Experimentalism In Wordsworths Later Poetry

"Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly-revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth's poetry, with such broadly-felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth's old age in relation to his earlier work. Tim Fulford is the author of many books and articles on the literature and history of the Romantic Period (1780-1840), and is the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2022). His monograph Wordsworth's Poetry 1815-45 (2019) won the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Scholarship 2020. His edition The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (co-edited with Sharon Ruston) (2020) won an honourable mention in the MLA biennial Morton N. Cohen Award For A Distinguished Edition Of Letters"--

William Wordsworth's later poetry complicates possibilities of life and art in war's aftermath. This illuminating study provides new perspectives and reveals how his work following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars reflects a passionate, lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace. Focusing on works from between 1814 and 1822, Philip Shaw constructs a unique and compelling account of how Wordsworth, in both his ongoing poetic output and in his revisions to earlier works, sought to modify, refute, and sometimes sustain his early engagement with these issues as both an artist and a political thinker. In an engaging style, Shaw reorients our understanding of the later writings of a major British poet and the post-war literary culture in which his reputation was forged. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake Poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets' rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake Poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work, as well as the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art, and the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake Poets' later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism.

This study, published in 2000, examines the dialogue between Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, by analysing their work in relation to discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology. Writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley explored the possibilities and limits of human being, language and hope. They engaged with the work of theorisers of the human sciences - Malthus, Godwin and Burke among them. The book offers original readings of canonical works, including Lyrical Ballads, Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, to show how the Romantics internalised and transformed ideas about the imagination, perfectibility, immortality and population which so energised contemporary moral and political debates. McLane provides a defence of poetry in both Romantic and contemporary theoretical terms, reformulating the predicament of Romanticism in general and poetry in particular.