Edition Of Lyrical Ballads Research Articles

Mary Robinson and the Costs of Animal Labor

ABSTRACT Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800) has long been understood as a retort to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and has long been admired for its multi-genre presentations of radical social, political, and sexual politics. This essay is on the collection’s understudied poem “The Shepherd’s Dog” and its focus upon the radical relationship between human and animal, colleague and companion, soldier and soldier of the working class. By privileging the working animal’s sentience, his complicated service to humans, and his similarity to revolutionaries, Robinson’s poem functions as a uniquely non-anthropocentric and postsecular precursor to “Michael,” Wordsworth’s famous pastoral poem from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This examination of “The Shepherd’s Dog” emphasizes Robinson’s authority among first-generation Romantics and among those she inspired after them, especially the nineteenth-century women writers who continued to assert the value of both the female and non-human gaze.

Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection’ by Heidi Thomson

 Reviews covering a vast range of issues relating to textual variants, subtextual meanings, cultural legacies, and historical contexts. Pittock describes the Museum as a ‘monument to the musical and generic fusion culture of eighteenth-century Scotland’ (, ); this edition might equally be described as a monumental contribution to the study of Burns and Scottish music, whose influence will be felt for decades to come. U  L A B Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: e ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection ’. by H T. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . xii+.£.. ISBN ––––. In the first few pages of Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper, Heidi omson poses the question ‘why, you may well ask, another book inspired by “Dejection”?’ (p. ), which one might supplement by asking whether we need another book about Coleridge and Wordsworth and, more specifically, the protracted collapse of their friendship, founded largely in mutual disillusionment and played out with the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; her answer is simple: ‘because I wanted to find out more about Coleridge’s compulsive expression of what could be considered private matters’ (p. ). Accordingly, this book focuses on just a few years of Coleridge’s life—–—during his ‘intense involvement with the Morning Post’ as a way of ‘unlocking his personal and poetic interests’ in a study that is primarily biographical, but also ‘textual and contextual’ (p. ). e results are surprising and persuasive, and throughout her book, omson provides sustained and illuminated readings of largely neglected pieces, excavates Coleridge’s complex and ever shiing state of mind (in part produced by his infatuation or limerent devotion to Sara Hutchinson and his compromised feelings towards his wife, whom he admired as a mother but struggled to adore as a lover), and also exposes and explores his friendship with Mary Robinson. Biography and creativity are seen to be interwoven to the point of co-dependency—which is, perhaps, on the face of it, an obvious point to make; but the book unpicks and unpacks the intricacies of their self-involvement in a consistently compelling way. omson examines Coleridge’s ‘reluctant, painful realization’ that ‘neither Wordsworth nor Sara Hutchinson were as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with them’ and his ‘need to publicize it’ (p. ). She further reveals that ‘his ideas about poets and poetry were to a surprising degree associated with his frustrated expectations of domestic happiness’ (p. ). In assessing how he publicized these frustrations, she presents a Coleridge who always needed to have the last word. e second chapter (aer the Introduction) sets the scene for what follows, examines Coleridge’s return from Germany in July , discusses how ‘the two most important relationships’ in his life—his marriage to Sara Fricker and his friendship with Wordsworth—‘came to a watershed’ (pp. , ), and considers his love of the North (geography being an important theme in the book: Coleridge was always MLR, .,   concerned with his proximity to those who were in—or moving out of—his life). e third discusses Coleridge’s work at the Morning Post and devotes considerable space to a prolonged assessment of the largely neglected poem ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ (later retitled ‘Love’), considering it in relation to ‘e Eolian Harp’, ‘To William Wordsworth’, and ‘Lewti’. e fourth considers Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Georgiana’ (the Duchess of Devonshire) and his fascinating essay on Pitt, which reveals much of Coleridge’s talent for astute insight. Aer this Coleridge leaves London and heads north to Greta Hall. omson traces the origin of the depression that would be immortalized in ‘Dejection’ from this period, combining newspaper pieces with letters and notebook entries to build up a full picture of his mental and emotional state. e next two chapters focus on Coleridge’s surprisingly close relationship to Mary Robinson and how it complicated the Coleridge/Wordsworth paradigm. e penultimate chapter contextualizes ‘Dejection’ in relation to ‘lesser known poems and texts which were published at about the same time in the Morning Post’ (p. ). e conclusion concentrates on the differences between the April and October versions of ‘Dejection’, and claims that ‘the poem that Coleridge published in the Morning Post is just as much both...

Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

<i>Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry</i>. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

The Epitaphic Poetry of Crabbe and Wordsworth

Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, building upon the work of Earl Austin Moore, argues that, historically, ‘the rate of specifically literary epitaph-writing is remarkably uneven’. He continues: ‘in England, two definite peaks are observable. One occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century, the other in the second half of the eighteenth century’. His subsequent claim that ‘the interest in epitaphs did not by any means die out immediately thereafter’ (Bernhardt-Kabisch, 113–14) is well-supported by a fairly lengthy census of pre-Romantic and Romantic-period literary epitaphs. Prominent among this survey is William Wordsworth, whose three ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ (the first of which was published in Coleridge’s The Friend for 22 February 1810; the second and third remained unpublished in full until 1876) constitute not only one of the most penetrating treatments of the subject in the early nineteenth century, but also, as W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser observe, ‘a notable contribution to Romantic poetics’. George Crabbe is mentioned only in passing in Bernhardt-Kabisch’s study of Romantic epitaphic writing, and this specific example reflects something of a general trend: typically, Crabbe has been a curiously marginal figure in Romantic critical discourse, and Arthur Pollard’s view of Crabbe as a figure who ‘stands between two distinct eras, the Augustan and the Romantic, belonging in part to both, yet owing total allegiance to neither’ has become something of a commonplace, despite the fact that most of Crabbe’s mature work was published after the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. In treating Crabbe as Wordsworth’s chronological contemporary, this essay examines, admittedly selectively for reasons of economy, the notably incongruent treatment of the epitaphic in each poet’s oeuvre. Both Crabbe and Wordsworth produced several examples of what Joshua Scodel defines as the ‘poetic epitaph’: ‘a poem inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon a tomb’. As Bernhardt-Kabisch’s list attests (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 129–31), anthologies of such poems proliferated from the early seventeenth century onwards, the chapter on ‘Epitaphes’ in William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605) and John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631, reprinted 1767) both proving particularly influential. Periodicals too, particularly the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, carried an increasing number of poetic epitaphs over the second half of the eighteenth century (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 131–2), a fashion which continued (having survived a post-1786 lull) into the early nineteenth century:

Johnny Foy: Wordsworth's Imaginative Hero

In the advertisement to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth requests that we “consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.”1 And yet many readers decline—even stubbornly refuse—to be pleased by several of the poems. In particular, “The Idiot Boy” has frustrated, confused, or offended readers since its first appearance in print. John Wilson, a devoted fan, wrote to the poet in 1802, “[A]mong all the people ever I knew to have read this poem, I never met one who did not rise rather displeased from the perusal of it.”2 Byron satirized the poem, implicitly comparing Wordsworth to his intellectually disabled hero: “[A]ll who view the ‘idiot in his glory’, / Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.”3 Contemporary scholars like Geoffrey Hartman continue to echo Byron’s comparison: “[T]he poet’s obvious pleasure while narrating . . . draws too much attention to Wordsworth’s own ‘burring.’”4 Indeed, Wordsworth’s pleasure shows in every bouncy line; in 1843 he famously recalled that, “[I]n truth, I never wrote anything with so much glee.”5 But to attribute Johnny’s disability to Wordsworth, however glibly, oversimplifies the poet’s complex appropriation of intellectual disability as an image of the poetic imagination and forecloses the possibility of enjoying the poem beyond dismissive laughter at the poet’s expense. For readers willing to distinguish Wordsworth from Johnny and from the narrator, “The Idiot Boy” offers a double pleasure, both satirical and sublime. As Brooke Hopkins points out, the poem’s pleasure comes from Wordsworth’s fulfillment of his objective in Lyrical Ballads to “purify the hearts of [his] readers by awakening them to the wonder that was, literally, right in front of their eyes” (Hopkins’s italics).6 As Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes, Wordsworth seeks to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom.”7 “The Idiot Boy” accomplishes this by surprising us with sublimity where we expect only silliness and imagination where we expect only idiocy. Whereas Byron and Hartman compare Wordsworth and Johnny to the former’s detriment, contemporary scholars have been increasingly

HONORABLE TOIL? COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH IN RETIREMENT

7 7 R H O N O R A B L E T O I L ? C O L E R I D G E A N D W O R D S W O R T H I N R E T I R E M E N T P A U L H . F R Y Part 1 of Wordsworth’s two-part Prelude of 1799 has almost reached its conclusion when – as in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ – the poet abruptly and unexpectedly addresses his ‘‘friend,’’ in this case Coleridge. He implies that he has not been getting any work done lately and expresses the hope that reproaches from his own former years (‘‘Was it for this?’’ is the abrupt note on which the poem had begun) will spur him on to ‘‘honourable toil.’’ In 1798 or 1799, this is actually a little surprising. The past two years had not been at all a fallow period for Wordsworth. At a time when he was freezing through a winter of record cold in the pastoral though provincial backwater of Goslar, Germany, but writing steadily and well, it is di≈cult to say why Wordsworth felt that he had anything in particular to reproach himself with, unless it be, indeed, that at twenty-nine he still did not have a job. In the eighteenth century there were relatively few professions for the educated classes: what counted as intellectual labor were the professions of medicine and law; scholarship, natural science, and dilletantism for those with inherited wealth; Grub Street journalism for the less fortunate like Dr. Johnson; and before all else the modest but genteel life of a clergyman. The arts other 7 8 F R Y Y than poetry occupied the border between the artisanal and the gentlemanly, depending on how and in what mode they were practiced. A history painter in oils was a gentleman, for example, but a topographer in watercolor was an atelier craftsman who made painting a shared and inherited family trade. Poetry may have been a divine gift, still worth patronizing through the sorts of small annuities and legacies from which both Wordsworth and Coleridge were to benefit, but unlike engraving, for example, poetry was not a job. More than a decade earlier Wordsworth had gone up to Cambridge , satisfying his uncle and his older brothers that he was intent on preparing for holy orders. But alas, he had since left school to climb the Alps, to fall into the dubious company of the London Dissenting Societies and other radicals, clerical or otherwise , to bond eventually with his sister to a degree that may well have made everyone uncomfortable, and by 1796 to have formed close ties with the Unitarian radical Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the convicted seditionist John Thelwall. Yes, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads had appeared in 1798, but in the eyes of those he had disappointed that scarcely betokened a job. And besides, hadn’t all those poems, with their idiot boys, garrulous old sea captains, and mad peasant women, become a magnet for public mockery and derision? Worse yet, the volume was selling poorly. Against this backdrop, then, as scholars like Thomas Pfau, Cli√ord Siskin, and Mark Schoenfield have argued, cogently but in my opinion too often with the smugness of sociopolitical hindsight, Wordsworth was a pioneer in the e√ort to make poetic labor a profession: not just toil but honorable toil calling forth respect; and the very impulse to undertake The Prelude, the long poem on ‘‘the growth of the poet’s mind,’’ is part of that e√ort. When he reconstructed the materials of the 1799 part 1 for book 1 of the 1805 ‘‘Poem to Coleridge,’’ as The Prelude was most often called in the Wordsworth circle, Wordsworth could more plausibly reproach himself for the relatively fallow period that did in fact ensue in the year or two following his 1800 arrival in Grasmere, his permanent home from then on; and that is what he does here, regretting that after a misleadingly ‘‘glad preamble,’’ as he calls it (‘‘There is a blessing in this gentle breeze’’ and all the spontaneous utterance that the breeze inspires...

To Be a Thing: Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal" and the Paradox of Corporealization

Aside from a few Shakespearean soliloquies, the eight lines of Wordsworth's did have probably garnered more critical attention in proportion to their number than any other passage of verse in the history of English literature. They've probably incited more disagreement among informed readers as well. Brian G. Caraher has devoted an entire book to the poem's critical history and Mark Jones to the small group of verses from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the so-called poems, to which it putatively belongs. For more than half a century., Slumber has served as an interpretive touchstone for Wordsworthians in pursuit of the poet's deepest reflections on life and death, grief and sublimity, eros and thanatos, and matter, pantheism and privation. (1) purpose here is to consider what slumber may have to tell us about being or, to use the language of the poem, seem[ing] to be a a possibility the poet introduces in line three: A did seal, I had no human fears, a thing could not feel The touch of earthly years. No has she now, no force; neither hears nor sees; Roll'd round in earth's course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.(2) Traditionally, readers have identified the unnamed of line three, who a thing, as Lucy, the doomed or threatened heroine of poems like Three years she grew, She dwelt among the untrodden ways, and Strange fits of passion, with which slumber is often grouped. But as Hugh Sykes Davies first pointed out in 1965, this identification is largely a result of the editing and anthologizing decisions of Wordsworth's Victorian admirers (148-152). Within the context of the poem as a purely autonomous work, can only refer to my spirit, the direct object of seal in the first line.(3) Based on this grammatical antecedent, Davies interprets slumber as expressing a distinctive, trancelike state of found elsewhere in Wordsworth's poetry (155) and typically associated with moments when the world appears, solipsistically, as an image or a dream sealed in the or of the poet, making his observing and what it observes a single, transcendental unity. (4) The word diurnal particularly reminds Davies of a passage in the `1805 Prelude composed at about the same time as slumber, while the poet was residing with his sister. Dorothy, in Goslar, Germany, during the winter of 1799. Here Wordsworth describes ice skating as a boy on Lake Windermere, spinning rapidly in a game of crack the whip and stopping short: yet still the solitary cliffs/Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled/With visible her round! (I, 458-60).(5) The connection is clear, writes Davies, but instead of stopping suddenly and watching the earth visibly roll past him, he imagines himself joined with it, and in a trance-like state identified with its motion (155).(6) My spirit is likewise sealed in the solipsistic waking dream overtakes the poet in Tintern Abbey, when the beauteous forms of the Wye Valley, a retrospective picture of the mind (62), induce in him during the years following his first visit that blessed mood,/In which [...] we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul can see into the life of things (42-49; emphasis added). The pantheistic implications of Davies's were first recognized about a decade previously by F. W. Bateson, who subscribed to the traditional understanding of as Lucy. Focusing on the exhilarating, sublimely cosmic perspective opened up in the second stanza, Bateson argued Lucy is actually more alive now she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature and not just a human 'thing' (59). In his exhaustive study of problematics of reading the poem, however, Brian G. Caraher rejects Davies's interpretation for its inability to account for the shift in tense between the first and second stanzas, a shift advocates like Bateson and Cleanth Brooks read into the syncope and silence of the white space between the two quatrains as a sudden shock of realization: she who seemed immortal to the poet, eternally young, is now dead, and the reality of her death has awakened him from his lover's pleasant, self-delusive slumber. …

The Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 "Lyrical Ballads" and the Mass Media

I heartily recommend a dose of British Romantic poets to defuse constant barrage of current news reports. --Letter to Editor, New York Times, 31 March 2003 THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OVERLAP BETWEEN EARLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE and newspaper journalism might seem unlikely to scholars, since many of central tenets of a key Romantic document, William Wordsworth's Preface to 1800 Lyrical Ballads, appear to be fundamentally opposed to transitory, episodic, and heterogeneous qualities of any periodical publication, especially a daily newspaper. Romantic literature, as author of letter quoted above suggests, is generally seen as opposite of news, an antidote to dominance of newspapers and proclivities of their readers. This view has been rigorously challenged, most prominently by Marjorie Levinson, who has drawn attention to topicality and contemporary significance of Wordsworth's verse, implicitly situating poems within world of current affairs. (1) But a specific, personal and sometimes overlooked contest for readers and for authority emerges from relationship between newspapers, journalism and literature in year that Wordsworth wrote Preface. Eighteen hundred was a year in which battle between newspapers and books for readers was felt particularly keenly. Mary Robinson, writing in Monthly Magazine in late 1800, provides a valuable insight into this battle: There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at present period; and to perpetual novelty which issues from press may in a great measure, be attributed expansion of mind, which daily evinces itself among all classes of people.... The daily prints fall into hands of all classes: they display temper of times; intricacies of political manoeuvre; opinions of learned, enlightened, and patriotic. But for medium of a diurnal paper, letters of JUNIUS had been unknown, or perhaps never written. Political controversy and literary discussions are only rendered of utility to mankind by spirit of contention. The press is mirror where folly may see its own likeness, and vice contemplate magnitude of its deformity. It also presents a tablet of manners; a transcript of temper of mankind; a check on gigantic strides of innovation; and a bulwark which REASON has raised, and, it is to be hoped, TIME will consecrate, round altar of immortal LIBERTY! (2) Robinson's notion of emulative contention within and between press and literature is a canny summary of state of affairs in 1800. Literature and journalism, as Lennard Davis has convincingly argued, spent eighteenth century disengaging themselves from their tangled relationship while struggling to secure same pool of readers. In Factual Fictions, Davis outlines a tentative theory of relationship between news and fiction, arguing that, prior to eighteenth century, the news/novels discourse is a kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels--that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones. (3) Davis' intriguing speculation implicitly raises a critical challenge for poets around 1800: if, by end of eighteenth century, readers turned to newspapers for facts and to novels for pleasure, what role could poetry play in literary marketplace, and how could poets engage with a public accustomed to reading in this way? This challenge evidently underpins Wordsworth's characterization of contemporary readers in 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Unlike 1798 Advertisement's warnings about feelings of strangeness and aukwardness that readers would have to confront when approaching first edition of Lyrical Ballads--warnings that juxtaposed Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems with contemporary expectations about poetry--the 1800 Preface identified challenge to new edition as emanating from journalism and literary genres and tastes that it spawned and fostered. …

New models for electronic publishing

Any project in the electronic medium that lays claim to scholarly authority will require adaptations in both the presentation and the dissemination of its materials. Work in progress on an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads illustrates how these changes may be realized, and brings home the lesson that the evolution of electronic publishing will necessitate innovations that are not just technological but also institutional. A new method of marshalling scholarly apparatus called 'dynamic collation' has been employed in this project, which reconceptualizes how variant readings can be presented in the digital medium. The real challenge for online publication, however, is what might be called the lack of mature institutional structures on the Internet. So long as anyone can publish anything on WWW, the quality of its materials remains questionable; furthermore, in the absence of independent web-based publishing houses, personal postings are all too often ephemeral. The imprimatur of an established publisher (in this case, the Cambridge University Press) would be a guarantee of the reliability and durability of these immaterial texts, but entails the development of new publication partnerships. It seems the future of electronic publishing depends upon asking questions about more than technical standards. Online scholarly archives must also meet standards of peer evaluation, editorial practice, and institutional backing that have traditionally ensured the quality of print publications.

Arthur’s Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede

A R T H U R 'S M ISU SE OF THE IM A G IN A T IO N : SE N T IM E N T A L B E N EV O LEN C E AN D W O R D SW O R TH IA N R E A L ISM IN ADAM BEDE MASON HARRIS Simon Fraser University ^ 3 ecause Adam Bede is "a country story - full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay,"1 it seems to invite oversimplified interpretations. Critics assume that George Eliot's first novel lacks the complexity of her later work, or at least that any complexity it possesses must be in conflict with its pastoral elements. Part of the problem in getting a clear perspective on this novel arises from a tendency to concentrate critical attention on the rather idealized Adam and Dinah as representatives of the author's values, while passing over Arthur, who does not belong to the pastoral community and whose affair with a tenantfarmer 's niece almost destroys it, as a rather ordinary seducer treated with conventional Victorian moralism. In a recent book on George Eliot, Neil Roberts expresses a widely-held view of the novel when he says that it presents a "static moral drama" enacted in an "absence of social and historical analysis" because Arthur's sin is only "a matter of private morality" unrelated to his grandfather's acquisitiveness as landlord.2 I shall argue that this seduction is very much a matter of class, and that Eliot's sense of historical process, if somewhat muted by nostalgia, is still active in the novel. A close study of the psychology behind Arthur's crime will show the vital thematic use Eliot makes of his aristocratic status and his participation in the literary taste of the later eighteenth century (Arthur turns twenty-one in 1799). As the well-intentioned heir to his grandfather's estate, Arthur reveals much about the influence of unconscious snobbery in rationalizing the exploita­ tion of social inferiors, while as a reader of fashionable fiction who scorns the first edition of Lyrical Ballads he provides a contrast to the narrator's Wordsworthian realism, revealing what the imagination should not be both in art and life. This contrast also suggests a turning point in the history of taste and sensibility. The moral vision of Adam, Dinah, and their author has something in common with the Romantic concept of the imagination (in Dinah's case mixed with the best aspects of the religious revival), while Arthur, thoroughly imbued with the aristocratic taste and social attitudes of his period, reflects the limitations of the old order and thus helps to show how the novel's narrative English S tudies in Can ad a, iv , 1, Spring 1978 42 vision looks forward to the needs of Eliot's own time as well as celebrating the virtues of the past. The timing of the action, with a leisurely account of the rustic community through the summer of 1799, while crime, suffering, and new insight come in the winter and spring of 1800, suggests a sense of transition between past and present. Hetty, the "lost lamb," is rejected by the rustic community but rescued by Dinah, whose Methodism has been nurtured in a bleak industrial town and who recognizes no distinctions of rank.3Again, the new insight which enables Adam to bear the pain of Hetty's fall foreshadows Eliot's mid-Victorian religion of humanity.4 On the other hand, Arthur's ideal vision of his future reign as Squire is based on the world-view of a ruling class soon to become obsolete. In her depiction of the semi-feudal community of Hayslope, Eliot makes much of the dignity of labour as manifested in the Poysers' farm and Adam's workshop, while old Squire Donnithorne, whose income derives from posses­ sion of fields which others till, represents the least admirable aspect of this society; as Mrs Poyser angrily remarks to the Squire, "I know there's them as is born t'own the land, and them as is born to sweat on't" (353). The limitations of the aristocratic world-view...

The Worst of Wordsworth

On the whole poets are known by the best versions of their works: Wordsworth is almost exclusively known by his worst, remarked Jonathan Wordsworth as he presented in Music of Humanity (1969) the earliest and die best versions of Wordsworth's great poem, Ruined Collage. history of lifts poem illustrates die problems of reading, and of editing, Composed when the poet was in his twenties and just reaching die height of his powers, Ruined Collage was left in manuscript, rewritten several limes and patched into another poem called Pedlar, then after some twelve mote years published, with blither alterations, as part of the first book of Excursion, which was put together alter the poet's powers had begun to decline. But even the original Excursion was then layered over with continuing revisions, and the text of die world knows is the one dial appeared in the final collection of Poetical Works in seven volumes which began to issue from the press in Wordsworth's eightieth year. If die ageing Wordsworth Tailed to serve himself well, he has been little better served by his editors. poet's final text is the one which Ernest de Selincourt chose to present in his great standard edition of the Poetical Works in five volumes. Recognizing die problems of this text, de Selincourt accompanied with an apparalus criticus which purported to show all variant readings. This strategy, lie explained, was made necessary Wordsworth's persistent, obsessive. habit of revision: it is probable dial no poet ever paid more meticulous or prolonged attention to his text. A lifelong habit of revision would have meant little to the text of Keats; Wordsworth, no more meticulous, perhaps, had the uncertain advantage of living three times as long. While he was still Reats's age he was showing an uncommon anxiety about his work. Dependent on the critical approval of friends and subject to physical distress whenever he took up a pen (an uneasiness at my stomach and side, and a dull pain about my heart). Ire began to keep his major writings by him, unpublished. As he grew older his opinions naturally, altered, his orthodoxies hardened, his creative energy fell off and the old anxieties intensified, from the age of thirty onward, he turned compulsively, again and again, to his manuscripts to reshape, alter, and extend his poems, and when this open-ended Struggle for perfection was I mm time to lime interrupted by publication he would introduce changes in successive printings, These appear tight up through the several collected editions that he published in the last decade of his life. De Selincourt's record of printed variants, which purports to he complete, is in fact fragmentary, and no full textual history of any Wordsworth poem had been published until the first volume of a new international edition of Wordsworth appeared at the end of last year: Salisbury Plain Poems, edited by Stephen Gill, Inaugurating The Cornell Wordsworth. a series to be published in the U.S. by Cornell and in Britain by Harvester Press, this volume contains an unpretentious poem of 270 lines called Female Vagrant, which Wordsworth composed in has twenties and printed in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. For the second edition of Lyrical he rewrote three lines and made three other scattered verbal changes. Bui die following year Wordsworth discovered dial the diction of his poem was often vicious and its descriptions often false, giving proof's of a mind inattentive to the true nature of the subject on which was employed. He went on (writing to Anne Taylor) in specify some corrections which would bring die language nearer to truth. These required die cancellation of three stanzas and some rewriting of five others. In 1802, when he published the poem for a third time, he introduced these corrections, cancelled one more stanza, and rewrote twenty-eight other lines scattered through die poem. …

Preface

The AMERICAN SOCIETY for Eighteenth-Century Studies was organized in 1968, founded in 1969, and held its first meeting in Cleveland in April of 1970. This meeting was a great success and led to the creation of a number of regional conferences on the same plan. The present volume represents a selection of papers from the first year’s activities. Having been established as a group of students of the eighteenth century from different disciplines, and having initially prospered, the Society can doubtless survive without any rigorous definition of its scope or method. There may be some slight value, nonetheless, in examining both these aspects of its work and in speculating on the significance of the principal theme of the Cleveland meeting, "The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century.” A visitor from outer space, such as Voltaire’s Micromegas, might reasonably ask why we earth-dwellers number periods of time in such a capricious and arbitrary way and why we define our range of interests by an astronomical standard (orbits of the sun x 100). And if we should give him an unconvincing answer, bearing per­ haps on the perceived nature, or essential character, of an epoch, he might courteously—for in the period under discussion even Sirians practice politesse—ask why, in that case, we of the Society ignore our own limits after having gone to the trouble of specifying them. In reply to Micromegas, we might insist that the eighteenth century was not merely a period of time, the hundred years from the death of Dryden to the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, for example. Rather, it is an era with a consistent point of view, evident in all the arts and most of the philosophy (including science), though variously labelled “the Enlighten­ ment,” "Neo-Classicism,” "Baroque” and "Rococo,” "the Age of vu The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century Reason,” and a number of other names ineffectually designed to capture this real but elusive essence. That we are, after all, political and not mathematical animals is perceptible from the fact that we are inclined to date the first emergence of the point of view (or vision) associated with the eighteenth century at about the time of the Restoration of the mon­ archy in England in 1660, and its disappearance as roughly simul­ taneous with the extinction of the monarchy across the Channel in 1792, or of the monarch himself the following year. The peaceful death or accession of British monarchs had no such great effect. What comparable changes are associated with the years 1727 or 1760, interfaces between sets of royal Georges ? Even the death of Queen Anne, which marked the end of a dynasty, and of which Swift made so much, did not mark the end of any kind of era, though the Tories did not recover for a time. Neither the Glorious nor the American Revolution, whatever their implications for the future, altered in any decisive way the steady course of thought, art, and life in their times. The revolts of 1715 and 1745 perhaps merely provided later ages with an opportunity for nostalgia and cost the Scots, for a time, some of their cherished traditions. The French dix-huitieme is not quite so easily marked by political boundaries, though its awesome terminus is of course the same. Coincidentally, an era began in 1661, when the young Louis XIV was finally freed from the rapacious clutch of Cardinal Mazarin. Clearly, too, another era began in 1715, when Louis the WellBeloved inherited the power from his great-grandfather, the SunKing . Nonetheless, the entire "century” of some hundred and thirty years constitutes an integral unit for both France and England, divisible, to be sure, into sub-units like Classical, Baroque, and Rococo in one set of terms, or Restoration, Augustan, and Georgian in another. This curious unit, for convenience called the eighteenth century, is the object of interdisciplinary scrutiny in this volume. Dean Crocker, in his Presidential Address, approvingly cites an­ other dean who spoke of the dangers of excessive specialization. The new antidote to specialization is the interdisciplinary method. He does not claim, however, that the synthesis proposed by the Society is a truly new...

The chemist and the poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the preface to Lyrical Ballads

It has long been known that Sir Humphry Davy, the greatest chemist of his age, became intimate during his stay in Bristol with Coleridge the poet-philosopher, and through him met and became friendly with Wordsworth, the greatest poet of the romantic epoch, (i) Davy had come to Bristol as an assistant to Thomas Beddoes in his Pneumatic Institution, an institute for exploring the use of gases in the treatment of disease. Though without any formal training in chemistry he was, at twenty-one years old, in the flower of his genius; in 1799, the year after his move to Bristol, he carried out his first important investigation, into the properties of nitrous oxide and its effects on the blood; a little later he was to explore the possibilities of the galvanic pile (‘the pile of Volta’). At this time Wordsworth, nearly ten years older, had just published, in collaboration with Coleridge but anonymously, the first edition of Lyrical Ballads , and in Germany in the severe winter of 1798-9 he had begun serious work on the poem on his own mind which we now know as The Prelude . By 1800 both Wordsworth and Coleridge had moved to the Lakes, and in March 1801 Davy left Bristol to take up his appointment as assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Royal Institution. Before leaving Bristol, Davy had corrected the proofs of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads , receiving them in batches from Wordsworth with his directions.

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy

When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”