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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... mystical awareness which was so important to Wordsworth , whereas " a philosophy of imagination is not so limited .... Imagination aids mystical intuition by achiev- ing a concentration of mental power in one act of attention ...
... mystical experience I quoted earlier , makes the point that one of the reasons we hold cer- tain states of mind and certain kinds of experience to be valu- able is that they have " good consequential fruits for life . ” Wordsworth seems ...
... mysticism seems to have done no harm and can be shown to have pro- duced great poetry . Let me now try to be a little less vague about Words- worth's " eternal present . " ( Although James uses the phrase to describe all mystical ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown