Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are

by Paul H. Fry

• ISBN13: 9780300126488
• ISBN10: 0300126484
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2008-06-24
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

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, ormore recentlypolitical 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."

Author Biography

Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University. The author or editor of five previous books, he lives in New Haven, CT.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Wordsworth's Originality	p. 1
Wordsworth in the Rime	p. 23
Jeffreyism, Byron's Wordsworth, and the Nonhuman in Nature	p. 42
Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth	p. 60
The Novelty of Wordsworth's Earliest Poems	p. 75
Hoof After Hoof, Metric Time	p. 91
The Poem to Coleridge	p. 119
The Pastor's Wife and the Wanderer: Spousal Verse or the Mind's Excursive Power	p. 146
Intimations Revisited: From the Crisis Lyrics to Wordsworth in 1817	p. 176
Afterword: Just Having It There Before Us	p. 200
Notes	p. 205
Index	p. 226
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