River Duddon Research Articles

“Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets

Abstract The writings of William Wordsworth evince a deeply ecological consciousness, a firm belief in the underlying connectedness of all living and non-living entities accounting for their continued existence. Such a consciousness becomes particularly evident in The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets from 1820 as the poetic account of the river’s flow from its source in the mountains to its estuary between Morecambe Bay and the North Lonsdale coast. For not only does it constitute a core element of the Lake District, which Wordsworth deemed the best example of a region of eco-friendly and hence socially unified communities; it is also depicted, as will be elaborated in this paper, as an ecosystem consisting in a complex web of symbiotic interactions between the fluvial, vegetal, animal and human.Instead of focusing on verbal representations of such more-than-human interrelations through semiotic processes that appropriate their otherness and render them intelligible in solely human terms, however, this paper argues that Wordsworth’s “speaking monument” (Wordsworth 1954: 247, iii, l. 3) rather enacts these ecosystemic interactions on a vocal, aural, and rhythmical level. It thereby foregrounds the materiality and corporeality of poetic speech that precedes as well as grounds meaning and so connects the human to the river ecosystem in a pre-reflexive and somatic way. In this context, it will be pointed out how not only the speaker and other human characters participate in the Duddon’s web of reciprocal relations through rhythmical synchronisation and sonic attunement, but also how the reader becomes an active part in them through their vocal performance of the sonnets. The river’s autopoietic structure illustrated through the metaphor of the hydrological cycle, it will thus be shown, is thereby continued through the sonnet cycle as a direct organic product and hence integral component of the ecosystem that, by repeatedly giving rise to various idiosyncratic readings, will poetically contribute to the Duddon’s continued existence.

Undercurrents of the River Duddon: Human Consciousness versus Nature

This essay examines the relationship between human consciousness and nature in William Wordsworth's "The River Duddon" sonnets. By adapting the method of literary analysis, Wordsworth’s portrayal of the River Duddon serves as a lens through which the boundaries of human understanding are examined, illustrating an unbridgeable gap between human consciousness and nature. After a brief introduction of research background, this essay elaborates on the River Duddon's unattainable origin as cloud’s child in deferral to both antiquity and industry, eco-Gothic wilderness in departure and return pattern, and nonperishable eternity compared with the transience of human. By deconstructing anthropocentric views prevalent in Romantic literature, the research emphasizes the urgent necessity of acknowledging nature's subjectivity and its independent existence beyond human perception. This essay not only revitalizes the poetic landscape of Wordsworth but also advocates for a non-human turn in literary criticism, promoting ecological awareness and respect for nature.

From the Editor

From the Editor

From the Editor

From the Editor

The River Duddon Volume’s Golden Ratio Wheel and Spiraling “Orbicular” Sonnets

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe River Duddon Volume’s Golden Ratio Wheel and Spiraling “Orbicular” SonnetsBrian BatesBrian BatesCalifornia Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 1Winter 2020Wordsworth and the River Duddon: Bicentenary Readings Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708149 Views: 51Total views on this site © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Discomposed at Cora Linn

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscomposed at Cora LinnPhilip ShawPhilip ShawUniversity of Leicester Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 1Winter 2020Wordsworth and the River Duddon: Bicentenary Readings Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707646 Views: 36Total views on this site © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Wordsworth Reshapes Himself and Is Reshaped: The River Duddon and the 1820 Miscellaneous Poems

Wordsworth Reshapes Himself and Is Reshaped: <i>The River Duddon</i> and the 1820 <i>Miscellaneous Poems</i>

Wordsworthian Undercurrents in Álvaro De Campos’s “Barrow-on-Furness”

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworthian Undercurrents in Álvaro De Campos’s “Barrow-on-Furness”Christopher DonaldsonChristopher DonaldsonLancaster University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 1Winter 2020Wordsworth and the River Duddon: Bicentenary Readings Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707647 Views: 35Total views on this site © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Duddon Sonnets and Duddon Tourism

Previous articleNext article No AccessDuddon Sonnets and Duddon TourismSaeko YoshikawaSaeko YoshikawaKobe City University of Foreign Studies Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 1Winter 2020Wordsworth and the River Duddon: Bicentenary Readings Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708152 Views: 47Total views on this site © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“Enough, If Something from Our Hands Have Power / to Live, and Act, and Serve the Future Hour”: Curating The River Duddon

“Enough, If Something from Our Hands Have Power / to Live, and Act, and Serve the Future Hour”: Curating <i>The River Duddon</i>

“Now Expands Majestic Duddon”: Wordsworth’s Textual Expansion of “The River Duddon” and Its Theological Implications

“Now Expands Majestic Duddon”: Wordsworth’s Textual Expansion of “The River Duddon” and Its Theological Implications

The Unremarked Wordsworth: Geoffrey Hartman andThe River DuddonVolume

The Unremarked Wordsworth: Geoffrey Hartman and<i>The River Duddon</i>Volume

Wordsworth, The River Duddon, and John Dalton’s “Ultimate Particles”

Wordsworth, <i>The River Duddon</i>, and John Dalton’s “Ultimate Particles”

Vaudracour and William; or, a Tale of Two Different Recluses

Previous article No AccessPAPERS DELIVERED AT THE 2015 WORDSWORTH-COLERIDGE ASSOCIATION MEETINGVaudracour and William; or, a Tale of Two Different ReclusesEugene StelzigEugene Stelzig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 2Spring 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888065 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Wordsworth, Hemans, and politics, 1800-1830: Romantic crises

Introduction Wordsworth 1. Michael: Late Eighteenth-Century Republican Millenarianism 2. Wordsworth, Poverty, and Relief 3. Generating a National Sublime: The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes Hemans 4. She is no sculptured form of woe: Meaningful Death in Felicia Hemans'sEarly and Middle Periods 5. Marriage and Maternal Love in The Siege of Valencia and Records of Woman 6. Victorian Afterlives: Felicia Hemans at Rydal Mount in 1830 Bibliography

Down the Duddon: Wordsworth and His Literary Pilgrims

Wordsworth’s later poetry, though traditionally despised, has recently aroused significant scholarly interest. From biographies to critical appreciations, several studies have highlighted the historical importance of the verse Wordsworth produced after the period of his “golden prime” (c. 1798-1808). The present article contributes to this larger project of revaluation by engaging with Wordsworth’s precedent-setting 1820 collection The River Duddon. Combining close readings of this collection with detailed assessments of its publication and reception history, the article explores both how The River Duddon secured Wordsworth’s reputation as “the great poet of the Lakes” and how this reputation was perpetuated by those readers who sought to experience the world behind his words. In doing so, the article contends that more than The Excursion, or even The Prelude, The River Duddon constitutes the defining work of Wordsworth’s later career.

Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception by Brian R. Bates

Brian R. Bates. Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 236. $99. Brian Bates's book, part of Picketing and Chatto's History of the Book series, contributes the recent swell of interest in Romantic print culture, book studies, and audiences. The book tells, as Bates puts it, two intertwined stories, of Wordsworth used supplementary writings shape and engage in his poetic collections and Wordsworth's critics and parodists responded and were connected with the designs of those collections (1). In so doing, it explores how these forms of paratextual and parodic writing, typically relegated the margins of literary scholarship, in fact played a key role in shaping literary production, reception, and culture during the Romantic period, as part of a wide-spread struggle between early nineteenth-century authors, reviewers and publishers negotiate and create the tastes of contemporary readers (15). Wordsworth's Poetic Collections is meticulously researched and documented-its endnotes weigh in at over fifty pages, roughly a third as long as the main text. It is also refreshingly clearly written and free of jargon, while at the same time critically astute. The book investigates how William Wordsworth used various forms of supplementary writings from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads through the 1820 River Duddon volume, including prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other (1), shape his poetic oeuvre, his literary identity, and his relationship with readers. Bates shows how these paratexts engaged in public contestation and dialogue with the writing of various critics, reviewers, and parodists, as poetry and parody, verse and prose, writers and reviewers, redefine[d] one in an ongoing dialectic of framing and refraining (76). One particular delight of the book is its exploration of the symbiotic relationship between Wordsworth and his parodists, whose writings often benefited the poet even as they sought ridicule him. J. H. Reynolds's Bell, a Lyrical Ballad (1819), for instance, not only imitated Wordsworth's repetitive style but literally appropriated and mashed together his titles, yet ended up swelling sales of Wordsworth's own Peter Bell by thrusting it into public attention. Reynolds, like other parodists, mocks Wordsworth's repetition of words, obsessive cross-referencing of his own poems, explanatory notes, and aggressively egoistic attempt define his own public. Like many of the best or most popular parodies of Wordsworth's poetry, Bates argues, it left unable determine whether it was written in earnest or in jest, or if it was written by Wordsworth or someone else (15). Yet Wordsworth reshaped this parodic discourse; in another turn of the wheel, as part of the ongoing refashioning of his own poetic identity. An 1820 poem On the Detraction Which Followed the Publication of a Certain Poem, for instance, denounces such parodies in order affirm the coherence and value of Wordsworth's own poetic works, labor, and reputation; yet at the same time, to remain prominent in the public eye, Wordsworth needed the 'harpy brood' of critics and parodists that his sonnet denigrates (136). Bates identifies a main source of contestation with parodists and reviewers in Wordsworth's theme of connective reading (12): his use of repeated words and themes across poems, as well as repeated references and allusions his own works, induce approach his oeuvre as a single coherent structure. Bates traces various forms of connection in a number of Wordsworth's volumes, such as repetition of the word stone in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads; the way the various flower poems in the 1807 Poems speak one another; and how the word change in the title from Written Composed in the 1815 version of Tintem Abbey, together with some added notes, draw his various poems in the collection into association. …

Contested Bounds: John Clare, John Keats, and the Sonnet

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WITNESSED AN EXTRAORDINARY SONNET boom. The revival began in the mid-eighteenth century; among its most prominent exponents were Charlotte Smith, Helen Mafia Williams, and William Lisle Bowles. Smith, influentially, sought a new English form for the sonnet, a form that would emphasize intensity feeling rather than rhetorical stateliness. Reacting against the formal constraints the Petrarchan sonnet, both Smith and Bowles developed a free approach to the Shakespearean model that tolerated a variety irregular and hybrid constructions. As Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson note, however, the popularity these experiments incurred the inevitable conservative backlash against innovation (1) and, by the early nineteenth century, when Wordsworth announced his conversion (2) to the sonnet and arose as its modem patron, the self-styled inheritor Milton's trumpet, whence he blew / Soul-animating strains--alas too few!, the Petrarchan sonnet was once again the dominant model. The sonnet was a form framed for self-reflexive meditation on the constraints and pleasures form itself; it was also a form framed for comparison. In an age when periodicals, annuals, and anthologies made short poems especially valuable, the sonnet--brief, precious, attemptable by all but perfected by few--was a highly marketable, collectable object, a gem consciously set off by its clarity and brilliance beside similar stones. To publish a sonnet was inevitably to enter into this market and a structure of comparative evaluation that reflected historical, national, literary, and political allegiances. John Clare was a major sonneteer. His three published collections contain, respectively, twenty-one, sixty, and eighty-six sonnets. Among his unpublished works, particularly the material designed for a projected volume, The Midsummer Cushion (1832), there are over three hundred sonnets. As early as 1820, Clare announced to his publisher John Taylor, been terribly plagued with the muses since I saw you I think I wrote 50 Sonnets. (3) They were important to him. In 1821, he instructs Taylor regarding his second book, The Village Minstrel, have a good care over the Sonnets & I think you will find first & last a Selection far superiour to the first book (4) and again careful in perusing the Songs & Sonnet as they are my favourites. (5) By 1824, he was planning an ambitious project akin to Wordsworth's 1820 sequence sonnets on the River Duddon. Whatever the success The Village Minstrel, he told Taylor, he planned to take a sabbatical 8 to 10 years to hone his skills and make literary experiments. In that interval, he writes, I made it up in my mind to write one hundred sonnets as a set pictures on the scenes & objects that appear in the different seasons & as I shall do it soly for amusment [sic] I shall take up wi gentle and simple as they come whatever in my eye finds any [inter] est these things are resolves not merely in the view for publication but for attempts. (6) It was presumably with a view to such a sonnet sequence that Clare began, in 1824, a manuscript entitled A Collection Sonnets Descriptive Appearances in the Seasons and other Pictures in Nature. If Clare had published this sonnet sequence in the 1820s, he would been ahead the curve in what became a sonnet rush: some 250 sonnet sequences published between 1800 and 1900 only 27 were published before 1830. (7) Various critics considered aspects Clare's sonnets, particularly the view place and the natural world that they espouse. (8) However, this essay will argue, we not as yet done justice to Clare's theoretical and practical engagement with a heated contemporary debate about the proper form and style the sonnet: Clare's sonnets should be seen as interventions in a market that was also a battleground. The sonnet is a means for Clare exploring the limits established form: constructing his own place within a tradition, but also signaling his departure from widely-held conventions. …

Wordsworth's 'To the Rev. Dr. W__.'

ALTHOUGH it was inspired by the festivities of the Christmas season, Wordsworth’s poem ‘To the Rev. Dr. W__.’ was first published in April 1820 among the twenty-six miscellaneous poems collected in The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: And Other Poems. To which is annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England (hereafter, The River Duddon). The poem comprises thirteen, six-line stanzas composed in rhyming iambic tetrameter, and reads, as its title suggests, as a epistle to the poet’s younger brother, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Wordsworth (then rector of St Mary’s, Lambeth). Discursive in tone, uniform in theme, and set amidst the fells and dales of the Lake District, ‘To the Rev. Dr. W__.’ resembles many of the other poems included in The River Duddon. Such similarities aside, its relationship to the rest of the volume is not entirely clear.

Commodity Culture in Dicken's 'Household Words': The Social Life of Goods by Catherine Waters

1122 Reviews its representation. In other words, his suggestion that the taking of a census ispart of the general movement toward what Michel Foucault called discipline' (p. 14) enables Wordsworth 'to identify abstract counting as one of the primary processes of the imagination' proves merely to be an interesting juxtaposition. Nevertheless, there ismuch of interest in Garrett's study for both novice and initiate.He argues convincingly for Wordsworth's self-conscious attempt towrite thenation, exemplified by thepoet's considerable literaryoutput between 1814 and 1823, a period during which tenvolumes of his poetry were published. In particular, The Excursion and Thanksgiving Ode serve as the groundwork upon which Garrett builds his claim that 'thispublic phase was not accidental, butWordsworth's deli berate and self-conscious efforttowrite a national poetry and become the national poet' (p. 69). Rather than retreating intoArcadian tranquillity,Garrett argues that Wordsworth was engaged purposefully with amapping of Britain?akin to the na tional census and national survey?in which he grappled with competing visions of Britain. However, Wordsworth's commitment to the particulars of the local (Peter Bell, TheWaggoner, The River Duddon) marked not a retreat but rather a repopula tion of thenational landscape, his 'most elaborate and conscious efforttowrite the nation through detailed local survey' (p. 126). Garrett concludes his study by invoking Svetlana Alpers's notion of the 'museum effect' inorder to demonstrate theway inwhich the aestheticizing gaze transforms its object into an object of aesthetic interest;museum culture and Romanticism, then, coexist with one another through their 'renewed awareness of historicity and a concerted effortto locate, collect, classify, catalog, and interpret thepast' (p. 150). He is critical ofArnold's 'GreatDecade' poet, and of theVictorian petrifaction of Wordsworth, whereby he becomes a Romantic monument, one indistinguishable from the landscape of his poetry and linked inextricablywith the national heritage of Britain. Ironically, as Garrett argues, 'thepoet attempts towrite the nation, and the nation revises the poet into itsown image' (p. 197). Garrett's unique approach yields fresh insights into the complex relationship between a nascent national and poetic self-consciousness, their convergence, and subsequent transformations. University of Warwick Brian Haman Commodity Culture inDickenss 'Household Words : The Social Life of Goods. By Catherine Waters. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. viii+i84pp. ?50. ISBN 978 0-7546-5578-7. This is the first book-length study ofHousehold Words, the twopence weekly miscel lanywhich broadly targeted the burgeoning middle classes of the 1850s under the watchful eye of itsfamous founder and 'Conductor, Charles Dickens. While much previous scholarship has concentrated on thisDickens connection, Catherine Wa ters shiftsthe focus away from itsfamous Conductor, instead approaching her study 'froma direction suggested by the form and contents of the journal itself (p. 7). This approach enables Waters to quote liberally from other prolific contributors to the journal, resulting in a book that ismuch less about Dickens thanmight be expected MLR, 104.4, 2009 1123 but which is undoubtedly the richer for it. Itself a commodity to be purchased via the new disposable income of the growing middle classes, Waters argues that the periodical in general, and Household Words inparticular, regarded commodity cul turewith great ambivalence and frequent contradiction. Rooting her discussion in the culturalmoment of theGreat Exhibition of 1851,Waters characterizes theworld inwhich Household Words moved as one inwhich 'identity is mediated by fictions of commodity culture' and the spectacle of that commodity is of primary importance (p. 45). As such, this is an informative and convincing examination of the relation ship between people and things, of the emergence of a consumer society inwhich sign-value begins to supersede the use-value of goods, and of the unease and com plicitywith which Household Words journalists responded to these social changes. At the outset,Waters states thatHousehold Words 'wasmost significantly distin guished by its imaginative non-fiction prose, which blurred the boundary between journalism and literature with cultural effects that have yet to be properly re cognized' (p. 2). Such generic blurring makes for unusual articles: biographies of anthropomorphized inanimate objects, for example; advertisements which merge into fictional stories and vice versa; and the 'process article', dubbed 'a form of industrial tourist tale' byWaters, which attempts tomake readers aware of the labour and production...