Description
Book SynopsisThis book is the first full-scale account of the growth of Wordsworth’s thinking about the theory of poetry. It draws mainly on his formal critical essays but also on unpublished material and personal statements about poetics and the growth and constitution of the poet’s mind in The Prelude, in other verse, and in letters. The foundation of the discussion is an account of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, based on Professor Owen’s edition of that text published in 1957. The chapters on the Essays upon Epitaphs, the Preface or 1815, and the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, trace a process of development in which the critic silently abandons the more embarrassingly controversial elements of his earliest argument (such as his advocacy of the language of rustics and the language of prose), confirms its more satisfactory features, and progresses to a subtle, intricate, and rewarding account of his psychology of literary creation and of the audience’s reaction t
