William Wordsworth : intensity and achievement

著者

書誌事項

William Wordsworth : intensity and achievement

Thomas McFarland

Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, c1992

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注記

Includes bibliography (p. [ix]-xv) and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Setting out from a dissatisfaction with the current trend towards New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, it endeavours to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primacy of the personal and the qualitative. Taking Marjorie Levinson's reading of `Tintern Abbey' as the book's starting point, McFarland sets forth a different way of approaching the poem, and then identifies `intensity' as the secret of Wordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality are illustrated by careful examinations of `Ruth', of the `spots of time', and of `Home at Grasmere', which is revealed as containing the incandescent centre of Wordsworth's values. There follow chapters on Wordsworth's dessication, which is seen as precisely the absence of intensity; and on the aspiration of The Recluse, which is seen to fail largely because the personal intensity necessary to complete the venture had been used up in the opening of `Home at Grasmere'. McFarland then discusses the special way in which Wordsworth assumed the prophetic stance which was essential to his poetic vision and was adopted in the intense personal confidence that he possessed the truth. The book concludes with a reading of The Borderers, not as a successful play but as a disposal chamber for the dark matter of Wordsworth's cosmos; the writing of the play is seen as necessary to clear the way for the purified current of Wordsworthian intensity to flow towards supreme poetic achievement.

目次

  • The clamour of absence - reading and misreading in Wordsworthian criticism
  • Wordsworth's hedgerows - the infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric
  • "I cannot paint what I then was" - the psychological structure of Wordsworthian intensity
  • Wordsworth's desiccation
  • perfection absolute - the aspiration of "The Recluse"
  • the prophetic stance
  • the play of absence - "The Borderers" and the winds of culture.

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