In the introductory definition of spots of time, Wordsworth claims that these important childhood episodes are virtuous and worthy of celebration. This definition is incongruous with the episodes considered independently, because they reveal themselves as essentially disturbing memories. As he revised the spots of time, Wordsworth attempted to mitigate the disturbing nature of the episodes, betraying his need to repress certain undesireable aspects of the early texts. / The following study is a Freudian reading of Wordsworth's spots of time in their various stages of revision. The Introduction to this study addresses some of the problems of interpretation. Chapter One places a Freudian reading of Wordsworth within the context of previous scholarship. Chapter Two is a close reading of the earliest spots of time as informed by Oedipal memories. Chapter Three examines Wordsworth's attempt, through revision, to repress these Oedipal memories.

Introduction: This present essay is an analysis of the place of man and nature in [Wordsworth's] poetry ... I have been concerned essentially with trying to discover how Wordsworth used his two most prominent poetic subjects. I have attempted to trace Wordsworth's development from the poet of nature, to the poet of man, and finally to the poet of man and nature. What I have hoped would emerge from this essay is an understanding of Wordsworth's relationship with nature and his attitude to it in the poems. I have attempted to stress that man and humanity were not always important to Wordsworth as a poet, and that their importance does not eventually equal that of nature. For by 1807 man, the mind of man and humanity in general are very much more important and much more vital as poetic subjects than is nature. I have tried to show that Wordsworth was at different times a poet of landscape descriptions, a poet interested only in man and humanity, and finally a poet interested in man within nature.

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This text recontextualizes Wordsworth's writings by showing the ways in which they question the assumptions about "philosophy" and "poetry" that have been constructed within the field of Cartesian dualisms. It employs the ideas of classical rhetoricians, particularly Isocrates and Quintilian, contemporary rhetorical thinkers such as Kenneth Burke, and twentieth-century scientists, particularly Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, and Antonio Damasio, to show that Wordsworth's efforts to establish connections between mind and body, mind and world, and feeling and thinking were coherent and highly relevant rather than simply paradoxical. And it argues that Wordsworth's writings embody his effort to develop a "rhetorical epistemology" or an "epistemic rhetoric" that could counterbalance the dangers of the reductive scientific epistemology of his time.Employing his knowledge of classical rhetoric, particularly Quintilian, and his own sense of the complexities of perception and representation, Wordsworth developed a model of knowing founded on personal experience, representation, relationship, and revision rather than on the establishment of "demonstrable" or "objective" knowledge. His model, like Gregory Bateson's "ecology of mind," was built on an integrated view of mind and world. He believed that perception, feeling, thinking and acting were related in a continuum of mental process (rather than being separate categories), and that individual minds had a mutually-shaping, integrative relationship with what he saw as larger mindlike processes (particularly "Nature").Within this ecology of mind, Wordsworth positioned poetry as a mental process which completed science by providing the means for joining fact and value, "objective knowledge" and personal meaning, reflection and participation. In his construction, poetry was to be an accessible, experience-based discourse of learning and knowing. He aimed to return poetry to its origins, not in "primitive utterance of feelings" but in "poesis" or meaning-making.By countering the assumptions of scientific epistemology, and offering a vital alternative, he sought to reshape and revalue poetry, to broaden his society's narrowing view of knowledge, and to reconstitute moral vision and belief in a society on its way to terminal doubt. His model of knowing is worth considering as we reshape our own views of knowing in the late twentieth century. / Department of English

The Italianate Wordsworth is a study of William Wordsworth's enduring interest in Italian literature and culture -- an important aspect of his intellectual life and creativity to which no previous book has been devoted. Of all the first-generation Romantics, Wordsworth was the most influenced by Italian poetry and aesthetics. The roots of his passion for the Italian language stretch back to the earliest stages of his imaginative development and extend throughout his life. His voluminous reading of and recurrent engagement with Italian texts -- as translator and imitator -- began in the late 1780s, when he was under the tutelage of Agostino Isola at Cambridge University. Wordsworth translated works by Petrarch, the paradigmatic Italian sonneteer, in 1789-90; by Ludovico Ariosto, the master of epic romance, between 1789 and 1795, in 1802, and in 1815; by Pietro Metastasio, author of popular songs and melodramas, in 1802-1803; by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the artist, poet, and polymath, in 1804 and again in 1839-1840; and by Gabriello Chiabrera, the epitaphist, in 1809-10 and 1837. Wordsworth's immersion in Italian culture became complete in 1837 when, at the age of sixty-seven, he made an extended visit to Italy. During the four months of this sojourn he was able, after years of dedicated reading and translation of major Italian texts from the foundational Trecento to the pre-Romantic Enlightenment, to realize fully his connection with Italy. In the period that followed, he composed poems that addressed various aspects of Italian history, politics, and culture; and in the last collection of poetry he published in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), he included a series of twenty-eight poetic reflections entitled "Memorials of a Tour in Italy." This dissertation sheds light not only on Wordsworth's debt to Italian culture but also on our inherited ideas about the English Romantic relationship to Italy. Given the emphasis traditionally placed on the Italianate leanings of the second-generation Romantics, the impact of Italian literature on the mind and writings of a first-generation poet like Wordsworth has been largely forgotten. Thus the "Italianate Wordsworth" comes as something of a surprise. Time and again, he expresses his veneration for the style and sensibility of Italian poets from Dante to Tasso, often going so far as to emulate their techniques and adopt their cadences in his original English verse. As a poet, scholar, translator, and traveler, he is receptive to all that Italian civilization provides.

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