, patience and diligence have been remarkable. I am also grateful for the kind attention of Charles Rzepka, which came at a crucial moment in the development of the book, and for the warm encouragement of the series editor Ann Hawkins whose humour, critical insights and forthrightness I continue to appreciate. I would particularly like to thank Scott Howard who has been a wonderfully supportive colleague and friend, and a model of honesty, fairness and integrity. Finally, I offer my most heartfelt thanks and gratitude to Jennifer Kearny, my best reader in so many ways.

In was published as 'Wordsworth, Milton, and Parodic Sonnets', Appositions: Studies in Early Modern Literature & Culture , 1 (Spring 2008), at http://appositions.blogspot.com/, and more completely as 'J. H. Reynolds Re-Echoes the Wordsworthian Reputation: "Peter Bell," Remaking the Work and Mocking the Man', Studies in Romanticism, 47:3 (Fall 2008), pp. 27397.

This study focuses on the poetry and prose relations, bibliographic forms, competitive poetry markets, readerly negotiations and parodic responses that informed the creation of Wordsworth's published collections of poetry from 1800 to 1820. Two intertwined stories govern the chapters that follow. The first describes how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections from Lyrical Ballads , with Other Poems (1800), to Poems , in Two Volumes , by William Wordsworth (1807), The Excursion (1814), Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) and The River Duddon volume (1820). The second relates how Wordsworth's critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the designs of those collections.

Beginning with the publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads , Wordsworth employed a variety of supplementary writings to make a case for his poetry as a valuable addition to the 'Old Canon' of poets, an innovation on ballad collecting, and a means of lending authority to his singular poetic credentials. Wordsworth not only presented himself as an important contemporary poet, but as an editor, anthologist, literary and cultural critic. The prose interlacing Wordsworth's collections from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to his 1820 The River Duddon volume provided him with opportunities to guide readers through his poems and draw their attention to how his work as a collector and commentator added aesthetic, cultural and historic depth to his books of poetry.

As much as Wordsworth's supplementary writings chart how readers might engage with his poetry, they also play out his struggles in the first two decades of the nineteenth century to frame, reframe, combat and absorb the myriad responses of reviewing critics and parodists into his poetic collections. In those publications Wordsworth exercises two principal supplementary strategies one that encourages connective sympathetic readings of his poetry and another that attempts to stave off reductive criticism. These vacillating interactions between poetry and prose, a poet and his readers, not only shaped Wordsworth's poetic

Whether in Lytical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion, Poems by William Wordsworth or The River Duddon volume, Wordsworth's supplementary writings often comment on individual poems or highlight poetic pathways between poems within a collection.

Wordsworth also used supplementary writings to forge connections between his past, present and future publications. These paratexts usually take the form of prose essays or notes. However, they can be poems as well, such as his 'Prospectus' to The Excursion which maps out a variety of ways to link together his past, present and future poems. While the supplementary writing described in the previous paragraph deals with individual poems or the connective shape of a particular collection, this type of supplement often accounts for and juxtaposes the temporal and spatial confines of the real world with the physical and figurative layout of Wordsworth's books of poetry. Such writing operates, as Paul Magnuson maintains generally about paratexts, as thresholds that relate Wordsworth's poetry to particular public discourses.