Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847603459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847603459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842

Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 PDF Author: R. Gravil
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
From 1787 to 1842, Wordsworth was preoccupied with the themes of loss and death, and with 'natural piety' in the lives of people and nations. Beginning with his consciousness of the Bards and Druids of Cumbria, this book treats Wordsworth's oeuvre , including the 'Gothic' juvenilia, The Ruined Cottage , Lyrical Ballads , Poems in Two Volumes , The Excursion , and the Poems of 1842, as unified by a Bardic vocation, to bind 'the living and the dead' and to nurture 'the kind'.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191019658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

The Romantic Poets

The Romantic Poets PDF Author: Uttara Natarajan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470766352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

The Harp and the Constitution

The Harp and the Constitution PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004306382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
‘Celtic’ and ‘Gothic’: both words refer today to both ancient tribes and modern styles. ‘Celtic’ is associated with harp music, native knitwear, and spirituality; ‘Gothic’ with medieval cathedrals, rock bands, and horror fiction. The eleven essays collected together here chart some of the curious and unexpected ways in which the Celts and the Goths were appropriated and reinvented in Britain and other European countries through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries – becoming not just mythologised races, but lending their names to abstract principles and entire value systems. Contributed by experts in literature, archaeology, history, and Celtic studies, the essays range from broad surveys to specific case-studies, and together demonstrate the complicated interplay that has always existed between ‘Celticism’ and ‘Gothicism’. Contributors are: John Collis, Robert DeMaria, Jr., Tom Duggett, Tim Fulford, Nick Groom, Amy Hale, Ronald Hutton, Joep Leerssen, Dafydd Moore, Joanne Parker, Juan Miguel Zarandona.

Wordsworth's Ethics

Wordsworth's Ethics PDF Author: Adam Potkay
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling PDF Author: Matthew Ward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198894775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Romantic period witnessed decisive interest in how feeling might align with forms of artistic expression. Many critical studies have focused on the serious side and melancholic moods of Romantic poets. Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling instead embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer an original and compelling new reading of British Romanticism. It reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics. Matthew Ward shows that laughter was one of the primary means by which Romantics embraced and expanded upon, but also frequently aped and lampooned, sympathetic feeling. The laughter of feeling is both the expression of sympathy and an articulation of its implications, prejudices, and constraints. For Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the sound of laughter carries the hope that greater knowledge of others derives from feeling for and with them through poetry, and this might lead to a better understanding of oneself. Yet laughter also makes these poets acutely aware that our emotional lives are utterly unfamiliar and perhaps ultimately unknowable. Their prosody of laughter enlivens and exposes; it embodies their sense of?and ambitions for?poetry, and yet calls those matters into the most comical and gravest doubt. Laughter helps define what it is to be human. This book shows that it also defines what it is to be a 'Romantic' poet.

Wordsworth's Revisitings

Wordsworth's Revisitings PDF Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Nothing was more important to Wordsworth than tracing the evidence that affinities had been preserved between all the stages of the life of man. In this beautifully written and thoughtful book Wordsworth's biographer and editor Stephen Gill explores the ways in which the poet attempted as an artist to maintain such continuities and shows how revisitings of various kinds are at the heart of his creativity. Habitually reviewing all of his work, both published and that still in manuscript, Wordsworth painstakingly revised at the level of verbal detail or recast it more largely. New poems frequently emerged from re-engagement with old, often serving as a sequel to or commentary from the maturer poet on his own earlier creation, and acts of self-borrowing and self-reference are plentiful. These linkings provide insights into the powerful vision the poet maintained that his imaginative creation was one evolving unity and reveal much about the obsessions and drives of the great poet. Combining textual analysis, critical commentary, and biographical narrative, Gill explores what binds Wordsworth's later, less well-known poems to his earlier work. At the centre of the book is an account of the evolution of The Prelude from 1804 to 1839, in which it is argued that Wordsworth's masterpiece must be followed through all its versions, seen as a poem growing old alongside its creator.

William Wordsworth - The Prelude

William Wordsworth - The Prelude PDF Author: Tim Milnes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137047127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The Prelude is now seen as a central text in the Wordsworth corpus. This Guide identifies and gathers significant critical perspectives, interpretations and debates connected with the poem, contextualising and explaining criticism from the Victorian period right through to the present day.

Blood & Mistletoe

Blood & Mistletoe PDF Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030015979X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 931

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Book Description
The acclaimed author of Witches, Druids, and King Arthur presents a “lucid, open-minded” cultural history of the Druids as part of British identity (Terry Jones). Crushed by the Romans in the first century A.D., the ancient Druids of Britain left almost no reliable evidence behind. Historian Ronald Hutton shows how this lack of definite information has allowed succeeding British generations to reimagine, reinterpret, and reinvent the Druids. Hutton’s captivating book is the first to encompass two thousand years of Druid history and to explore the evolution of English, Scottish, and Welsh attitudes toward the forever ambiguous figures of the ancient Celtic world. Druids have been remembered at different times as patriots, scientists, philosophers, or priests. Sometimes portrayed as corrupt, bloodthirsty, or ignorant, they were also seen as fomenters of rebellion. Hutton charts how the Druids have been written in and out of history, archaeology, and the public consciousness for some 500 years, with particular focus on the romantic period, when Druids completely dominated notions of British prehistory. Sparkling with legends and images, filled with new perspectives on ancient and modern times, this fascinating cultural study reveals Druids as catalysts in British history.