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’. |
From inside the book
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... perhaps in part with genetically determined programmes for development and behaviour, but also with a 'potential' for development along certain general lines that can only become specific when the environmental, contingent factor is ...
... Perhaps it might be suggested, at least, that to commit oneself to language is to move further into the realm of intersubjective behaviour than is the case with many other forms of action. Sex and aggression are also open to explanation ...
... perhaps all the more powerful for a generation that is so clearly responsive, as ours is, to the temptations of what is called 'literary theory'. This too is a beast with many heads, not all nodding benignly at each other. But it seems ...
... perhaps as a propaedeutic clearing of the head) and acquaint ourselves with the materials familiar to the social historians. To free ourselves from the restraints of theory, understood in its most totalizing and therefore inadequate ...
... Perhaps 'alienation' comes closest to being adequate for a title word; and, in the Hegelian Entfremdung and Entausserung, and the Marxist-Brechtian Verfremdung, there lie a whole series of social–psychological models and aesthetic ...
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 |