Wordsworth and the poetry of what we are

Abstract

In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or-more recently-political repression, Fry redirects poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading. Fry argues that underlying rhetoric of transcendence or love of nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: poet is most astonished not that world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes our widest commonality in simple fact that we are in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in presence of being is what makes him original, Fry shows, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called the hiding place of his power.