Real Language Of Men Research Articles

Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience ed. by Alexander Regier, Stefan H. Uhlig

284 BOOK REVIEWS difficult this history is but also how much the Romantics were obsessed with it. But this book is not a history of money and Romanticism nor, I think, was it intended to be. Writing such a history would have under­ mined Rowlinson’s and the Romantics’ nuanced understanding of capital­ ism and literature’s “curious” relation to it. Alexander Dick University of British Columbia Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds. Wordsworth's Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. l’p. vii + 220. $75.00. “What has a poet to do with a theory?” William Whewell asked. In their introduction to Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory, Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig respond that “Wordsworth makes his contribution to our modern ways of thinking about poetry both inside his poetic writing and alongside it,” and moreover that his theory “forms a decisive part of his work’s claim on us” (1). Regier and Uhlig’s collection of eleven essays by emerging and well-established scholars explores key areas of Wordsworth’s “poetic the­ ory,” from the poems and prose of Lyrical Ballads to The Excursion and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” At the heart of this book’s wide-ranging analysis of Wordsworth’s aes­ thetic theory is neither the privileging of “low and rustic life” announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads nor the Preface’s controversial claim that the volumes’ poems approximate the “real language ofmen.” It is the Pref­ ace’s most famous, twice-stated, claim: that “all good poetry” is produced by “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” As several essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory help us to see, this claim’s elaboration reveals the inherent difference and complexity that predominate in the creative pro­ cess. Any “good” poem may originate in a superflux of sensation, but po­ etry can at best only point toward that origin by way of mediating kindred feelings and the superadded “pleasures” of material language, form, and meter. As Regier and Uhlig’s book title aptly suggests, the focus of the essays is thus not only upon Wordsworth’s theory of poetry but also upon the “po­ etic” character of that theory and its articulation. In the Advertisement and Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as in the subtler workings of the Essays upon Epi­ taphs and 1850 Prelude, the poet’s theory is poetic in part both because it is predicated upon a complex process and because it posits a poetics of an in­ determinate character, yet situated within the theorized bounds ofa system. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 285 The Preface imparts not just a “systematic defense of the theory” upon which the poems ofLyrical Ballads were composed, as Wordsworth states; it also presents a systematic theory ofpoetic complexity and poetical limits set against a world of experience and material things. Several of the essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory in fact draw upon what Bill Brown and other theorists herald as “thing theory,” concerning the connections between culture, including poetry, and material thinglincss, where a “thing” is that which precedes the categorized object apprehended through perception and representation. Indeed the great virtue of Regier and Uhlig’s collec­ tion is the way it helps us to see familiar aspects ofWordsworth’s theory in new and uncanny ways. The book also serves as a useful companion of sorts to Lyrical Ballads, as ten of the eleven essays consider works from one or both of the volumes. The subtitle of Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory signals three sites of interre­ lated tensions in Wordsworth—knowledge, language, and experience—and in the leadoff essay, “Wordsworth’s Poetic Ignorance,” Andrew Bennett pro­ vocatively addresses the first of these. Following upon his book Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology, he contends that the poet’s works often involve “the possibility of making the reader not know his or her own world” (21). For Bennett, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ultimately privileges a condition of “not knowing, of ignorance” (21), and the 1798 volume’s “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy” are likewise at bottom agnoiological narratives “consti­ tuted by and constructed around ignorance and around ignorance...

'Burns and Byron in Scottish, British and European Romanticism' The Byron Centre, University of Manchester 4–5 December 2010

In light of the fact that most of Western Europe had been brought to a standstill in the week immediately prior to the conference, it is a miracle that so many participants actually managed to get to Manchester at all. Interestingly, those who failed the snow challenge were all from other parts of the UK - a triumph for UK public transport and public services! The conference organisers, Gerry Carruthers (Glasgow) and Alan Rawes (Manchester), seemed quite unfazed by the impact of the weather, although we suspect that they were secretly more than a little worried about whether anyone would still be able to make it. This took nothing away from the enthusiasm of the participants and rather promoted a sense of victory over the snow. Located in the historic Samuel Alexander Building, the conference was a collaboration between The Byron Centre at the University of Manchester and the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. It opened on Saturday morning with the first plenary, given by Professor Murray Pittock (Glasgow) and entitled 'The Real Language of Men: fa's speerin?', which offered a lucid close reading of, among other texts, Burns's 'To a Mouse' and 'To a Louse', focusing on their use of idiolects and dialects from a historical and political perspective, and on the particular power of the poems' language. After a coffee break, the first set of parallel sessions commenced. In 'Burns, Byron and Scotland', chaired by Gerry Carruthers, Colin Clark (Charles, Prague) presented his paper, 'Hell's Hot Jurisdiction: Byron, Burns and the Poetics of Transgression and Transcendence'. This unravelled the complexities of the Calvinist literary legacy in various well-known works by Burns and Byron. Inspired by the portraits of Burns and Scott (both freemasons) and Byron and Shakespeare (neither normally linked with freemasonry) hanging in the lodge room of Lodge Canongate Kilwinning, Andrew Prescott (Glasgow) then explored some interesting connections between Burns and Byron and freemasonry in his wide-ranging paper, 'Annexing Reputation: the Masonic Reputations of Byron and Burns'. The other parallel session, 'Burns and Byron in British Romanticism', chaired by Alan Rawes, was marked by the first arctic-weather absence, that of Will Bowers (Oxford), whose paper would have been on 'Byron, Hunt and the Genesis of the Italian Fashion'. Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College) was present, and spoke on 'Byron and the Mistress Poem', discussing the question of whether Teresa Guiccioli was or was not a source of inspiration for Byron's poetry, looking closely at works such as 'Stanzas to the Po', 'Stornelli' and 'The Prophecy of Dante'. The session then closed with Adam White (Manchester), whose paper, 'Burns, Byron and John Clare', argued that Clare drew on the lyric poetry of Burns and Byron to construct a haunting, complex and mysterious female figure through which to imaginatively explore farflung, exotic places. The second plenary speaker of the day, Brean Hammond (Nottingham), scheduled for after lunch, was defeated by the Nottinghamshire snow, but his paper was not. It was very competently delivered by Alan Rawes. Entitled 'The Ethical Turn in Literary Criticism: Burns and Byron', Hammond's paper examined the issue of ethical reading in relation to the problematic cases of Burns and Byron - two poets who have often been seen as unethical in both their lives and work. To explore notions of the performativity of the self and its aversiveness, and how these fit with the idea of poetic truth in both Burns and Byron, Hammond gave an insightful analysis of 'Ae Fond Kiss' and 'So We'll Go No More A-Roving', to the musical accompaniment of Leonard Cohen's husky rendering of the latter. The afternoon tea and coffee break was followed by two more parallel sessions: one dealing with 'Burns, Byron and Romantic Celebrity' and the other with 'Burns, Byron and other European Writers'. In the Romantic celebrity session, chaired by Murray Pittock, Hannah Doherty (Stanford) opened with a paper on 'Byronic Advertising: Selling Romanticism in the Early Nineteenth Century', which explored the many ways in which Byron's name was put to use for publicity purposes during the latter part of his life, highlighting especially the political associations evoked by its eclectic use. …

Keats, Wordsworth, Burns and the Real Language of Men

Keats, Wordsworth, Burns and the Real Language of Men

Allegory and Psychoanalysis

Previous articleNext article No AccessSymposium on the Works of Claudia TateAllegory and PsychoanalysisBarbara E. JohnsonBarbara E. Johnson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 88, Number 1Winter 2003 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3559049 Views: 23Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry

Wordsworth's account in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads of the groundbreaking nature of his rustic poetics has long served as foundational to our understanding of Romanticism. Yet his representation of "the public taste in this country" in 1800 elided the presence of a decades-long tradition of "peasant" and "working-class" poetry in Britain. Figures like Stephen Duck ("The Thresher Poet"), Robert Burns, and Ann Yearsley ("The Bristol Milkwoman") had been the focus of fashionable critical interest because they were seen as embodying the very values of simplicity and rustic authenticity that Wordsworth claimed were absent from the contemporary scene. Though a review of this context exposes Wordsworth to charges of solipsism and historical repression, it also helps us to imagine how the pervasiveness of peasant verse complicated his efforts to establish himself as a legitimate conduit for rusticism and "the real language of men." While Wordsworth did not have to create a taste for rural subjects and pseudo-humble diction, he faced the more difficult task of creating a vital rustic verse that was distinct from peasant poetry. In staging confrontations between educated narrators and uneducated subjects, several poems of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, including "The Thorn" and "Simon Lee," dramatize Wordsworth's historical dilemma as a gentlemanly chronicler of "low and rustic life." Through these experiments in narratorial perspective, class identification, and social sympathy, Wordsworth establishes both the contemporaneity and the innovation of his poetic project.

The idea of 'the real language of men' in the 1800 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac

The idea of 'the real language of men' in the 1800 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac

Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's 'Songs' and Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads'

Acknowledgements Note on the texts Introduction 1. Poetic 'simplicity': Blake's Songs and eighteenth-century children's verse 2. Poetic 'simplicity': Lyrical Ballads and magazine verse 3. The real language of men 4. Vision and morality: Songs of Innocence 5. The morality of experience: Songs of Experience 6. Morality through experience: Lyrical Ballads 1798 7. Desire and disillusion: the Goslar Lyrics 8. Names and signs: the poems of Grasmere Conclusion Notes Index.

Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Although Coleridge’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface has shaped subsequent understanding of Wordsworth’s meaning, Coleridge was out not to clarify but to refute Wordsworth. His discussion of the Preface repeatedly shifts the positions to which it objects and misleadingly distinguishes between what the Preface can legitimately be taken to mean and what it probably does mean. It distorts Wordsworth’s account of his choice of subjects and his comments on poetic language. Although intelligible meanings can be discovered for Wordsworth’s remarks about “the real language of men” and the lack of “essential difference” between the languages of verse and prose, Coleridge’s exegesis reduces them to absurdity. The position he offers in opposition to the one he draws from the Preface closely resembles the one Wordsworth actually put forward there. The real agreements and disagreements between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s views are more interesting than those to which Coleridge’s interpretation has called attention.