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<p>Wordsworth is a mythopoeic or mythmaking poet. While the fell-sides, sheep-folds, and mountain roads of Cumberland-Westmorland provide an external reality in which his dramas can unfold, and while the shepherds, fell-folk, and travellers offer him the dramatis personae to people this natural stage, the drama is also, and perhaps even more so, an inner psychological ritual played upon the stage of Wordsworth's psyche, and the actors are just as much gods and goddesses and titans, representing the psychic forces which come into play in the various stages of his spiritual progress, as they are people.</p> <p>If one is to see this drama clearly, then, one must adjust one's eyesight as well to the dark inner landscape of the psyche in order to realize the full scope and quality of Wordsworth's pastoral. As he plainly warns us in the Preface to the 1814 Excursion, we must look</p> <p>Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man-My haunt, and the main region of my song.</p> <p>Those people who, by their own unwitting habit, see only the outer landscape--the outer light of consciousness is so bright that they fail to see the shadows--will have only a one-dimensional view of his poetry, for, like all Titans, Wordsworth is a creature of the caves and mountain bases, and a good portion of him is inside and underground.</p> <p>In the earlier and more real part of his poetic career--the period of Lyrical Ballads, the fell-side tragedies, the 1805 Prelude--Wordsworth knows the true source of his energy, speaks and acts like a true son of Mother Earth, like a Prometheus unbound, and defends her interests as he knows how to do. The poetry is rich, insightful, and positive. There is noticeable, however, even as early as the 1805 Prelude, a conflict of allegiance developing in his work in which he reveals a being at odds with himself because his ego--with its illusions about human perfection and its unrealistic evaluation of himself as an epic poet with mastery over an external and public order of truth--is totally ignorant of another Wordsworth which is sleeping and unconscious--a source from which he needs to find out that life and people are imperfect and from which he could understand that his talents or propensities were better suited to pastoral--an internal and private order of experience.</p> <p>Such a conflict, if not healed by a fruitful communication between the two parts of his personality, can result in unhealthy polarization and even in disaster for his entire being. Wordsworth may have avoided disaster for a time by taking some cognizance of the pressures of his mortal or animal self and by adjusting his viewpoint to some extent to allow for its needs. But, obviously, he has not understood the warning of his unconscious (Dream of the Arab in Book V, and the Simplon Pass passage of Book VI, of The Prelude) soon enough or fully enough, for, instead of compensating for his excess idealism, he turns upon the oracle of his truth as though she were his enemy, and sets up exaggerated ego defences against her, secretly dreading her power. He gains a certain amount of outer security at the price of inner security and the death of his imagination.</p> <p>The Excursion (1814) illustrates the retrogressed and negative view of life he has come to hold as a result of his distrust and fear of the imaginative life, and also reveals him as almost totally unfit for any kind of epic endeavor or poetry aiming at a social and external order of truth.</p> <p>Since Wordsworth, as a poet, presumes to steal fire from heaven while he is grounded in the fire of the inferno-. tries to be an epic poet when he is really a pastoral one-he is caught at the deadly point of opposition between the warring principles of life, is fused and turned into stone, a Prometheus bound for his presumption, no longer having an inner life of his own or fighting for the truth of suffering humanity, but sounding hollowly as the oracle or propagandist of the otherworldly wisdom of the sky gods or aristocrats. For the balance of his long life, he is nothing but a fallen one, a titan groaning under the weight of the world, a "voice of ruin" unable to do anything but echo the barren clich6s of reactionary authority.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>The categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful, popularized during the eighteenth century, are central to Wordswordth's major poem The Prelude. In this poem, phrases which pair off fear or terror and love obviously recall Burke's theory of the Sublime as having to do with ideas of self-preservation and the beautiful with ideas of love and society. In book 1 of The Prelude Wrdsworth interprets his formative experiences in terms of solitude and society. experiences of fear and friendship. This interpretation governs the entire poem, though in the final books Wordsworth deprecates his tendency to respond excessively to the sublime. Other ideas of the sublime than Burke's also affected his powerfully. The theme of the mind's steady acquisition of power through The Prelude; it is stated at the conclusion of book VII and in the "Climbing of snowdom" episode of book XIII. This there is a modification of the 17th and 18th century, which examines the mind's attributes to the mind's activities when it confronts grand and wast forms, and attributes to the mind capacities of expansion and elevation. In this own essay, "The Sublime and the Beautiful", belonging to the same period as his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth elaborated this idea, claiming that the mind is likely to respond in terms of either awe or elevation when it confronts forms combining "individuality of form" with "duration" and "power". In The Prelude significant experience, involving the arousal and excersie of imagination, generally arises from some combination of simplicity, duration and power in phenomena. Wordsworth's interest in the sublime and beautiful developed through conventional, sensationalist response to the mountaous Lake district environment of his boyhood, and to the alpine regon he visited in 1790. But gradually he evolved a series of laws, stated in "The Sublime and the Beautiful" and implied in The Prelude, which accounted for the imaginative significance of sublime phenomena in terms of their ability to suggest unity, infinity and power. These qualities, once precieved, provided emblems of the imagination, explores its powers, and links it with sublimity. At the end of the poem, however, Wordsworth attaches equal importance to love and beauty. After the crisis of the French Revolution his sister Dorthy, Marry Hutchinson and Coleridge helped to restore his faith in man and nature by directing his attention to the beautiful. The Prelude therefore suggests that the beautiful is fundamentally important in promoting moral and spiritual health. But the poem's major theme is the growth of a poet's mind and imagination, and it is the sublime that is consistently yoked with imaginative vitality.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The aim of this thesis is to show, by means of a chronological study of poverty as treated in the poetry dating from the early 1790's to 1807, that Wordsworth's treatment of this topic was both highly politicized and unusually probing. To look at his treatment of poverty is also to gain some understanding of his changing political and social views over these years. He began writing about poverty and the poor in a period in which picturesque and/or sentimental ways of viewing poverty alternated with moralisitically judgmental ways. His approach and attitudes are soon seen to be different. After a period of fervent protest at the very existence of poverty, he proceeds to probe the more hidden costs, to the indigent, of poverty, an approach which is less overtly polemical. This study seeks to demonstrate that this stage is no less committed, and, indeed, comprises an insightful analysis of the social and psychological damage consequent on poverty, damage now widely recognised as one of the major costs of poverty both to the individual and to the state. Furthermore, Wordsworth becomes concerned with the alienation both from the self and from the other consequent on poverty. It is this that he recognises as a major, yet rarely acknowledged, component of poverty. He recognises too, his increasing inability to understand the impoverished other. Conscious of the divide that separates the privileged from the indigent, he can only wonder at, and acknowedge, the powers of endurance of which some seem capable. From such examples he, in his precarious vocation of poet, can learn much. Such admiration of the reolution and independence apparent in some of the indigent leads him to espouse values and judgments which tend to differentiate clearly between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Although such attitudes become increasingly prevalent in Wordsworth after 1807, the work of the preceding years remains a rare, forceful and multi-dimensional cry of protest against poverty.

My thesis studies Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to redress the unjust neglect of Hartley’s work, and to reach a more positive understanding of Dorothy’s conflicted literary relationship with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I provide a complete reassessment of the often narrowly read prose and poetry of these two critically marginalized figures, and also investigate the relationships that affected their lives, literary self-constructions, and reception; in this way, I restore a more accurate account of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers, and also highlight both the inhibiting and cathartic affects of writing from within a familial literary context. My analysis of the writings of Hartley and Dorothy and the dialogues in which they engage with the works of STC and William, argues that both Hartley and Dorothy developed a strong relational poetics in their endeavour to demarcate their independent subjectivities. Furthermore, through a survey of the significance of the sibling bond – literal and figurative – in the texts and lives of all these writers, I demonstrate a theory of influence which recognizes lateral, rather than paternal, kinship as the most influential relationship. I thus conclude that authorial identity is not fundamentally predetermined by, and dependent on, gender or literary inheritance, but is more significantly governed by domestic environment, familial readership, and immediate kinship. My thesis challenges the long-standing misconceptions that Hartley was unable to achieve a strong poetic identity in STC’s shadow, and that Dorothy’s independent authorial endeavour was primarily thwarted by gender. To replace these misreadings, I foreground the successful literary independence of both writers: my approach reinstates Hartley Coleridge’s literary standing as a major poet who bridged Romanticism and Victorian literature, and promotes Dorothy Wordsworth as one of the finest descriptive writers of nature and relationship.

Consacrée au rapport idéologique entre le romantisme anglais et les Lumières françaises (aboutissant à la Révolution de 1789), cette thèse entend combler une lacune critique sur des échanges intellectuels reconnus et méconnus. Parmi les auteurs anglais, ces liens entre les cultures lettrées anglaises et françaises se sont très clairement manifestés sous la plume de William Wordsworth (1770-1850), initié à la pensée des Lumières par le capitaine militaire français Michel Beaupuy (1755-1796). Notre recherche évalue la dette contractée par Wordsworth envers des auteurs majeurs des Lumières dans le traitement de quatre sujets clés : la démocratie, la sensibilité, la religion et le langage. Cette thèse vise également à mettre en évidence le développement original de ces thèmes dans les oeuvres poétiques de Wordsworth. Pour ce faire, nous avons choisi d'articuler notre étude autour de comparaisons et d'analyses de textes. Le premier chapitre est consacré au Contrat social (1762) de Rousseau, le second à La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) de Rousseau, le troisième à Zadig (1747) de Voltaire, et le dernier chapitre à VEssai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) de Condillac. Bien que les sujets et les oeuvres abordés soient apparemment disparates, l'ensemble est intimement lié à l'épanouissement de l'oeuvre poétique de Wordsworth : cette contribution effective sous-tend et justifie leur traitement dans une même étude. Sur le plan théorique, l'argumentaire de cette thèse se base sur la théorie poétique de Harold Bloom, telle qu'exposée dans The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Faisant appel à la notion freudienne du complexe d'OEdipe, fondée sur la rivalité palpable entre père et fils pour l'amour de la mère, Bloom constate qu'une rivalité semblable existe entre les poètes et leurs modèles d'inspiration poétiques. Cette opposition permet à terme de se distinguer comme poète ou, pour reprendre le terme de Bloom, comme poète « fort ». L'étude intertextuelle menée ici montrera comment Wordsworth s'établit comme « poète fort », via ses sources d'inspiration.

Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Diss., 2006

[pt] O trabalho apresenta traduções comentadas de seis poemas situados no longo século XIX, conceito criado pelo historiador britânico Eric Hobsbawm para descrever o período compreendido entre a Revolução Francesa e o início da Primeira Guerra Mundial (1789-1914). Os poemas escolhidos foram escritos como reações a guerras, conflitos ou revoluções que se passaram no continente europeu, mais especificamente à Revolução Francesa (Is it a reed, de William Wordsworth), às Guerras Napoleônicas (Poetical essay on the existing state of things, de Percy Bysshe Shelley, apesar de não ser apenas sobre isso, e Napoleon s farewell (from the French), de Lord Byron), à Primavera das Nações (To a foil d European revolutionaire, de Walt Whitman) e à Primeira Guerra Mundial (On being asked for a war poem e The Second Coming, ambos de William Butler Yeats). / [en] This thesis features commented translations of six poems written during the long nineteenth century, a term coined by British historian Eric Hobsbawm for the period between the French Revolution and the start of the First World War (1789-1914). The chosen poems were written as responses to wars, conflicts or revolutions that were happening in Europe, more specifically the French Revolution (Is it a reed , by William Wordsworth), the Napoleonic Wars (Poetical essay on the existing state of things, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, even though it deals not only with that, and Napoleon s farewell (from the French), by Lord Byron), the Springtime of Nations (To a foil d European revolutionaire, by Walt Whitman) and the First World War (On being asked for a war poem and The Second Coming, both by William Butler Yeats).

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed an imaginative mass migration as authors wrote about withdrawing from society. This thesis traces the origins of 'Romantic reclusion' in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth, particularly Cowper's poem The Task and Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork The Recluse, which epitomise the tradition. Romantic reclusion differs from 'solitude' and 'retirement' in that its motives were social. Cowper and Wordsworth wrote about withdrawing in order to criticise the increasing commercialism and competition they saw in British society. Both poets imagined seceding into a community of individuals who would care for a shared set of values, envisaging this as a form of non-violent political protest leading to reform. The thesis builds on recent studies of Romantic community, and develops Raymond Williams's cultural criticism, to refute the New Historicist position that Romantic writing elides history. It proceeds by historicising Cowper's and Wordsworth's concepts of reclusion, tracing echoes of their extensive reading about this subject in what they wrote. Romantic reclusion emerges as an artistic attempt to defend the individual against the dehumanising effects of contemporary society. Its aims can be grouped under four interrelated headings-'creative', 'medical', 'political', and 'natural'-which form the basis of the chapter divisions. Chapter One argues that Cowper and Wordsworth both presented Milton as a precedent for their poetic reclusion. They withdrew from literary society and cut themselves off from the diction of eighteenth-century poetry, because they believed that it turned words into luxury items which could only be purchased by the imaginations of a few. Cowper's translations of Madame Guyon and Wordsworth's modernisations of Chaucer both attempted to develop a plain style which would unite a wider, non-hierarchical community of readers. Chapter Two explores the origins of Cowper's reclusion in his spiritual crisis of 1763-5. Beginning with a study of medical books owned by Cowper's doctor, Nathaniel Cotton, it argues that Cotton regarded Cowper's illness as a product of eighteenth-century models of sociability. Both Cowper and Wordsworth employed Robert Burton's concept of 'Honest Melancholy', or sorrow for the state of one's country, to critique social competition and call for new models of community. Chapter Three examines Cowper's and Wordsworth's presentations of reclusion as the best response to the violence of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on the works of Classical and modern historians, both poets argued that political revolutions would only succeed once individuals learned to renounce self-interest and govern their selfish passions. The 'retired man' becomes the unexpected political hero of The Task, which in turn forms the basis for Wordsworth's conception of The Recluse. Finally, Chapter Four explores Cowper's and Wordsworth's interests in natural theology, arguing that both poets built on the works of writers including Calvin, David Hartley, and Joseph Butler to explain the psychological mechanism by which reclusion in nature could help to reform the mind, eliminating the selfish passions and teaching individuals to live in an active, mutually responsible community.

In Romantic studies, Romanticism is regarded as a reaction against modernity, or more accurately, a self-critique of modernity. There have been critical debates over the nature of the preoccupation of the Romantics with the past and the natural world, whether such concern is an illustration of the reactionary tendency of Romanticism, or an aesthetic innovation of the Romantics. This study tries to approach this problem from the perspective of space. It draws from the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, discussed in the Production of Space, in which Lefebvre conceives a spatial history of modernity, and sees Romanticism as the cultural movement that took place at the threshold of the formation of abstract space. The poetry of three British Romantic writers, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge and Joanna Baillie, is examined. This study analyses how the writers’ thinking and poetry writing are interactive with the formation of social space during the Romantic period. Their poetry embodies the lived experience of the time. The writers show an awareness of the performative aspect of poetry, that poetry is a kind of linguistic creation instead of mere representation, which can be used to appropriate the lived space of reality. This awareness is particular to these Romantic writers because their poetic tactics are socially contextualized. Poetry is their method, as well as manner of life, for confronting the unprecedented social changes brought by modernity. By using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, an examination of the significance of the body and perception in Romantic poetry is also employed to show how, through the use of performative poetic language, the writers re-create their lived space so as to counter the dominance of abstract space.