1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910962857603321

Autore

Fry Paul H

Titolo

Wordsworth and the poetry of what we are / / Paul H. Fry

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, : Yale University Press, c2008

ISBN

9786612352201

9781282352209

1282352202

9780300145410

0300145411

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource (xvi, 240 p.).)

Collana

Yale studies in English

Disciplina

821/.7

Soggetti

Philosophy, English - 19th century

Philosophical anthropology in literature

Philosophy of nature in literature

Philosophy in literature

Nature in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references  and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Wordsworth's Originality -- 2. Wordsworth in the Rime -- 3. Jeffreyism, Byron's Wordsworth, and the Nonhuman in Nature -- 4. Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth -- 5. The Novelty of Wordsworth's Earliest Poems -- 6. Hoof After Hoof, Metric Time -- 7. The Poem to Coleridge -- 8. The Pastor's Wife and the Wanderer: Spousal Verse or the Mind's Excursive Power -- 9. Intimations Revisited: From the Crisis Lyrics to Wordsworth in 1817 -- Afterword: Just Having It There Before Us -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or-more recently-political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.Fry argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of



nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes "our widest commonality" in the simple fact that "we are" in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in the presence of being is what makes him original, Fry shows, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called "the hiding place of his power."