Description
Book SynopsisThis original study is the first fully to acknowledge the impact of early grief on Wordsworth''s poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813.
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- Looks at the impact of grief on Wordsworth''s great poetry.
- Explains the importance of the poet''s great, unfinished epic ''The Recluse'' to his work as a whole.
- Includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks.
- Contains the first annotated text of ''The White Doe of Rylstone''.
Trade Review"A major achievement. A marvellous combination of profound scholarship and equally profound speculative insight."
Professor Stephen Gill, Oxford University
"Wordsworth: An Inner Life shows that it is still possible to say new things about a life and a literary oeuvre which might seem, in outline, all too familiar." Times Literary Supplement
"This is traditional scholarship at its best, attentive to detail and immersed in a welter of poetic sources, which will no doubt be studied and absorbed by bright graduate students and Wordsworth experts." Times Higher Education Supplement
"In his reconstruction of Wordsworth's "inner life", Wu offers a compelling blend of biography and literary criticism." Religious Studies Review
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xii
A Note on Texts xiv
Abbreviations xv
1 ‘Perhaps my pains might be beguil’d 1
2 ‘In black Helvellyn’s inmost womb’ 20
3 ‘Charg’d by magic’ 43
4 ‘The world is poisoned at the heart’ 69
5 ‘Their life is hidden with God’ 88
6 ‘The vital spirit of a perfect form’ 118
Part I: October 1798-April 1799 118
Between Parts I and II: April-May 1799 134
Part II: May-December 1799 146
7 ‘Serious musing and self-reproach’ 167
8 ‘I yearn towards some philosophic song’ 189
9 ‘That vast Abiding-place’ 210
10 ‘I only look’d for pain and grief’ 231
11 ‘Forbearance & self-sacrifice’ 257
12 ‘O teach me calm submission to thy will’ 275
Epilogue 303
Appendix: The White Doe of Rylstone (1808 Text) and it’s ‘Advertizement’ 316
Bibliography 347
Index 361
