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A series of such dead (and textually buried) selves help us to understand silenced rhetorical voices that eventually modulate into the speaking ‘Wordsworth’. Geoffrey Hartman s claim, in Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987 ), that the poet looking at this child’s grave is Wordsworth ‘mourning the loss of a prior mode of being by replacing the boy with himself’ is, in one sense, the starting point for my argument: ‘The poet who stands at the child’s grave knows that consciousness is always of death, a confrontation of the self with a buried self’, pp. It is a warning of the difficulties of generalizing about Wordsworth’s mood that lines of such perfect composure should be so close to an incident of “stealth and troubled joy”, p. 28–31, who also notes that ‘to judge from MS JJ, the original first-person drafts of “There was a boy” followed the boat-stealing by a matter of hours, or days at most. 187Īnd Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. Cooper, Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Chapter 2 Īndrew M. Robert Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. Stephen Lukits, ‘Wordsworth Unawares: The Boy of Winander, the Poet, and the Mariner’, TWC 19 (1988): 156–60 109–11 įrances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp.
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Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: a Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. Other important discussions of ‘There was a boy’ include: James K. 211, calls the boy a ‘revenant’ or ‘surrogate’ speaking for the ‘power of imaginary representation, but also for the duplicity of its substitutions’.Īlan Bewell links the boy with an anthropological critique, a ‘hypothetical history of the process by which the child is ushered into language’, in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. Tilottama Rajan, in Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) p. Paul Magnuson sees the passage connected to Wordsworth’s anxieties about completing a major poetic project: Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. Few Wordsworthian passages have received more comment in recent years than ‘There was a boy’. The Cornell edition is an indispensable volume for an understanding of the textual origins of the Wordsworthian autobiographer. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) for variants of early manuscript materials and photographic reproductions of the texts. See also Gill’s ‘“Affinities Preserved”: Poetic Self-Reference in Wordsworth’, SIR 24 (1985): 531–49, which emphasizes Wordsworth’s ‘refusal to acknowledge a frontier between poetic fiction and verifiable, experienced fact’, p. Gill notes that ‘poetic evidence’ is often the only evidence we have for the ‘facts’ of Wordsworth’s experience, adding that Wordsworth ‘did not scruple elsewhere to tamper with the “facts” if they spoiled an imaginative conception’, p. Gill’s introduction warns of the dangers of a text like The Prelude which presents a version of the self to an implied audience while at the same time creating a textual self for the poet to live up to in his own subsequent life.
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Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The Wordsworth(s) thus created, from the descriptive narrator of the 1790s to the autobiographer of 1805, are best understood as complex dramatized projections developed through a series of incomplete narratives, rather than as an authentic reflection of the historical William Wordsworth who grew to adulthood in the English Lake District between 17. The constant writing and rewriting of poems with many titles over many decades was a textual act designed, at least in part, to create a version of the word ‘Wordsworth’ that would satisfy the poet’s expectations and the expectations of his imagined, as well as real, readers. Amid the continuing conversation about Wordsworth’s revisionary practices, we sometimes forget that Wordsworth’s greatest revision was performed in a text but on himself.