Time and Mind in Wordsworth's PoetryWilliam Wordsworth was fascinated by the relationship of the creative mind to the created world, and by the effect of time on both of them. In this important new study, Jeffrey Baker explores the significant ways in which the theme of time is manifested in the imagery and diction of Wordsworth's major poetry. He discusses the poet's preoccupation with "clock" and "natural" time, as well as his escape from time through "deliberate holiday" and in the famous visionary "spots of time." Throughout his analysis, Baker concentrateson the texts which the poet himself approved for publication, asserting that the growing practice of citing poetically inferior versions for biographical or other extra poetic reasons misdirects a reader's attention. Only by reexamining the familiar poems as poems, rather than as philosophical or psychological statements, is it possible to appreciate how Wordsworth's changing concepts of the creator, the poet, and the ambiguities of time function as works of art. The volume includes a selected bibliography and an appendix describing the early Christian shrines alluded to in The Prelude. |
From inside the book
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... kind of a creature man is and what kind of a creation he dwells in . The need reveals itself in the dogmatic certainty of the phrase " immortal Mind , " while the misgiving shows more subtly in the implicit contradictions in both poems ...
... kind of creature he is , being man , but what kind of man he is , being a poet . A principal characteristic of Wordsworth's notion of de- liberate holiday is that it is often a kind of holiday on top of a holiday : the shepherd steals ...
... kind of context . To carouse through the night until the time when the ordi- nary man must leave his bed to go to work is the mark of a special kind of joy and freedom . But of course , such a night represents only a rather spe- cial kind ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
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