Wordsworths Vagrant Muse

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.

Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From his work on the Salisbury Plain poems through to the poetry about vagrants, beggars, and lunatics in Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey argues, Wordsworth attempted to imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor that could challenge the systematizing impulses of William Pitt and Jeremy Bentham. Whereas writers had previously relied on sensibility and fellow-feeling to reveal the correct ordering of society, Wordsworth was writing in a period in which legislators, magistrates, and commentators agreed that a more aggressively interventionist approach and new institutional solutions were needed to tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce. Wordsworth's interest in individual psychology and solitude, Bailey suggests, grew out of his specific awareness of the Bloody Code and the discussions surrounding it. His study offers a way of reading Wordsworth's poetry that is sensitive to his early radicalism but which does not equate socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.

In this beautifully written and thoughtful book Wordsworth's biographer and editor Stephen Gill explores the ways in which the poet attempted as an artist to maintain continuities through all the stages of his life and shows how revisitings of various kinds are at the heart of his creativity.

This book provides the essential contexts for an understanding of all aspects of the major English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.

From 1787 to 1842, Wordsworth was preoccupied with the themes of loss and death, and with 'natural piety' in the lives of people and nations. Beginning with his consciousness of the Bards and Druids of Cumbria, this book treats Wordsworth's oeuvre , including the 'Gothic' juvenilia, The Ruined Cottage , Lyrical Ballads , Poems in Two Volumes , The Excursion , and the Poems of 1842, as unified by a Bardic vocation, to bind 'the living and the dead' and to nurture 'the kind'.

In exploring Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer, the author's interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socioeconomic status.

Through a wide variety of verbal and pictorial references, this book demonstrates how Wordsworth's iconography, albeit apparently 'collateral', makes crucial contributions to his central arguments and preoccupations in The Excursion, as well as in his other major works.