Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult ChildFairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1995 - 269 pages Wordsworth and Feeling returns to Wordsworth's personal history in order to locate and contextualize some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language. In this study, G. Kim Blank details how this poetry evolves out of Wordsworth's radical subjectivity, but the most pressing feature of that subjectivity is the cluster of subjects - loss, guilt, suffering, endurance, death - which appears throughout much of his poetry up until 1802-4. |
Contents
41 | |
47 | |
55 | |
65 | |
Penrith | 68 |
Wordsworths Health and the Composition of Poetry | 72 |
The Abandoned Child and the Abandoning Father | 80 |
The Poets Progress Early Struggles Early Gains | 91 |
The Letter to Coleridge December 1798 | 149 |
More Poetry from the Winter of Discontent | 167 |
Home Again in Grasmere | 174 |
Towards the 1799 Prelude | 176 |
The 1799 Prelude Book 2 | 184 |
Longing for and Belonging at Grasmere | 189 |
The Immortality Ode Back to the Future | 205 |
Wordsworth as the Lost Child | 216 |
Wandering Lonely 179395 | 93 |
From Racedown to Alfoxden 179597 | 98 |
Towards the 1798 Lyrical Ballads | 114 |
Tintern Abbey Revisited or Aching Joys and Healing Thoughts | 125 |
Down and Out in Germany Writing in SelfDefense | 140 |
Off to Germany | 143 |
Wordsworth Trauma and the Poetry of Dissociation | 218 |
Wordsworth Recovery and Writing | 220 |
Notes | 222 |
Works Cited | 248 |
Index | 263 |
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Common terms and phrases
adult child Alfoxden Alice Miller Annette attempt autobiographical become brother childhood circumstances Coleridge 1956 Coleridge's confused critical death difficult feelings Dorothy Dorothy Wordsworth Dorothy's early Edited emotional Ernest de Selincourt experience expressed father fear feeling and thought feelings of loss felt figure Germany Goslar grief guilt heart Home at Grasmere hope idea imaginative Immortality Ode important inner child John Wordsworth kind of poetry landscape language later Leavis letter lines Lucy poems Lyrical Ballads M. H. Abrams Matlak mind Moorman mother nature pain parents particular passage past Pedlar Penrith perhaps poet poet's poetic Prelude present recollection reenactment Ruined Cottage Salisbury Plain scene seems sense sister solitary solitude stanzas Stephen Gill story suggests things Thorn Tintern Abbey tion trauma troubled University Press Vaudracour wanted William Wordsworth words Wordsworth 1967 Wordsworth's poetry writes written wrote
Popular passages
Page 135 - Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create, And what perceive...
Page 46 - I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
Page 133 - For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the...
Page 214 - Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears ; To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Page 5 - How strange that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself!
Page 235 - My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.
Page 132 - What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Page 126 - No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.
Page 132 - That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures.
Page 132 - Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For Nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.