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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... past , and while we are seeing it in this way Wordsworth draws our eyes to suggestions of a more recent past which at first may seem an irrelevant intrusion . But there is poignancy in thus complicating the reader's time consciousness ...
... past events ; in this respect there is no poem quite like Childe Harold . But if we think of Byron as typically the poet with a sense of history , we may well miss the value of Wordsworth's less spectacular historical consciousness . It ...
... past than the past represented by the moment of experience . The reader's mind therefore not only works back and forth between the time of writing and the time of the incident , but between both of these and the past which was perceived ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
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