Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This thesis deals with Dorothy Wordsworth's Rydal Journal, a journal written between 1824 and 1835, when Dorothy Wordsworth was between ages 53 and 64. The most interesting entries in the Rydal Journal include descriptions of William's political views, famous callers at Rydal Mount, church sermons Dorothy heard, books she was reading, and her relationships and correspondence with many friends and family members. In terms of structure, Dorothy's journal entries are generally quite similar over the eleven years of these volumes. Perhaps most strikingly, the vast majority begin with a record of the day's weather. Sometimes, she broadly outlines the entire day's weather (e.g., "Fine day—but still thundery" [11 July 1825]). Other times, she foregrounds the weather she woke up to or experienced in the morning (e.g., "Another fine morning—sun shines" [12 September 1826]). Regardless, throughout the entries, she intersperses events with the weather, as in this typical entry from 11 January 1827: "Very bright—Dora rides—Mrs. Arlow & 3 Norths call—I writ[in]g to Lady B. . . Lovely warm moonlight on snow—Long walk on Terrace." In this way, weather plays a central role in the Rydal Journal, for Dorothy employs weather as her primary measure of time. In what follows, I will begin by offering a short history of timekeeping before and during the Wordsworths' lifetimes, focusing particularly on the degree to which tracking and standardizing minutes and hours was becoming commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From there, I will show how, in contrast to this trend toward mechanical timekeeping, Dorothy processed time primarily through natural and climatological cycles and events during the Rydal Journal years. Dorothy's apparent rejection of clock time seems to be related to her reliance on nature, for weather time was much more lyrical than mechanical time.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2007 Jun 15

The thesis examines Thomas De Quincey’s opium use as a product of social strain. De Quincey’s collection of work provides evidence that he felt alienated from society prior to his addiction and that his feelings of inadequacy contributed to his dependence on drugs. Utilizing Robert K. Merton’s strain theory, this thesis delineates De Quincey’s aspirational references and perceived failures through an examination of his imagery and interprets his perceptions of human life as a catalyst for his compulsions to cope with opium. De Quincey, strained by the aspirations of an industrial and imperialistic society, looked for several avenues of escape. The Romanticism of William Wordsworth presented De Quincey with a method for alleviating social strain; however, when De Quincey failed to discover the transcendence evident in Lyrical Ballads he turned to the intoxicating effects of opium and retreated from English society.

In this project, I use Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Charles Dickens to trace the emergence of what I call a poetics of private life. I argue that a literature of individualized, interior domesticity developed in response to the effacement of the Scottish Enlightenment and its local specificity at a time of British assimilation. In the eighteenth century, metropolitan Scotland, buoyed by hopes of cultural and economic renewal, developed and popularized antiquarian studies of local folk culture and theories of history positing telic models of societal development. Such concepts and practices were the intellectual fruits of the universities, learned societies, and philosophical circles that typified Scotland's heavily institutionalized Enlightenment. In the wake of the Act of Union, a new literature emerged, one exchanging models of universal human progress for narratives of private life. This arc coincides with Scott's renunciation of regional, historically inflected Scottish poetry in favor of three-volume fiction and Wordsworth's corresponding need to develop an increasingly autobiographical (and generically "British") Romanticism. These dual developments would significantly alter the shape of British literature for Scott's novelistic successors such as Dickens. Thus, this dissertation resituates the emergence of British Romanticism and the nineteenth-century three-volume novel both historically and geographically, within a narrative beginning in the eighteenth century, with Scotland's assimilation into an increasingly urban, homogenous Britain.

In critical discourse surrounding the poetry of William Wordsworth, it has become generally acceptable to describe the course of the poet’s career by means of a theory of “decline.” In its most common form, this theory argues that Wordsworth’s best poetry was written during one “Great Decade” (1798-1807)—an isolated epoch of prolificacy and genius. His subsequent works, it is argued, neither surpass nor equal his initial efforts; the course of his career after 1808 may be best described in terms of declivity, ebb, and decline. Due to its ideological complicity with the very texts it engages, and due to its construction as a “myth” of criticism, the theory of decline ultimately becomes a reductive premise that precludes understanding Wordsworth’s apparent downtrend as a complex but explicable process. This study therefore seeks to provide a critical explanation for the process of decline so often observed in Wordsworth’s poetry. In essence, I contend that the perceptible downtrend in Wordsworth’s verse is the direct consequence of continuous, career-long processes of revision or self-editing. This self-editing took two forms: First, the explicit form, whereby Wordsworth actually emended his poetry; and second, the implicit form, whereby Wordsworth sought, through his poetry, to amend his self-image by constructing an autobiography tailored to fit an idealized poetic identity. This analysis thus reveals and explicates Wordsworth’s possible motives for revision—the fluctuating demands made upon the poet by the poet himself. Because these demands represent the operative (if unstable) principle underlying specific textual changes, one may infer from their character the reasons why Wordsworth’s later poetry suffers in revision. By attending to the process whereby earlier verse was continually revised in order to fit a conceptual or poetic context for which it was not originally intended, I demonstrate how the actual substance of Wordsworth’s poetry was compromised or attenuated through a reductive (re)appropriation of its own materials. Unlike many critics, I do not treat Wordsworth’s revisions as the signifiers of some external change. Instead, my approach keys upon the conflict between Wordsworth’s efforts to realize a stable poetic identity and the representational and rhetorical limitations of poetic form, particularly with regards to autobiography. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolfson, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, I argue that Wordsworth’s revisionary practices are motivated by an agonistic process best described as “autobiographical anxiety” or the “‘anxiety of influence’ turned inward.” Ultimately, I conclude that Wordsworth’s decline was the consequence of an overarching ethic of composition which, because it privileged revision as a means of changing not only poetry but the poet himself, allowed self-consciousness to become a self-defeating agent.

The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines and rule. What makes the Romantic interest in this form noteworthy is that like the other forms, they found new ways to use the sonnet as a means of poetic experimentation and creative expression. Exploring the various internal and external variations, those changes that took place within the lines and phrases of the sonnet and those that form the organizing and rhyming portions of the poem, this study seeks to establish the ways the Romantics took the uniform techniques of the sonnet and stretched its bounds to find new means of creativity. Close reading of the poems of William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals the variant use of caesura, creative dissonance, as well as original organization and rhyme scheme to accomplish purely Romantic goals within the uniformity of the sonnet form.

La presente investigación parte de dos postulados básicos: primero, la rotunda dimensión cognitiva que cabe asignar al arte; y segundo, la primacía del discurso y la experiencia estéticos frente a los modos epistémicos que dislocan conciencia y realidad por medio de múltiples dicotomías. Nuestro ámbito principal de indagación es la obra del poeta romántico William Wordsworth. Haremos especial hincapié en su producción desde 1797 hasta 1805, o sea, el período en que se perfiló el proyecto filosófico-poético cuyo impulso central es inseparable del movimiento romántico, ya que está vertebrado por los mencionados postulados sobre el valor cognitivo de lo estético y su preponderancia sobre discursos concurrentes.Así pues, el objetivo de este trabajo persigue elaborar la estructura implícita de ideas que subyace a los postulados antes mencionados y, con ello, determinar sobre qué fundamento es posible encontrar en lo estético una primacía epistemológica como la que Wordsworth y el movimiento romántico en general sostienen como piedra de toque de sus teorías. Para el despliegue de esta investigación hemos planteamos una serie de preguntas que han guiado el desarrollo general de la tesis. Nuestra estructura se ha desplegado alrededor de cuatro cuestiones principales: ¿en qué consiste la visión que otorgan el arte y el modelo de experiencia estética?; ¿en qué sentido la actitud estética deviene agente de esta verdad viva, más amplia, radical y completa?; ¿cómo se operan la comprensión y la asimilación de los modelos cognitivos reductivos de la tradición desde este nuevo modelo?; y también, como reflexión final, ¿se le otorga a la filosofía, en su sentido tradicional, un papel respecto a ello, o por el contrario se le exige una remodelación de raíz en sus modos y sus hábitos más sedimentados?A través de estas cuestiones y el análisis de los conceptos centrales del romanticismo de Wordsworth como 'imaginación', 'naturaleza', 'poesía', etc., hemos pretendido una explicitación de un modelo cognitivo radical y completo: el modelo estético del conocimiento y del saber. Este modelo asume el carácter no problemático de nuestra participación en los procesos de conocimiento y de realidad, y se estructurará alrededor de cuatro ejes centrales: percepción extensiva, significados abiertos, dinámicos e inagotables, la asunción plena de la lógica de la polaridad, y el postulado de un sustrato primordial, de una fuente o campo indiferenciado del aparecer, inherente a lo aparecido mismo y accesible por un ejercicio de agudeza perceptiva. El análisis de las nociones 'Imaginación' y 'Naturaleza' en Wordsworth nos llevará a la conclusión de su indiferenciación última, puesto que ambas apuntarán en su significa pleno y más amplio a esta realidad original entendida como apertura, como un campo integrado y unificado inherente a los fenómenos, a los cuales anima, realiza y disuelve en un juego interminable de encuentros e interrelaciones, de reciprocidades que disuelven los límites taxativos entre sensaciones, cosas e ideas. / This thesis is based on two fundamental premises: first, the deep cognitive dimension attributable to art; and second, the primacy of discourse and aesthetic experience over epistemological modes which dislocate awareness and reality through multiple dichotomies. Our principal line of inquiry is the work of the poet William Wordsworth. We shall pay special attention to his output from 1797 to 1805, that is, the period in which he outlined his philosophical-poetic project, the main thrust of which is inseparable from the Romantic movement.Thus, our aim is to construct the implicit structure of ideas underpinning the above mentioned beliefs and, through this, to determine on what basis it is possible to find an epistemological primacy, such as Wordsworth, and the Romantics in general, maintained was the touchstone of their theories, in the aesthetic. The research has been carried out employing a set of questions to guide the general development of the thesis and has been structured around four main questions: Of what does the vision provided by art and the model of aesthetic experience consist? In what sense does the aesthetic stance work as an agent of this broader, radical and complete living truth? How does the comprehension and assimilation of reductive, cognitive models of tradition work within this new model? Finally: is philosophy, in the traditional sense, given a role with respect to that new model, or on the contrary, does it demand a root and branch remodelling of philosophy's most settled modes and habits?Through these questions and the analysis of the central concepts of Wordsworth's Romanticism as "imagination", "nature" or "poetry", we shall try to form an explicit statement of a radical and complete cognitive model: an aesthetic model of knowledge and knowing. This model assumes our uncomplicated participation in the processes of knowledge and reality, and will be structured around four key concepts: extensive perception; open, dynamic and inexhaustible meanings; the full assumption of the logic of polarity; and the suggestion of a primordial substrate, of a source or an undifferentiated field of appearance inherent in what appears and accessible by exercising acute perception.

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / Published also without thesis note. "Stellingen": 2 leaves laid in. "List of books consulted": p. [194]-202.

This essay compares Wordsworth’s and Arnold’s conceptions of nature and suggests reasons for the differences found. Both poets were keenly sensitive to the leveliness of the external world, and found in nature a soothing and healing power for the troubled mind of man. Both derived sensuous enjoyment from the beauties of nature, and found in nature permanence, peace, and tranquillity. The fundamental difference in their doctrines of nature is in their conceptions of abstract nature. To Wordsworth, nature was a benevolent force which actively participated in the moral and spiritual growth of man. His was a doctrine of joy and optimism. To Arnold, nature was a great and indifferent force which man must transcend. His was a doctrine of stoicism and pessimism. The differences are mainly due to the progress in science and thought from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Wordsworth inherited the eighteenth century belief in a benevolent and all-powerful Deity, who manifested his goodness in nature. By a synthesis of this philosophy, the assumptions of associationist psychology, and his own experience, he explained the moral and spiritual growth of man. Wordsworth believed that through love of nature, man was led to love of his fellow man and of God. He believed that nature participated in man’s moral growth, through the senses, with the aid of some super-sensuous power – ‘a superadded soul’, an ‘auxilier light’, which he believed to be the imagination. Through semi-mystical and visionary experiences, he became convinced of the unity between the soul of man and the soul of nature. This was the source of his joy in nature. Arnold took for granted many of the assumptions of nineteenth century science regarding nature. Through these, and his own search for truth, he lost faith in a benevolent force in the universe. He saw no evidence of harmony or teleological purpose in nature. He found in nature only an edifying example of tranquility, steadfastness, and stoicism. The central tenet of his doctrine was of the superiority of man over nature, through his reason and conscience. On a broader basis, the change in attitude to nature between Wordsworth and Arnold is due to the changed conception of men’s place in the Chain of Being. In the eighteenth century, man held the most important earthly place in nature’s Chain of Being. In the nineteenth century, he lost that place. The Industrial Revolution created a materialistic world in which only the fittest survived economically. Biologists and zoologists reduced man to the level of all other creatures. He lost his favoured place in the Chain of Being, and for him nature lost all order and purposiveness. A pessimistic view of nature was logical and common. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate