Wordsworth and Coleridge Promising Losses

by Larkin, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780230337367
• ISBN10: 0230337368
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread. Interpreting the ways Wordsworth and Coleridge used the resources of imagination at crucial moments in their creative lives, this book reveals how they struggled to assimilate the intricacies of Romantic vision preoccupying their contemporary writers and critics. Ultimately, the essays here demonstrate that these two major poets are able to inject fresh cross-currents of their own into the anti-canonical swell and furnish a poetics of Romantic promise.

Author Biography

Peter Larkin is a Philosophy and Literature Librarian in the University of Warwick. He has published numerous essays on British Romantic poetry and on contemporary ecopoetics, as well as two collections of poetry: Terrain Seed Scarcity and Leaves of Field.

Table of Contents

"Criticism at its best: Larkin's book is a profound dwelling on Romantic poetry and on what it means to be a reader of Romantic poetry today. Full of the most discriminating and rewarding attentiveness throughout, its engagement with Wordsworth transforms our understanding of his late, revisionary imagination." - Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University

"Peter Larkin is one of our most subtly meditative critics. Wordsworth and Coleridge are his longstanding familiars, and his responses to them in this continuously original, provocative book exhibit an intensity of thinking that seems to outflank the more routine protocols of commentary." - Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University
 
"In these extraordinarily intense and attentive readings of the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Peter Larkin writes as a poet who is testing himself and them. Their work becomes a difficult terrain across which he moves exploring the texts' promises, withholdings, provocations, and withdrawals. At every turn Larkin's ramified and intricate insights haunt the mind." - David Fairer, University of Leeds