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Resonances of Joy

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Abstract

Wordsworth afterwards remembered the occasion of the ‘Lines Composed … above Tintem Abbey’ with particular delight. He had begun it, he said, on leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as he was entering Bristol after a ramble of four or five days with Dorothy. Not a line of it was altered, and no part written down until he reached Bristol.1

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Notes

  1. Cudworth, Intellectual System of the Universe (1743), I, p. 465. Quoted by J. D. Gutteridge in his unpublished Oxford D.Phil. Thesis, ‘The Sources. Development and Influence of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems, 1793–1798.’

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  2. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (1936), pp. 160–I.

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  3. For an account of the critical reception, see John E. Jordan, Why theLyrical Ballads’? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), Ch. iii. Jordan’s account suggests that critical reactions for and against were fairly evenly balanced, but that the standards by which the judgments were reached were disappointingly ordinary, and even trite.

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  4. F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth: A Re-Interpretation (1959). p. 33.

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  5. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, ‘Irony as a Principle of Structure’ (1949) and Geoffrey Hartman’s discussion of both in Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970), pp. 43–4 et sea.

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  6. ‘He lived amidst the untrodden ways …’. Quoted by Bateson (op. cit., 2) from Notes and Queries, 19 June 1869, III (NS) p. 580 (cf. 24 July 1869, IV (NS) pp. 85–6).

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  7. See Bateson (op. cit., 34)

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  8. citing H. E. Rollins, The Keats Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), II, p. 276.

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  9. For a full account of the lines, which may have been projected originally as a separate poem ‘The Pedlar’ and which were later subsumed into the opening of The Excursion, see Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (1969), pp. 157–241. My text is taken from the one reproduced in that study, pp. 172–83.

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  10. x. Ibid., 146. It should be noted that the Prelude lines (1850 ii 245–8) appear only in the late version, when Wordsworth was emphasising the frailty of the baby.

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  11. ‘What got into Coleridge on Imagination was a sort of free reconstruction. I wasn’t so much concerned to say what Coleridge had thought as to suggest what might be done with what he had said.’ ‘Beginnings and Transitions: I. A. Richards Interviewed by Reuben Brower’ in I. A. Richards: Essays in his Honor, ed. Brower, Vendler and Hollander (N.Y., 1973), p. 33.

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© 1978 John Beer

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Beer, J. (1978). Resonances of Joy. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_4

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