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. |
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... memory . " In this context " earthly " seems to mean mortal , bodily , and is thus set against things " of the sky " - that is , things of heaven , which are therefore thought of as permanent . And yet we know that it is the cloud ...
... Memory , of course , is stimu- lated by association . The notion of affective memory binding together disparate moments to form a sense of time elapsing requires the notion that one image seen or remembered will suggest other images ...
... memories . In doing this one also created a self : all those innumerable " I's " that existed in all those past , discrete moments became , in their interaction in memory , an " I " that seemed to endure . Through memory the " I ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
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