Coleridge Wordsworth And The Language Of Allusion

In her study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a startlingly new version of the poetic interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the critical years from 1797 to 1807. Rejecting the traditional accounts, even those given by the poets themselves, which have minimized the differences between the two, Newlyn demonstrates that it is only on the most superficial level that each poet seemed to be the other's ideal audience. Below that surface, she insists, there were radical dissimilarities between the two which led to a kind of "creative" misunderstanding by which each artist clearly defined himself in relation to the other. Because it is in the poet's "private language" of allusion that these differences are most clearly seen, the book concludes that this "private language" spoken by artists amongst themselves may in fact be the most aggressive of literary forms.

Thomas Owens explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy, and establishes the central importance of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets' imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens' reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

Paul Magnuson contends that the relationship between Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetry is so complex that a new criticism is required to trace its intricacies. This book demonstrates that their poems may be read as parts of a single evolving whole, a "dialogue" in which the works of one are responses to and rewritings of those of the other. Professor Magnuson discloses this dialogue as a joint canon, or sequence, which includes the complete early versions of poems, as well as fragments, canceled drafts, and poems in progress. He further shows that this sequence is based on lyric structure: the relations among its poems and fragments resemble those among stanzas in an ode, and individual poems take their significance from their surrounding contexts in the dialogue. Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetic conversation arose from their recognition that their themes and styles were similar. There were, as one of Coleridge's friends said, "fears of amalgamation," and it was actually from their failed attempts to collaborate on individual works that their dialogue began. The first chapter of the book elaborates a dialogic methodology and the following chapters discuss the dialogic relationship between Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems and "The Ancient Mariner"; "The Ruined Cottage" and Coleridge's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Conversation Poems and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; Wordsworth's Goslar poetry of 1798, "Home at Grasmere," and Lyrical Ballads (1800); and the dejection dialogue of 1802. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Where others have oriented Wordsworth towards ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or - more recently - political repression, Paul H. Fry argues that underlying all this is a more fundamental insight - Wordsworth is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities, but rather that it simply exists.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) needs little introduction as the central figure in Romantic poetry and a crucial influence in the development of poetry generally. This broad-ranging survey redefines the variety of his writing by showing how it incorporates contemporary concepts of language difference and the ways in which popular and serious literature were compared and distinguished during this period. It discusses many of Wordsworth's later poems, comparing his work with that of his regional contemporaries as well as major writers such as Scott. The key theme of relationship, both between characters within poems and between poet and reader, is explored through Wordsworth's construction of community and his use of power relationships. A serious discussion of the place of sexual feeling in his writing is also included.

The poems that Coleridge wrote after his "golden" period are seldom studied or anthologized. Yet many of these later poems are of quality and interest, addressing such universal themes as the nature of self and the experience of unrequited love. Paley examines the later verse in the context of Coleridge's oeuvre. He discusses its distinguishing characteristics, and looks at why the poet felt he had to develop distinctively different modes of writing for these works.

This book analyzes Coleridge's male friendships during the 1790s. It shows the poet's experience of relationship is structured by and contributes to contemporary debate about friendship. Examination of Coleridge's epistolary relations with Poole, Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, Thelwall, Wordsworth, and Godwin demonstrates that each friendship negotiates issues of relationship discussed throughout English culture of this period.