Wordsworth's Poems Research Articles

The Last Woman in Wordsworth's Excursion

This essay argues that the story of Margaret in the first book of William Wordsworth's long poem, The Excursion (1814), prefigures a recessive strain of hopelessness in a work that casts itself as consolatory in outlook. The master trope of this pessimism derives from Last Man narratives popular in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most notably Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826). Margaret's seemingly absolute isolation following the deaths of her husband and children is not literally apocalyptic but, rather, psychological in nature, though not the less catastrophic for that. While this story and others like it in The Excursion are by no means apocalyptic narratives, their consolatory drift might be seen to beg questions of apocalyptic significance for those readers who are having none of Wordsworth's message of forbearance in the face of human suffering.

Wordsworth in Youth and Age

The encounter between youth and age is familiar to any reader of Wordsworth, who populated his early poetry with figures of advanced age. Readers of Lyrical Ballads will recall Walter Ewbanks, Michael, and Simon Lee. The dramatic energy of the poems often arises from the gap between such imagined figures of age and a callow narrator, as in Resolution and Independence. The configuration attests to Wordsworth's urgent search in his 20s and 30s to discover how one gets from an unsettled here to an unknown there, but it is a strategy that became less available as the poet aged and became a public figure. To shed light on this significant trajectory, I bring to bear a variety of perspectives, including close reading, biography, textual and book history, the relations of word and image, and reception, on a juxtaposition of The Two April Mornings and The Fountain (both 1800) and one of Wordsworth's least-known poems, To an Octogenarian (1846).

"The Ruined Cottage" and Southey's "English Eclogues"

Southey's English borrowed several themes and settings directly from Wordsworth's poetry (Jacobus 21-22), but treatment of human suffering most fully reveals originality of first version of Cottage. The Eclogues were product of Southey's visit to William Taylor in June, 1798, and were completed by end of that year. Although he had objected to Taylor's translation of Lenora in Monthly Magazine (March, 1796), Southey warmed to Taylor in person, finding him young man of fortune, much diffidence, much genius & very uncommon acquirements (Collected Letters, part 2, letter 318; hereafter, RSCL). (1) Their conversations about German poetry helped Southey define what he wanted his eclogues to achieve: purpose writing some which may be called English, as sketching features peculiar to England: not like one which you read to me of Goethe which would suit any country with Roman (RSCL 2. 338). To thank Taylor for his hospitality, Southey sent him his new poem, Old Mansion-House, a revised version of which was published following year as Eclogue I in Poems (1799). The poem Taylor read to Southey was his translation of Goethe's Der Wandrer, published in August, 1798, in Monthly Magazine. Jonathan Wordsworth has suggested that this poem, which tells story of an encounter between a Wanderer and a woman whose family lives among ruins of an ancient temple, also influenced Wordsworth's work on Cottage (263) in period after Coleridge's June, 1797, visit to Racedown. The woman in Goethe's piece, for instance, initially mistakes Wanderer for a asking him if he has brought toys,/ [o]r other ware, from town to sell i'th' country? (6-7). Both poems similarly attend to what Wordsworth termed the calm oblivious tendencies/ [o]f nature (Ruined Cottage and Pedlar, Ms. D, 504--5; hereafter, RC): in Der Wandrer, thistles cover ground, briars shade ruins, and tall grass wav[es] o'er their prostrate forms (42); in Cottage, rose and sweet-briar gone, replaced by [a] cold bare wall whose earthy top is tricked/[w]ith weeds and rank spear-grass (Ms. D, 106, 107-8). Although evidence that Wordsworth saw even a manuscript copy of Der Wandrer before June, 1798, is not strong (see Wu 68), concern in all three poems with place of human structures in natural landscape and value of those buildings to past memories and present experiences points to a broader convergence between Wordsworth' and Southey's poetry in 1797-8. Southey's Cottage, which takes reader to a poor cottage, with roof/ [p]art mouldered in, rest o'ergrown with weeds,/ [h]orse-leek and long thin grass and greener moss (Poetical Works, 5. 326, 11. 12, 13-15; hereafter, RSPW) is an obvious point of intersection, but it is only one of several pieces in which Southey responded to originality of first version of Wordsworth's Ruined Cottage and attempted to reclaim and relocate strangeness of Wordsworth's poem within a less troubling narrative frame. The version of Cottage that Wordsworth drafted in Spring, 1797, offered a way of writing about human suffering that relied on neither class nor politics; Southey briefly identified with this approach in Hannah, but poems he produced after his conversations with Taylor return to earlier, more sentimental models to justify their tales of loss and suffering. The version of Old Mansion-House that Southey sent to Taylor differed from version published in Poems (1799) as Eclogue I. At Taylor's suggestion, Southey replaced expository opening with a dialogue and changed Traveller of original version to a Stranger who is revealed, in a new final stanza, to be owner of house. Anticipating Hazlitt's criticism that the dialogues in The Excursion are soliloquies of same character, taking different views of subject (4. …

Introduction: Exploring Forgiveness in Nineteenth‐Century Poetry

AbstractThis essay serves as an introduction to the essays collected in the ‘Nineteenth‐century Poetry and Forgiveness’ cluster. It takes as its foundation the recent turn to questions of hospitality, forgiveness and gift in the intra‐disciplinary field of religion, philosophy and literature and highlights the centrality of these issues for reading nineteenth‐century poetry. The essay argues that nineteenth‐century poetry attempts to figure forgiveness as poetic sound and rhythm as a way of thinking reciprocal forgiving relationships between people. Part I contextualizes this argument and argues for an understanding of forgiveness through emotion. Part II offers an overview of the field of forgiveness scholarship and explores its relevance for nineteenth‐century debate on the topic. Part III offers a way into thinking forgiveness as sound and rhythm in Wordsworth's poem ‘Airey‐Force Valley’ through Martin Heidegger's reading of poetics and being.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the ‘strain of words | That shall be life’: ‘Home at Grasmere’ on ‘Religious Musings’ in Dove Cottage Manuscript 28

When Wordsworth's unpublished poem ‘Home at Grasmere’ was printed posthumously in the 1880s, its readers and reviewers would only describe it as ‘prose’. This article suggests that understanding what they were so offended by can illuminate aspects of Wordsworth's blank verse style whose significance we no longer intuitively sense. It dwells on one of those aspects – repetition – before going back into the compositional history of ‘Home at Grasmere’ to explore Wordsworth's deliberation about its effects and importance, in the stylistically and intellectually combative context of his earliest work on the poem, in the blank pages and margins of a printed copy of Coleridge's 1796 work ‘Religious Musings’. The article elucidates some of the arguments with ‘Religious Musings’ that Wordsworth's work on ‘Home at Grasmere’ conducts in this manuscript (now classified as DC MS. 28). In particular, it suggests that Wordsworth's divergence from and condemnation of the diction of ‘Religious Musings’ here plays an important part in his divergence from and condemnation of its treatment of sensation and suffering. It ends by suggesting an ethical dimension to the repetitions of ‘Home at Grasmere’, to which its first readers were rightly sensitive.

The Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth

TO READ DOROTHY WORDSWORTH AS AN EXPERIMENTAL WRITER, WE must investigate how nineteenth-century books of daily writing function as sites of intertextual and generic experimentation. As text objects that imitate public forms while serving private functions, such books facilitate cross-genre and cross-textual conversation, collaboration, and invention. Examining the generic and formal innovations particular to nineteenth-century books of daily writing facilitates two broader literary-historical interventions. First, investigating the history of homemade and handwritten books provides an alternative origin story for modern experimental poetry that dramatizes the overlapping public and private spheres represented by its literal and theoretical materiality. (We can think here, for example, of the late modernist mimeograph revolution, in which books of poetry were given limited print runs and sent directly to their intended audience, or of the poststructuralist turn to the materiality of print and language foundational to Language poetry.) Second, such a project provides a fresh perspective from which to approach the experience of reading. should pause for a moment to define this term, archival reading, which am using to indicate a particular type of textual criticism focused, not on process and product, but rather on the experience of encountering an text. When transcribed and removed from the archive, Dorothy Wordsworth's poems, journals, and travel writings fit neatly into the conventional genre categories of Romantic women's However, when read in their original, material contexts, the texts engage in cross-genre innovations and intertextual experiments. Writing about Emily Dickinson's processes of composition, Alexandra Socarides explains, I am talking about her actual, literal, and physical methods and processes of writing ... [i]n doing so, draw attention to the text in a historically-specific scene of writing. (1) In the pages that follow, focus on the physical forms of Dorothy Wordsworth's manuscripts in order to draw attention to the texts in a scene of material encounter. do so not to privilege the position of the literary critic but rather to accomplish two goals--to facilitate a reading of Dorothy Wordsworth as an experimental author writing in the literal and figurative margins of a literary history that she is working to construct, and to open up a conversation about how reading the experimental Dorothy Wordsworth might enrich our understanding of the Romantic inheritance. In the service of these broader arguments, this essay motivates a reading of one particular homemade book, Dorothy Wordsworth's commonplace chapbook, a circumscribed collection of poetic consolations that occurs within Wordsworth's commonplace book. The commonplace chapbook is but one small-scale example of the inventive that make up Dorothy Wordsworth's corpus, which ranges from the hand-sewn books of her travel writings, to the artful composition of her journals, to the extensive transcriptions of her brother's poetry, to the poems that cluster and fragment and fill out and break off across her journals, notebooks, albums, and commonplace book. These writings are at once public and private, communal and directed, occasional and lyrical, written for a reader and indifferent to her presence. Following Felicity Nussbaum, we might conceptualize these works as borderline genres connected to immediate social relationships as well as to trans-historical, projected understandings of Wordsworth's position in relation to literary fame. (2) To sift through Dorothy Wordsworth's literary output is to encounter writings that transcend, ironize, and imitate print culture in order to create hybrid texts and experiences of reading. In addition to contributing to a broader understanding of nineteenth-century literary experiments, working through the commonplace chapbook facilitates a more localized argument, namely, that we must attend to Dorothy Wordsworth's manipulation of published and quotidian forms and of the materiality of text more generally, if we are to understand her as an early experimental writer. …

Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze

In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem, The Ruined Cottage, in terms of the importance of the Pedlar, who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence, as exemplified by the trope of wandering, and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the second version of the poem (1798). While recognizing the strength of earlier critics, particularly the New Historicists, who emphasized Wordsworth's displacement of social and material reality into nature, Berman argues that wandering, both in its physical form, and as metaphor for impermanence, undermines the quest for permanence, complicating thematically and linguistically, our efforts to wrest any coherent interpretation from the text. Instead of relying on the Hegelian Aufhebung as dominant paradigm, a critical interpretation based on a "Deleuzian" structure may be more fruitful in helping us understand the challenges Wordsworth faced when writing the poem – and, in particular, his conceptualization of nature – and better appreciate its power, even while acknowledging that, to adopt this paradigm works against the grain of Wordsworth's own text.

Highland Emigration and the Transformation of Nostalgia in Romantic Poetry

This essay examines Scottish Highlanders as both objects of and participants in British Romanticism by bringing into conversation Gaelic song and English-language poetry about Highland emigration. Together, Gaelic song and English-language poetry reveal Highland emigration's role in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation of nostalgia from pathology to sentiment. By tracing representations of emigration through Gaelic songs by John MacCodrum, Calum Bàn MacMhannain and John MacDonald, and English-language poetry by Anne Grant and Felicia Hemans, the essay shows how nostalgia emerged from the specific context of the Highland Clearances to become a more generalized Romantic condition. The essay then turns to some of Wordsworth's poems inspired by his 1803 and 1831 visits to Scotland to argue that although the Clearances seem to have made little impact on “high” Romanticism, the nostalgia that they represented not only permeated English-language poetic representations of Highlands and Highlanders but may also have been absorbed by Gaelic-speaking poets. In a kind of literary-historical feedback loop, Gaelic poets' depictions of emigration were influenced by English-language representations of Gaelic emigration songs.

“A love for things that have no feeling”: Dorothy Wordsworth's Significant Others

Dorothy Wordsworth's infrequently-cited poem, “Loving & Liking,” offers a theory of love as an ethical relation to human and nonhuman others. This essay reads the poem with passages from the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals, exploring the various ways in which Wordsworth is responsive to objects and things that seem to distinguish themselves to her, standing out from their surroundings to catch her attention as individuals worthy of careful and extended engagement. Through the terms of this engagement, a tree is not simply an elm tree but what she calls “a creature by its own self”; a waterfall not only stands “upright by itself,” but also is “its own self.” Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, this essay identifies these objects and things in Wordsworth's work as “significant others.” Bringing the aesthetic and natural historical discourses of the Romantic period into conversation with current post-humanist and ecocritical ones, this essay explores the role of a special form of description in Dorothy's relationships to nonhuman others.

The Work of Genre: Labor, Identity, and Modern Capital in Wordsworth and Verga

Few nineteenth-century authors were as prescient as william wordsworth and giovanni verga in grasping what karl marx referred to as capitalism's power to accelerate the “wheel of history” (64). Although neither writer speculated directly on the capitalist system, each manipulated literary form to show how the new free-market ethos affected the lives of workers and, more broadly, the relation between personal and professional identity. Wordsworth's poem “Michael” (1800) and Verga's novelI Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree[1881]) explore how a traditional type of labor, shepherding in “Michael” and fishing inI Malavoglia, is transformed by the advent of modern capital. This essay considers how shifts in labor suggest a literary transformation, as elements of genre in each work—the pastoral in Wordsworth's lyric, the epic in Verga's novel—are rendered obsolete by new networks of discourse pegged to modern economic practices.

Historicism, Formalism, and “Tintern Abbey”

This article responds to Marjorie Levinson's groundbreaking historicist study Wordsworth's Great Period Poems. Beginning with a reading Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” I give a different account of how we might approach the politics of Wordsworth's poetry – namely, by acknowledging Wordsworth's exploration of the interconnection between poetic and institutional forms. I relate this account to several themes that I explore in my own writing on Romantic literature and the history of secular institution-building and penal reform; I close by considering how my arguments depart from recent, competing accounts of literary form.

Roads, Rivers, Railways and Pedestrian Rambles: The Space and Place of Travel in William Wordsworth's Poems and J. M. W. Turner's Paintings

Roads, Rivers, Railways and Pedestrian Rambles: The Space and Place of Travel in William Wordsworth's Poems and J. M. W. Turner's Paintings

Sign, Sensation and the Body in Wordsworth's “Residence in London”

This article argues that although a layer of readable or decodable experience is crucial to Wordsworth's London, and has been a fundamental focus for critics, it co-exists inextricably with a layer of tonal or extra-semantic experience (rhythm, pitch, intensity, lustre). While the former implies a mental separation between spectator and object, the latter implicates embodiment (the body's movements, sensations, responses and contacts) in the midst of city life. The poetic distance that is characteristically sought by Wordsworth to make sense of the city's chaotic and problematic signifying regime is hence undermined by the entangling of the poet's own body in the rhythms and tonalities of the urban space. In particular, two fundamental recuperations of the city's semantic monstrosity (the blind beggar and St. Bartholomew's fair) depend on steady and stable observing stances that are subverted when the body is read back into the poem. However, as I argue when considering the issue of a produced or culturally stratified body in the wider context of organism and natural communities, this is no accident. Eighteenth-century empiricism demands that habitual and stable structures of perception are constructed from a chaotic firmament of atomic sensations, vibrations and impressions. The shock and novelty of London in Wordsworth's poem exposes this, showing how fragile and reversible the terms of organic unity actually are.

Wordsworth and Reading Verse

By learning from Wordsworth's account of how readers experience verse, I argue, current scholars could increase their sensitivity to elusive social and historical dimensions of poems. If, as Wordsworth asserts, readers' experiences of verse are conditioned by their historical expectations, then critics should ask how qualities of metrical language prominent in their own experiences of a poem might have carried historically specific meanings for that poem's initial readers. Scholars can make informed surmises about those meanings by considering the experiences implied in past vocabularies and practices of literary reception and evaluation. This would also help critics better appreciate the historical and social significance of the conflict within Wordsworth's poems between interpretive mastery and unforeseen response. I try to demonstrate the potential benefit of these considerations by applying them to my own close interpretation of Wordsworth's A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags from Lyrical Bal...

Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity by David Simpson

David Simpson. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 292. $99. David Simpson's gorgeously written, audacious study gives us a haunted Wordsworth, an occupant and observer of a modern capitalist world's ghost-ridden dark and twilight zones (3). By characterizing him these terms, Simpson is part calling attention how obsessively William Wordsworth's verse treats figures--like the discharged soldier of Prelude, Book 4, the old Cumberland beggar, or Margaret The Ruined Cottage--who are spooky their de-animated, death-in-life demeanor and their tragic disconnection from human sociality. He is also underlining how Wordsworth's self-representations partake of the same spectrality, so that the poet somehow wanders lonely even when, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals indicate, he ought by rights describe himself as enjoying company. To approach this Romantic ghost world Simpson takes a path distinct from that followed by the many Romanticists who, while aligning Wordsworth and Freud, have foregrounded the elegiac strain verse that seems forever be rehearsing loss (of Lucy, of a younger self, of his brother John) and that brings the dead back only lose them once more. spectrality this book treats is likewise misapprehended if construed as a link connecting Wordsworth the Romantic period's Gothic tales and ballads and so as yet another indication that a poet his day perforce lived (as Thomas Love Peacock complained) in the days that are and was obliged make exploded superstition and premodern custom his stock-in-trade. On the contrary, the ghost-seeing recorded by Wordsworth's verse and demanded of his readers is not the product of a backward look, but rather, Simpson insists, a marker of this poet's ongoing relevance. Wordsworth's specters express the conditions of their time, which is ... still our time and as far as we can see the time still come (11). poetry which they feature is the vehicle of an unresolved history we still inhabit (13), one reason Simpson has found himself returning it, making this his third book on Wordsworth (Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real appeared 1982, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination 1987). In its dramatization of indigence, dislocation, and disconnection, guilt and sorrow, Wordsworth's poetics of modernity represents, Simpson avers, a signal resource with which theorize the conditions of human existence a modern lifeworld shaped by the achieved dominance of the commodity form. In Specters of Marx--a key resource for this argument--Derrida pondered the claim about the specter haunting Europe that had opened Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto and noted that there are several times of the specter. By returning, the revenant might testify either to a living past or a living future. capitalist societies who post-1989 triumphally declared communism history--obsolescent, a dead end--should have remembered, Derrida suggests, that precisely never dying the ghost remains both to come-back and to come (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Routledge, 1994], 99). Through brilliant readings of an immense range of Wordsworth's poems, Simpson seeks a similar fashion rebuke accounts of Wordsworth as history, a figure so distant time from us as be over and done with. (Generally this is his students' response, he notes an Introduction whose attention the travails of pedagogy will, for many academic readers, occasion gleams of recognition and remembered sensations of sad perplexity.) For Simpson, the ghostly figures Wordsworth's works, rather than blasts from the past, haunt the present from the present itself (145). Thus Simpson's Wordsworth finally places little credit the Burkean traditionalism and attendant notions of an organic social solidarity that he sometimes espoused. He is notable, rather, for his insight into the abstraction, hollowness, and deadness that commodification introduces into human relations. …

“Striking Passages”: Memory and the Romantic Imprint

BURIED IN THE MIDDLE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE'S BIOGRAPHIA literaria (1817) is an unusual little paragraph, one that (unsurprisingly) offers critique of Wordsworth's poetic theory based on elusive mechanisms of (surprisingly) disordered memory. According to Coleridge, the pleasure received Wordsworth's poems being less derived either excitement of curiosity or rapid flow of narration, passages form larger proportion of their value. (1) And these striking passages, Coleridge continues, find their own independent life in memory of their reader: many people confess that from no modem work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times (2:106). Isolating themselves in they arise, we're told, reference to poem in which they are found (2:106). This decontexmalization and subsequent relocation of such passages matters to Coleridge in part because he sees it as effect of an historical shift in relationship of poetry to memory, one explicitly linked to invention of print culture: Before introduction of printing, and in still greater degree, before introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at beginning of words, as in Pierce Plouman, or at end as in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting recollection, and consequently preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. (2:67) In an oral culture, then, memorization of poetry was facilitated by its rhythmic consensus, its integrity as series. But this changed, Coleridge says, with introduction of print. Recent criticism has sought to reconsider traditional critical interpretation of Romanticism--and Coleridge in particular--as invested primarily in organic theories of voice and speech, looking instead for signs of its engagement with specifically print culture. Celeste Langan, for example, has suggested that Coleridge's Christabel enacts an explicit move away orality as medium of transmitting and recording meaning. Langan sees Coleridge's Romantic project in terms of nostalgia for 'oral' culture of ballad but rather as an exploration of ballad meter as sign of 'narration without narrator,' as sign of writing-as-citation rather than of speech. (2) Coleridge's view of poetry in print culture revises way poetry is seen to function in relation to reader's mouth, but it also revises poetry's relationship to reader's memory: Coleridge implies that poetry operates within memory in ways that are irregular, striking, and self-replicating. And, while sources of this implication are varied, Coleridge's poetic technology generally relies very much on new understanding of memory as physiological, one that grows out of Enlightenment materialist philosophy and early Romantic medical science. Linda Austin identifies in this newly embodied memory privileging of repetition and iterability over authenticity: a mnemonic process governed by physiology is unbeholden to recollected, cognitive past and can generate aesthetic pleasure that thrives, correspondingly, on copies and replicas. (3) Coleridge's responsiveness to print culture and to materialist physiology together make his understanding of poetry and memory stand in sharp contrast to Wordsworthian poetics of context, association, and recollection: emotion recollected in tranquility. (4) But what happens, more particularly, when poetry is memorized without rhythmic context provided by regular meter? And what happens when we memorize poetry by reading it printed page? These were key questions not only for Romantic poets but also for Romantic physiologists of memory and hallucination. Just as, for Coleridge, excerpted passages in Wordsworth's poetry possess an independent force that can start up anew in mind, so hallucinations were theorized as sensory images decontextualized, relocated, and involuntarily recalled--a move that, I will argue, depends on this newly physiological understanding of memory as somatic repository imprinted with past sensory experiences. …

'Churchill's Grave': A Response to Wordsworth's Excursion

Highlighting William Wordsworth's unsatisfying conclusion to The Excursion, this essay suggests that in 'Churchill's Grave: A Fact Literally Rendered' Byron directly addresses the problematic ending of Wordsworth's poem. While acknowledging Byron's claim that 'Churchill's Grave' is a serious imitation of Wordsworth, the essay argues that Byron's poem is simultaneously a pointed critique of The Excursion, concluding with a rejection of the Wordsworthian doctrine that graves offer access to a higher truth. In 'Churchill's Grave', Byron insists that we cannot gain any wisdom from the dead, but can and should instead find truth in the words of the living. The poem adds to our understanding of Byron's equivocal attitude towards Wordsworth, as a man and poet he greatly admired but also deplored.

Toward a Book History of William Wordsworth's 1850Prelude

This essay argues for the necessity of a book history of the 1850 first edition of William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude, which is currently a liber non gratus: a marginalized, unwelcome book. Editing of and scholarship on The Prelude since 1926 have promoted earlier, manuscript versions at the expense of the 1850 edition, despite accepting it as a "fact of literary history". Thus, attention to the material life of the 1850 poem with Victorian readers — such as in criticism and biographies of Wordsworth, and the giving of books as gifts — recovers its significance to our conceptions of nineteenth-century literary history.

In Memoriam Michael Riffaterre: An Introduction

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Michael Riffaterre, who taught at Columbia for almost fifty years and was editor of the Romanic Review for three decades (1970-2000), died on May 27, 2006. Sadly, therefore, my first official gesture as incoming general editor of the journal is to pay homage to him. Having been his student and also his editorial assistant for a number of years, I would like to open this memorial collection by offering up some personal reminiscences of Michael Riffaterre. The first time I saw him was in the classroom. The semester I began my graduate studies at Columbia, in the fall of 1985, he was offering a seminar on Proust. I still remember the course description, which was at once admirably concise and absolutely horrifying: close textual reading of A la recherche du temps perdu and related texts. And related texts! So intimidating did I find this that, despite my intention to study Proust, I decided not to take the course, as I had read only the first volume. Nonetheless, I went to the first class meeting, as I wanted to see the great man in action. Once I had done so there was no turning back. His presence in the classroom was so electrifying--so dynamic, witty, provocative--that there was no longer any question of not taking the course. I signed on for the Proust seminar (which was to determine the entire course of my academic career), as well as both semesters of Theory of Literature, and then all the seminars he offered while I was in residence: Baudelaire; Rimbaud; Surrealista; Balzac. The titles of these seminars were never more specific than the name of the author or movement in question, which was entirely fitting as he confidently assumed the comprehensiveness of his own approach. The idea, it seemed, was that the course in question would provide essentially all one needed to know about the subject. We would obviously not discuss all of Balzac, e.g., but we would analyze what we did discuss so thoroughly that anything else would naturally follow from what we had done in class. And this method worked astonishingly well: among other things it enabled me to face all subsequent teaching situations with equanimity, through a combination of the model provided and the wealth of information gained in his classes. His seminars were always exciting events: always keenly anticipated, sometimes negatively. Dread was not an unknown emotion among those preparing to give a presentation. Each Wednesday at 4 after the end of the class, all the students were to be found either waiting with the others in front of his door during his office hours or else downstairs in the graduate lounge, animatedly--and sometimes combatively--discussing the class over tea and cookies. He terrified us. Giving a presentation in his seminar was a deeply trying ordeal, alternatively exhilarating or gut-wrenching; often both. Watching presentations given by others was also challenging, in its way. I have the impression he did not realize how frightening he was. Some felt he was sadistic, looking for occasions to humiliate students. I never thought so; it seemed clear to me from the beginning that what he wanted was for the student to defend him- or herself. He was often unpredictable, but never unfair. He was the most demanding interlocutor imaginable, and by the same token the most intimidating. This was helpful beyond all measure: after him nothing seemed daunting. Once in a while he asked us a question in class. It was always a trap: not necessarily meant as such (I was never sure), but the mere fact that he had suddenly asked a question made it a trap. Everyone tried to answer; no one ever really succeeded, to my recollection. This was mostly a testimony to how intimidated we all were. I remember distinctly one example: about the Wordsworth poem Written on Westminster Bridge, he asked the Theory of Literature class which single word did not go with the rest. …

Wordsworth, Joseph Johnson, and the Salisbury Plain Poems

Previous articleNext article No AccessJoseph Johnson MLA 2008: A Selection of Papers on Joseph JohnsonWordsworth, Joseph Johnson, and the Salisbury Plain PoemsJoseph ByrneJoseph Byrne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 40, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043452 Views: 7Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.