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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... moment joined to eternity . The incidents leading to the great moments of vision are always introduced casually , with ref- erence to material time . The skating episode ( Prelude , 1 : 425– 63 ) begins at six o'clock on a winter ...
... moment of sensation ; man lived intensely in the moment , creating himself in his sensations and creating also a sense of duration by the mem- ory of succeeding moments . Memory , of course , is stimu- lated by association . The notion ...
... moment in the flux of consciousness . 1 And yet I am not quite happy with the manner in which Perkins expresses the idea . " Solidifying a moment in the flux " has certain unfortunate undertones : if this is what poetry does , and all ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
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