Abstract
Given the complexity of Wordsworth’s development, it is not surprising that by 1815 his contemporaries hardly knew what to make of him. The poetry which he had written in the 1790s had in itself been unusual, standing away from the Godwinianism to which it was a response; when modified as a result of all that had happened to him in subsequent years the body of his work became, at a direct approach, still more bewildering.
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Notes
Shelley, Peter Bell the Third, IV, xi–xiii (Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson (1934), p. 354).
For good accounts of the relationship between the two poets, see Sidney Colvin, John Keats, His Life and Poetry (&c.) (1917), esp. pp. 125–6, 220 and 233–4; and
John Middleton Murry, ‘Keats and Wordsworth’, Studies in Keats, 2nd ed. (1939), pp. 123–45 (repeated in Selected Criticism 1916–1957 (1960), pp. 127–45).
D. Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown, Conn., 1959), pp. 53–6.
See e.g. W. J. Bate, John Keats (1963), pp. 272–3.
J. C. Young, Memoir of C. M. Young (1871), I, pp. 182–3.
Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), II, pp. 235–6 (Cited Moorman II 581).
Letters of Mary Wordsworth, ed. M. E. Burton (Oxford, 1958), pp. 165, 298.
Letter to Henry Taylor, 4 Jan. 1839. Quoted, Edith Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1933), p. 37n.
Swinburne, ‘Hertha’ (Collected Poetical Works (1924), I, p. 739); Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), p. 79.
(See also W. Stone, The Cave and the Mountain (Stamford, Calif., 1966), pp. 61–2, for further references.)
Eliza Fletcher, Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1875), p. 283.
F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth — A Re-Interpretation (1956), p. 174.
Edith Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1933), p. 45 (cited Moorman I 471).
Coleridge, Table Talk, 21 July 1832 (1835, II 71).
D. H. Lawrence ‘Lizard’, Complete Poems, ed. V. de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (1964), I, p. 524.
Ibid., II, p. 658.
‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, Phoenix II, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (1968), p. 597.
‘On Human Destiny’, ibid., p. 624.
Ibid., p. 447.
Phoenix, ed. E. D. McDonald (1936), p. 513.
‘Democracy’, Complete Poems, op. cit., I, p. 526.
Ibid., p. 525.
Blake, Annotations to The Excursion (BW 784). It should be noted that this passage was quite possibly not drafted until 1806; if so, Blake’s critical antennae may be picking up a note of willed affirmation, following the doubts raised by John Wordsworth’s death (see above, pp. 167–8). For the successive versions of the Prospectus and a discussion of the dating problem see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), pp. 465–79.
x. Milton 15: 21–27 (BW 497). For a detailed discussion of this passage in relation to contemporary scientific theories see Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago, 1974), pp. 154–6.
C. Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), II, 474 (cited Moorman II 581).
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© 1978 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1978). The Stately and the Quixotic. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_10
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