Gender Fluidity and Nature Writing: William Wordsworth and Edward Abbey

Through hitherto neglected manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, and the Wordsworth Trust, this paper explores the relationship between William Wordsworth and his Irish friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth around 1829. It details the debates about poetry and science between Hamilton (Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland) and Edgeworth (the novelist Maria Edgeworth's half-brother), in which Wordsworth was embroiled when he visited Ireland in the autumn of 1829. By examining a variety of documents including letters, poems, lectures, and memoirs, a fragment of literary history may be restored and a clearer understanding may be reached of the tensions between poetry and science in Wordsworth's poetry, particularly in The Excursion, and of the Irish provenance of a memorable passage in ‘On the Power of Sound’.

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‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

Victoriographies ◽

10.3366/vic.2015.0181 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 17-35

Author(s):

Julian Wolfreys

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

William Wordsworth ◽

Urban Landscape ◽

Thomas De Quincey ◽

Urban Centre ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Urban Representation ◽

Robert Southey ◽

The World ◽

The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

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The History of Missed Opportunities

10.11126/stanford/9781503600195.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

William H. Galperin

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

William Wordsworth ◽

Jane Austen ◽

Lord Byron ◽

Missed Opportunities ◽

Romantic Period ◽

The Everyday ◽

Everyday World ◽

History Of ◽

Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

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Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

10.1093/oso/9780198733706.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

James Whitehead

Keyword(s):

William Wordsworth ◽

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽

English Literature ◽

Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽

John Keats ◽

William Blake ◽

Lord Byron ◽

The Public ◽

John Clare ◽

Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

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