Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Routledge Revivals): The Poetry of DisplacementTraditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’. |
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... coherent messages. When this writing is understood for what I think it is, it should become almost impossible to cite Wordsworth as the exemplum of any organicist reconstruction of Romanticism and any unitary discursive energy, whether ...
... coherence of those ideas, and of the polemical framework within which they make sense. To take up this task is, however, to produce an over-coherent reading of Wordsworth. In my second chapter I take that risk in order to make clear ...
... coherence as in its incoherence. He was subject, as many others must have been, to a series of fairly standard conflicts accompanying the passage from a counter-cultural youth to a middle-class maturity. We will see that he worried ...
... coherent) way, in the problematization of subjectivity, of perception and of expression. At times, as in 'The Thorn', this is done by conscious exploitation of the dramatic method, where we are clearly told not to miss the poet's ...
... coherent positions; in 'Gipsies', for example, the poet too much affirmeth, and it is in the hyperbole itself that we must look for alternative clues to the poem's allusions. It would be hard to bring forward a poetic ego that occupies ...
Contents
the case against urban life | |
Another guide to the lakes | |
In single or in social eminence? The political economy of The Prelude | |
The world of all of | |
Michael and Simon Lee | |
the politics of sympathy | |
The Excursion | |
The star of eve was wanting | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |
Other editions - View all
Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Routledge Revivals): The Poetry of ... David Simpson Limited preview - 2014 |
Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Routledge Revivals): The Poetry of ... David Simpson No preview available - 2016 |
Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Routledge Revivals): The Poetry of ... David Simpson No preview available - 2014 |