Mason - The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

Authors

Jane Austen Janet Todd

Samuel Beckett Ronan McDonald

Walter Benjamin David Ferris

J. M. Coetzee Dominic Head

Joseph Conrad John Peters

Jacques Derrida Leslie Hill

Emily Dickinson Wendy Martin

George Eliot Nancy Henry

T. S. Eliot John Xiros Cooper

William Faulkner Theresa M. Towner

F. Scott Fitzgerald Kirk Curnutt

Michel Foucault Lisa Downing

Robert Frost Robert Faggen

Nathaniel Hawthorne Leland S. Person

Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King

James Joyce Eric Bulson

Herman Melville Kevin J. Hayes

Sylvia Plath Jo Gill

Edgar Allen Poe Benjamin F. Fisher

Ezra Pound Ira Nadel

Jean Rhys Elaine Savory

Edward Said Conor McCarthy

Shakespeare Emma Smith

Shakespeares Comedies Penny Gay

Shakespeares History Plays Warren Chernaik

Shakespeares Tragedies Janette Dillon

Harriet Beecher Stowe Sarah Robbins

Mark Twain Peter Messent

Edith Wharton Pamela Knights

Walt Whitman M. Jimmie Killingsworth

Virginia Woolf Jane Goldman

William Wordsworth Emma Mason

W. B. Yeats David Holdeman

Topics

The American Short Story Martin Scofield

Comedy Eric Weitz

Creative Writing David Morley

Early English Theatre Janette Dillon

English Theatre, 16601900 Peter Thomson

Francophone Literature Patrick Corcoran

Modern British Theatre Simon Shepherd

Modern Irish Poetry Justin Quinn

Modernism Pericles Lewis

Narrative (second edition) H. Porter Abbott

The Nineteenth-Century American Novel Gregg Crane

Postcolonial Literatures C. L. Innes

Postmodern Fiction Bran Nicol

Russian Literature Caryl Emerson

Scenography Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth

The Short Story in English Adrian Hunter

Theatre Historiography Thomas Postlewait

Theatre Studies Christopher Balme

Tragedy Jennifer Wallace

Victorian Poetry Linda K. Hughes

Emma Mason

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Emma Mason 2010

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Wordsworth, wrote Coleridge, both deserves to be, and is , a happy man and a happy man, not from natural Temperament, but because he is a Philosopher because he knows the intrinsic value of the Different objects of human Pursuit, and regulates his Wishes in Subordination to the Knowledge because he feels, and with a practical Faith, the Truth. Coleridge, like the other members of Wordsworths close family group (his sister Dorothy, brother John, wife Mary and sister-in-law Sara), understood Wordsworths poetic project in a way modern critics sometimes overlook: eager to brand the poet an apostate, conservative or ego-driven solitary, Wordsworths practical and emotional commitments to his family, community, natural world, as well as to poetry, are often underplayed. His jokey, flirtatious and good-humoured side is similarly glossed over, while his vulnerability and neuroses pale before a critical focus on his assumed narcissism.

Yet Wordsworth sought to teach people how to feel and think not because he felt confident in his own efforts to do so, but rather because he did not. John Stuart Mill considered his poetic ability in similar terms: Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. Far from the self-involved figure conjured by those unwilling to engage with his project, Wordsworth was above all a watcher and a listener of his world. His visions, occasionally apocalyptic and sublime, are more often intimate and tender. They are concerned with starlings, sparrows, skylarks, daisies, butterflies, hedgehogs and glow-worms (often seen alongside Dorothy, who anchors his musings), or with individual human beings caught up in moments of everyday emotion joy, affection, love, sadness, anxiety and loneliness.

That Wordsworths ontological vision is concerned with the everyday and domestic is borne out in his early poem, The Dog: An Idyllium (1786). Written for the deceased pet of his landlady, Ann Tyson, the poem enables Wordsworth to claim an intimacy with the dog that elevated them both as the happiest pair on earth (24). His poetic attentiveness to the dog is also

Even when immersed in profound contemplation, as we find him at the end of The Prelude looking up to the moon from the heights of Snowdon, Wordsworth realizes that the greatest things are built up From least suggestions by those ever on the watch, / Willing to work and to be wrought upon. / They need not extraordinary calls ( P , XIII.98101). Certainly Wordsworth never recorded having any extraordinary calls to the vocation of poet, obsessively revising and rewriting his poems and doubting his poetic ability into the last days of his life. He was nonetheless spurred on by a devotion to poetry and its rhythms, pauses, cadences and silences as a path to that state of reflection in which our emotional experiences, joyful and painful, begin to make sense. His prosodic style invites readers to think about how they feel after reading a poem in order that they find meaning, not from computational analysis, but from their own felt reactions synthesized with thoughts. This is what Wordsworth meant when he suggested that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: the poem allows us to experience our current feelings moral, sexual, domestic, intellectual by rhythmically situating us in a state of contemplation where we recollect who are we are, think about it, and then, as the tranquillity gradually disappears, acknowledge the emotion that we feel in that moment ( PW , I.149).