Wordsworth's Poems Research Articles

A Critical Analysis of Imagery in My Heart Leaps Up: Illuminating Wordsworth's Nature Poetry in the Context of Ecocriticism

This paper presents a critical analysis of the imagery used in William Wordsworth's poem My Heart Leaps Up, examining its role in the context of Ecocriticism. By offering a close reading of the poem and drawing on various eco-critical perspectives, the researcher explores the relationship between the poem's imagery and concepts such as biocentrism, anthropocentrism, eco-feminism, and deep ecology. Additionally, the researcher compares My Heart Leaps Up with other nature poems by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, which helps us to identify particular stylistic and thematic features of the poem. This study aims to demonstrate how the use of imagery in My Heart Leaps Up connects to contemporary discourses on climate change and the anthropogenic epoch. This paper highlights the significance of My Heart Leaps Up within the broader context of Wordsworth's poetry and offers new theoretical and argumentative extensions to the reading of his nature poetry. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of how language and imagery can be used to convey the beauty and importance of the natural world and our role in it.

Human Nature Bonds in Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”

This article explores the theme of human nature bonds in William Wordsworth's poem, The Ruined Cottage (1799). The poem depicts the story of a rural family facing poverty and despair, with a focus on the protagonist's relationship with nature, fellow human beings, and the wider community. The protagonist's deep connection with the natural world is highlighted, portraying nature as a source of solace and spiritual renewal. The bonds within the human community are also explored, depicting both acts of compassion and indifference. The poem emphasizes the importance of empathy and communal support in the face of adversity, fostering a sense of collective understanding. Through its portrayal of human nature bonds, "The Ruined Cottage" underscores the restorative power of nature, the complexities of human relationships, and the significance of communal solidarity.
 The researcher has planned to examine The Ruined Cottage through the lens of ecocriticism by focusing on the correspondence between the gradual withering of Nature and the gradual demise of Margaret’s soul to reach a comprehensive interpretation of the poem. The researcher has explored on the importance of humankind’s ability to survive in nature by considering the viewpoints of the Yale School critics, the New Historicists, and the ecologists also.

The Experience of Being Alive Through Poetry

It is viewed that poets and poetry readers mostly come to a disappointing idea from the community’s belief proclaiming poetry’s death and that poetry is in vain and it is a waste of time. Readers and poets keep wondering intensely that, if so, then how do their souls still recall the inspirational world of imagination? How do their souls travel into an imaginative world of thoughts creating a piece of art through some words that are of daily life experiences? William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, for instance, connects humanity and nature to make life more meaningful. The natural world provides human beings bliss, enabling them to overcome life challenges such as loneliness. The poet obtains happiness from the dancing daffodils and overcomes his loneliness. This togetherness between humanity and the natural world aids the poet in overcoming the challenges. The poem uses poetic devices, especially figurative language, that demands the readers to recall their experiences to understand them better. Like Campbell, Wordsworth has a positive view of the natural world because it enables the speaker to deal with sadness. Therefore, artists should acknowledge the significance of discourses while writing poems. The community, in addition to that,is called to reconsider their beliefs and observe that it is through poetry that our souls get nourished and call our daily life experiences. This study examines former beliefs to prove that poetry is the experience that keeps our souls alive.

Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800-1925, by Daniel Karlin

Reviewed by: Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin Lee Behlman (bio) Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, by Daniel Karlin; pp. xii + 195. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $44.95, $43.99 ebook. In Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, Daniel Karlin tracks the incursions into poetry and fiction of the extraordinarily vivid and now-lost musical soundscapes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London, Dublin, Paris, Florence, and New York. In seven chapters, four of which were Clarendon lectures at an earlier stage, we are introduced to writers' persistent fixations on aural street performances as works ripe for appropriation and restaging as dramatic tableaux. In selecting his examples, Karlin seeks to go "beyond mere reference," or that which only "adds local colour to a realist fiction"; rather, he investigates works in which a song "plays a specific part in an artistic design" (7). As this decision suggests—thematic connections across its chapters notwithstanding—this book as a whole is not thesis-driven. Elizabeth Helsinger's related Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) (which Karlin does not cite) is a useful point of contrast. While Helsinger reflects at length, via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's aesthetic theory, on both "ideas about song" and "song as a possible model for understanding how poems can be said to think," Karlin resists larger claims about how his writers understand song as a rival or coequal to the lyric, let alone as a crucible for intellection ([University of Virginia Press], 2). He limits himself to actual existing street songs—or made-up ones—that made their way, as subject matter and quoted content, into poems and novels, while leaving unexamined the headier subject of how literary works might function as "song" and the implications of that gesture. He stays close to the ground of his chosen texts in resourceful readings of familiar and lesser-known poems by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Walt Whitman, as well as major twentieth-century novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. As with his earlier The Figure of the Singer (2013), Karlin's critical voice here is charmingly warm and direct, fast on the move but unhurried, as he teases out implications and chains of association. In the opening chapter, for example, he uses Robert Herrick's "Cherrie-Ripe" (1648), which famously incorporates an actual street seller's cry, as the point of departure for reflections on Thomas Campion, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, the "migrations" of songs into visual art, and then back to poetry with Wordsworth's "Power of Music" (1807), to which much of the chapter is devoted (4). In discussing that poem, Karlin shows Wordsworth's middle-class spectator celebrating a solo violinist's performance before a rapturous working-class crowd, and distracting them from the cacophony of competing street sounds; as he keenly notes, this Orpheus figure "consciously or [End Page 338] unconsciously recalls" William Hogarth's etching The Enrag'd Musician (1741), a comic representation of street music and street life overwhelming a frustrated professional musician (16). (Wordsworth characteristically plays it straight, though.) Karlin later juxtaposes Wordsworth's poem with George Gissing's 1889 novel The Nether World to demonstrate how, in both, the surrounding street sounds constitute an assault on the senses that poses challenges to aesthetic reception and public order. Throughout the book, Karlin's avowed emphasis is not on street songs in their original cultural contexts but rather on how his authors repurposed them for divergent aesthetic and ideological purposes. A standout chapter focuses on Barrett Browning's use of street singers, children and adults in a range of late works that respond to the fluctuating fortunes of the Risorgimento in the late 1840s and early 1850s, including both parts of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and "The King's Gift" (1862). In the former work, the child singer in the poem's second part "is there not by accident, 'overheard' as he passes beneath the speaker's window," but instead has been obviously planted there in a patently "improbable" gesture (46). The...

Symbolic meaning on the poem of I wondered lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) By William Wordswort's

This research is an analysis of a poem written by Willliam Wordswort. The writer analyses the Wordswort's poem titled I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud (Daffodils) to reveal the denotation and connoation as the symbolic meaning. To analyze it the writer uses qualitative-descriptive method to reveal the data. The writer also uses Roland Barthes theory to analyze the symbolic meaning on Wordsworth's poem. Reasearch finding on this analysis is tha the poem of Daffodils mostly uses the naturalistic symbol so that the writer concludes that the poem has full of message of the beauty and powerful of the universe. Wordswort wants us to know his feeling through all these naturalistic symbols.

Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830.

Leask, Nigel. <i>Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830</i>.

Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas

Reviewed by: Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth by Jayne Thomas Andrew Elfenbein (bio) Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas; pp. vi + 210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $100.00. Scholars have often recognized William Wordsworth's importance for Alfred Tennyson. In Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, Jayne Thomas addresses major issues in this relationship by focusing on familiar works: "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842), "Ulysses" (1842), In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Maud (1855), and "Tithonus" (1860). Her general approach [End Page 295] balances Harold Bloom's antagonistic understanding of influence against Christopher Ricks's more cooperative understanding of poetic allusion. Chapter 1 examines the 1832 "The Lady of Shalott" and its 1842 revision to describe Tennyson's impatience with what Arthur Henry Hallam called the poetry of sensation and Tennyson's revision of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" (1807) and "The Green Linnet" (1807), among others. In Thomas's view, Wordsworth enables Tennyson's "concerns between the demands of a poetry concerned purely with private experience and poetry that moves away from the self and engages with life, politics, and generalised humanity" (40). Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807) is perhaps the inevitable focus for a chapter on "Ulysses," stressing the lack in Tennyson's work of the compensations and recovery found in Wordsworth. In Memoriam A. H. H. may represent Tennyson at his most Wordsworthian, and Thomas argues that "echoes and allusions" in the poem "create a pattern of both independence from and dependence on Wordsworth, a desire for unity and filiation with the older poet, alongside a desire to re-engender and reinvent" (82). I found the chapter on Maud the least convincing, mostly because Tennyson's engagement with other authors in the poem seems so much more salient. "Tintern Abbey" (1798) (again, among others) is appropriately at the core of the discussion of "Tithonus," which "draws from the language of reflection" and "employs the language of sensation, thereby dissolving the arbitrary separation of the two forms of poetry" (166). Discussing influence in such poems, some of which are not obviously Wordsworthian, requires guidelines for understanding and evaluating it. As Thomas's title reveals, "echoing" is her core concept. Usually, for a piece of language to be the source of an echo, that language must be so distinctive as to have no other possible source. In the jargon of linguistics, such language is a low-frequency collocation, or a rare grouping of words. The echo of an earlier author in the work of a later author may appear at the level of just a single word. Yet the existence of the same word in two authors' works is not enough to prove an echo. Thomas claims that the Lady of Shalott's "glassy countenance" (24) echoes Wordsworth's "glassy sea" in his "Elegiac Stanzas" (25). Such a claim has to contend against other possible uses of "glassy" by Tennyson's precursors, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "glassy quiet" in Alastor (1816) (393), Lord Byron's "glassy gaze" in Parisina (1816) (334), or Felicia Hemans's frequent uses of the word glassy to describe bodies of water. Without acknowledging such competing possibilities or providing reasons for why a Wordsworth poem might be especially relevant to a given Tennyson poem, Thomas's treatment of echo sometimes feels murky. It also restricts her argument by hiding the broader intellectual and poetic stakes in Tennyson's originality: while he is indebted to so many other writers, he sounds like nobody else. The phrase "glassy countenance" is striking not because it revises Wordsworth but because it renovates a formulaic adjective by extending its reach. Before Tennyson, "glassy" described poetic bodies of water or, less often, the watery organ of the eyes. Tennyson unforgettably, and even creepily, extends what "glassy" and "countenance" might mean by turning the Lady's face into metaphoric glass, thereby stressing both its link to her magic mirror and its frozen fragility. I was also unsure that Thomas's opposition between Bloom's antagonistic theory of influence and Ricks's cooperative one worked successfully. Such an opposition is too likely to produce the conclusion that we see a little of both. A deeper engagement both [End...

‘Spain! Most Pleasant were my wanderings’: Robert Southey's Pedestrian and Mountaineering Writing in the Iberian Peninsula

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in ‘a land of strangers’.

Looking at Sympathy in Wordsworth's Disability Poetry

Wordsworth's poems about disability – ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Blind Highland Boy’ and other long poems in which disability plays a tangential yet pivotal role like The Prelude and, less obviously, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ – posit the encounter with impairment as central to feelings of sympathy. Consequently, these poems are usually read as advocating the inclusion of people with disabilities. This article argues that Wordsworth's poems about disability reify a pattern of liberal identity that posits impairment as an obstacle to subjecthood reflecting Wordsworth's misreading of Adam Smith's moral theory. Departing from Smith's argument that disability is socially constructed, Wordsworth separates disabled and able-bodied lives into separate spheres, mediated by a voyeuristic aesthetic. As a result, characters with disabilities arouse intense curiosity and yearning in Wordsworth's poems, but also remain a spectacle of dependence and an adjunct to able identity.

Idle Singers, Idle Songs: The Birth of Poetry from the Spirit of Idleness

Idle Singers, Idle Songs:The Birth of Poetry from the Spirit of Idleness Irmtraud Huber (bio) In the opening lines of The Prelude (1850), William Wordsworth invokes a feeling of liberty and ease, since "escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined," the speaker finds that "Long months of ease and undisturbed delight / Are mine in prospect."1 This is, he suggests, when he felt the first stirrings of what the 1805 version of The Prelude calls a "mild creative breeze" (I: 43), which, after many abortive attempts to embark on more epic or philosophical themes, finally results in the autobiographical narrative of The Prelude. Idleness, liberty, and a quiet enjoyment of rural scenes are thus framed as the seeds of creative production. Creative production itself is envisioned as "active days urged on by flying hours," but this activity, too, is based on leisure: "Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought / Abstruse" (I: 42–44). In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's version of a poet's autobiography, Aurora Leigh (1856), a work which clearly takes up and reacts to The Prelude in many ways,2 the conditions for poetic production sound strikingly different. Early in the story, Barrett Browning has Aurora reject not only her cousin's hand in marriage, but also his intended gift of a comfortable financial settlement. This rejection forces the poet-protagonist into a life of constant industry rather than idleness. Instead of producing her poetry in the ease of the countryside, Aurora sits in a garret in Kensington where she "worked on, on. / Through all the bristling fence of nights and days / Which hedges time in from the eternities" to the point where her health suffers from the constant strain.3 Wordsworth, for his part, tells us in the introductory verses of The Prelude how, his hopes for poetic production having been repeatedly thwarted, he falls back on an idle enjoyment of the moment: "Be it so; / Why think of any thing but present good?" He is content to wander on, with not "one wish / Again to bend the Sabbath of that time / To servile yoke. What need of many words?" (I: 99–100, 103–104). Aurora, in contrast, celebrates work for its own sake: "Get leave to work / In this world—' tis the best you get at all; / . . . Get work, get work; / Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get" (III: 161–168). [End Page 403] In turning her heroine into a martyr figure of poetic labor, Barrett Browning offers a notable contrast to the Wordsworthian poet, whose creative spark strikes from moments of idle enjoyment of nature. While Wordsworth never concluded the projected masterpiece to which The Prelude should have served, precisely, as a prelude (though, of course, The Prelude, arguably, came to stand in for the projected work in the process of composition), the fictional Aurora does complete her masterpiece. It is not idle contemplation which eventually leads to this success, however, but constant exertion. It is not unrelated to this marked difference in their speakers that the two poems, though somewhat similar in outward form, are also strikingly different in the way they shape their narratives. Even though the subtitle of Wordsworth's poem, The Growth of a Poet's Mind, suggests a Bildungsroman plot, no one could mistake the poem for a novel. While the poem dramatizes a number of false starts, an accumulation of experiences which predicate the final epiphany, Herbert Lindenberger has noted that "[t]here is no real progression in The Prelude," and suggests "to look at the poem as saying essentially the same thing again and again."4 The primary narrative logic of the poem, which becomes emblematic in the Wordsworthian "spots of time," is one of return and revision. While there is ambition at the heart of the poem, the speaker's aim is to prove himself what he already believes himself to be: a great poet. In The Prelude, the dynamics of narrative desire, which Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot, has so closely linked to progressive ambition,5 recede largely into the background. It seems safe to say that few readers would be driven to read through the...

The Poetics of Heritage: an inquiry into disaster.

This paper argues that heritage is what contemporary culture makes of history and that this may distort our ability to face future realities. Funded by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund, the VIEWPOINT ecological arts project at the confluence of two rivers in Cockermouth, Northwest England, questioned the deployment of art and heritage as a means of community recovery from the 2009 and 2015 flood disasters. As the climate crisis accelerates and the psychosocial emergency increases, this project reassigned a Wordsworth poem and repurposed twelve large rocks to celebrate the potential for communities to live with their rivers in the future and defy their tendency towards nostalgia and memorialization.However, the situation was exacerbated when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Heritage awarded cultural heritage status on The Lake District National Park, affixing the environmental management of the area to Beatrix Potter’s romanticized notion of sheep farming; thereby ensuring perpetual landscape deforestation and future flooding.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND WILLIAM WORDWORTH’S POEM

This study aims to determine the use and meaning of figurative language (majas) in poetry. The sample of this study is ten poems from two different writers of the era, namely Shakespeare and Wordsworth. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method and an objective approach used to analyze data. Figurative language (majas) was analyzed based on theories from Wren and Martin and also analyzed the meaning of each figurative language (majas) that had been discovered. The figurative language (majas) found is presented in tabular form. From the data analysis, all figurative languages ??(majas) were found in Shakespeare's five poems except Euphemism and Irony. In Wordsworth's poem, all figurative languages ??(majas) are found except Synecdoche and Irony. From the figurative language (majas) that has been found and from the author's background, it has been concluded that Shakespeare is a Poetic person, he usually uses some beautiful words. Meanwhile, Wordsworth is a Romantic person. He usually talks about love, feelings and even sadness which is always associated with the loss of someone he loves.

Wordsworth, Bellow, and understanding multiple sclerosis

In 1975, the American novelist and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow gave an address to the University of Chicago Board of Trustees (Chicago, IL, USA). He chose as his subject “distraction”, taking his cue from William Wordsworth's poem The world is too much with us, written in 1807. Life in England at the beginning of the 19th century was being rapidly transformed by the industrial revolution and Wordsworth lamented what he saw as a society in thrall to materialism, its citizens increasingly blind to the beauty of nature.

Designing ‘free’ spaces for children with disabilities

As many individuals now spend a large proportion of their time in virtual worlds, what is the value of real space in the 21st century? And for children especially, what are the dimensions of a physical area or expanse that promote health and well-being, support learning and development, and encourage play and creativity? In reviewing the literature over the past few decades, there are a few seminal papers. Notably, Wade and Ellis1 manipulated playgrounds to explore the play of children in two environments. One came with a large amount of apparatus to promote physical activity (climbing frames, cargo nets, hollow tubes, etc.); another equipped with only a steel horse, and small wooden beam and cylinder. Using heart rate telemetry and observations, the findings showed that group size (numbers of children) provoked greater physical activity than the highly-equipped environment, once the initial novelty of the equipment had ceased. A more recent study considered the nature of playground equipment and risk exposure and impact on physical activity and play.2 The materials utilized in the intervention schools were moveable, low-cost, and/or recycled, such as car tyres, Styrofoam boxes, or milk crates. Items were chosen to encourage cooperation and multi-purpose play through challenging, creative, and/or sensory experiences. New materials were added every 3 weeks to maintain novelty. Children in the intervention schools were found to engage in approximately 12% more moderate to vigorous physical activity, measured via accelerometers, with indications of sustained benefits at 2 years. Extending the concept of playgrounds to the natural environment, access to nature, particularly green spaces (grass, trees, parks, forests, etc.) and blue spaces (lakes, rivers, coastal water, etc.) has been associated with better mental health.3 The wonders and beauty of nature are difficult to quantify, but include unexpected pleasures such as coming upon a strip of daffodils (as in Wordsworth's poem I wandered lonely as a cloud 1807) or hearing birdsong whilst smelling spring blossom. These multi-sensory experiences do not necessarily require physical activity, but only space and time in which to appreciate the surroundings. In this respect an investigation of the leisure activities of children with cerebral palsy showed that going for a walk or a hike were recreational activities in which more than 50% participated.4 While most participants in this study had more mild movement restrictions and/or were independently ambulatory, why should those without independent mobility not also enjoy access to the natural environment? These studies highlight some interesting points with respect to the use of open spaces and the freedom for children with disabilities to explore these spontaneously. Moveable items in playgrounds and outdoor activities in natural environments are commonly considered as risky due to more unpredictable usage and hazards.2 Safety-conscious societies may thus inadvertently be contributing to increased risks to health and well-being by limiting these experiences. Our efforts to design spaces to encourage participation and engagement could in fact constrain countless aspects of spontaneity and limit creative play and enjoyment of various spaces. There are opportunities to exploit nature's potential for enjoyment and creativity, alongside enhancement of play and physical activity for young people with more restricted mobility. A recommendation is therefore made to include a sixth ‘F’ word in child disability interventions:5 freedom. This includes the freedom to choose, freedom to be, and freedom to enjoy the moment. Initiating occasions to engage with nature and allow participation in open environments with unstructured activities may be more difficult to orchestrate for children and young people with disabilities and their families, but this should not stop us from trying. The design of virtual spaces that recreate the multi-sensory and emotional experiences of nature will be more of a challenge.

Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson

Wordsworth's poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ suggests that it is better not to go somewhere than to go and risk being disappointed. Responding to this idea in the poem ‘Askam Unvisited’, the twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson describes how he had planned to visit the dilapidated town of Askam in the southern Lake District only to face an agony of indecision before resolving in the end not to go. Both poets look forward to a time when they might be forced to look back with regret, and choose instead to preserve a sense of what might have been. A preoccupation with the passage of time and the consequences of decision-making is connected in these poems to the workings of rhyme, particularly to rhyme's relationship with effects of timing and determinism.

Questioning Curriculum Theory in Teacher Education: Nourishing and Invisibly Repairing the Minds of Researchers and Teachers

I begin by posing the following question: Whatever happened to curriculum theory in teacher education? My answer is short—it is missing in action, both in the action of research and practice! To address the consequences of this for teacher education research and practice, I use a Wordsworth poem “Spots of Time” to illustrate my premise that we need curriculum theory in teacher education to nourish and invisibly repair both our researching and pedagogical minds. Curriculum theory informs, evokes, provokes, and disrupts our mental frames about teaching. Hence, theoretically informed conceptualizations can enable teacher educators to revisit their practice in a manner that escapes dour and lifeless pedagogy. Such an approach arises when we focus too directly on learning and its measurement to the neglect of understanding how study is the central site of education. This misplaced emphasis leads us into intellectual traps around teaching that educators need to divest themselves in curriculum if we are to become creative and engage students in assiduous study. My argument is that, without this turn, teacher education will remain moribund; and, if teacher education as a viable practice dies, then so too will Faculties of Education. We need curriculum theory to find spots in time whence our minds as teacher education researchers and pedagogues are nourished and invisibly repaired.

Zero Ground: Mapping Maritime Commemoration in the Age of Nelson

As the Napoleonic Wars ended, deceptively simple forms of commemorative militaria attuned Romantic writers to the overrepresentation of officers in victory culture. This article asserts that the ideological biases of battlefield maps prompted William Wordsworth's radical critique of naval commemoration in “Benjamin the Waggoner.” Although the campaigns of the army created travel destinations for battlefield tourism, the naval battlefield occupies a strange space in Romantic commemoration. Lacking a “place” for tourists to stand, naval commemoration induced geographic simulations from victory arboretums to dinner plates adorned with tactical maps. Inspired by the assumed objectivity of simulations such as these, Wordsworth's poem mocks the discharged sailor's reenactment of the Battle of the Nile for its revisionist geography. By overinvesting Nelson in the battle's history, Wordsworth's poem reveals the limits of patriotic nostalgia and its tendency to elide the memory of departed seamen and the families that mourned their memory.

Romantic Autopsy and Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude

This essay traces the development of autoptical dissection as a medical practice during the French Revolution and its relation to modes of self-analysis in Romantic poetry, especially William Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude (1798–1799). In keeping with William Godwin's association of autoptical analysis with radical politics, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem reveals his attraction to a practice of poetic interpretation informed by anatomical techniques of probing and dismemberment. What emerges in the Two-Part Prelude, though, is a hybrid version of dissective exegesis, in which post-Revolutionary radical analysis coexists with an earlier Enlightenment sense of dissection as a procedure that reveals underlying sympathy and wholeness. Performing this double function of dissection through invocations of the probing glance, the Two-Part Prelude looks beneath the surfaces of landscape and of the speaker's body to analyze and animate its account of the growth of the poet's mind. As it marks the historically transitioning status of dissection in the anatomical medicine of the 1790s, the poem asks how medical method might function as a protocol for poetic hermeneutics and anticipates the modern practice of symptomatic close reading.

Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes by Bill Conlogue (review)

Reviewed by: Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes by Bill Conlogue Robert Gordon (bio) Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes. By Bill Conlogue. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii+ 218. $45.48/$26.96. Bill Conlogue’s book is roughly equal parts autobiography, interpretation of literary texts, and local history of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and its environs. These disparate components are united around the theme of “reading” landscape, a technique introduced by W. G. Hoskins in England. The author’s introduction explains his approach to the landscapes of work—work here being anthracite coal mining and dairy farming—as seen by a college professor of English. In each chapter a place or structure in or near Scranton introduces a theme that the author then explores through works of poetry and prose that usually shift the discussion to places elsewhere, enlarge the interpretation, and eventually bring the narrative back to home ground. The technique illuminates Conlogue’s theme that “looking around us” helps us see “what’s beyond us.” His primary concern is abuse of the land but he also worries about the valuation of literary scholarship and liberal education today. The first chapter introduces water issues, beginning with drainage of contaminated runoff from flooded anthracite mines. They lead him to Robert Frost’s poem “A Brook in the City,” and the assertion that a farmer adapts to what the land offers while a city alters the land to suit its needs, here the creation of a watershed to supply its water demand. Next he moves to place-based poems. Can we fully appreciate W. S. Merwin’s poem about the massive Lackawanna furnaces without actually reading it on site? Or, in an account of underground mine fires, do we need to smell the sulfurous odor, feel the scorched earth, and see the abandoned homes to fully appreciate the poem? In the third chapter Conlogue turns to the division of the land by Early Republic surveyors and its subsequent settlement by migrants from Philadelphia competing with incomers from Connecticut who were following King Charles’s grant that set their state’s western boundary at the Pacific Ocean. This leads him to a discussion of Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Next, razing the cattle barn on the Conlogue family farm takes us to the decline of dairy farming, to Thoreau, and to a Wordsworth poem. [End Page 542] The last two chapters turn to liberal arts in college education via the International Correspondence School, which happens to be located in Scranton, and was probably the first learning-at-a-distance educational institution. The final chapter examines waste, specifically mine waste (culm) and more generally garbage such as that shipped from New York to Pennsylvania to fill worked-out open-pit mines. The coda revisits natural gas extraction first mentioned in the Introduction. The “Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes” of the subtitle are actually just one landscape, the northern anthracite coalfield. It is an early, domestic example of a global issue that Conlogue touches on but doesn’t explore extensively. Anthracite, a clean-burning fuel, gave residents of New England and the mid-Atlantic states heat in winter without the foul air that residents of London or Pittsburgh endured from burning soft coal. Delivered to seaports such as New Bedford and Fall River in Massachusetts, it freed manufacturers from dependence on waterpower, and allowed the production of textiles and machinery at lower cost to consumers than would otherwise have been possible. These were positive benefits that left the consequences of coal extraction in the mining region. The issue remains with us, now on a global scale. We export the environmental and social costs of supplying metals and minerals for the consumer-driven, throw-away society to miners and mining communities in Africa and South America. The worked-out open-pit anthracite mines Conlogue describes in Pennsylvania now can no longer contain all of New York’s waste. Workers in China and India deal with the hazardous materials in our discarded electronic devices. Would that Conlogue had explored these issues further. A few questions arise. Why the assault on the International Correspondence School for failing to provide liberal arts education...

Wordsworth Learns to Write Elegy

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth Learns to Write ElegyPamela WoofPamela Woof 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/TWC24888058 Views: 27Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.