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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... seems to achieve in his visionary experi- ences . There are times when the poet seems to regard it as the durationless " moment " in which the eternal mind dwells and which the mystic seems to share with God in his moments of exaltation ...
... seem unnatural . The moon is reflected in a lake of " sullen water " ( 1. 704 ) and is unlike the moon we have seen in ... seems malignantly careful to perplex , and the Words- worthian heaven of Lake Como now has echoes of the Miltonic ...
... seems to derive . The first author describes his reaction only in general terms ; he has clearly not tried to impose ... seems to have experienced a similar delusion — the movement of the cloud masses is so large - scale that it seems ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Ordered and Disordered Time | 29 |
The Nature and Status of the Mind | 51 |
Copyright | |
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