William Wordsworth (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

289 Pages·2007·1.43 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: William Wordsworth—Updated Edition
Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
William Wordsworth / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed.
p. cm — (Bloom’s moden critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9318-2
1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Bloom, Harold.
PR5881.W46 2006
821’.7—dc22 2006025337
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Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson
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Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Two Roads to Wordsworth 11
M.H. Abrams
The Scene of Instruction: “Tintern Abbey” 23
Harold Bloom
The Preludeand the Love of Man 47
Frances Ferguson
Wordsworth’s Severe Intimations 67
Paul H. Fry
Wordsworth and the Defile of the Word 89
Thomas Weiskel
“Was it for this...?”:
Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods 131
Geoffrey Hartman
From Wordsworth to Emerson 147
David Bromwich
vi Contents
“While We Were Schoolboys”:
Hawkshead Education and Reading 163
Kenneth R. Johnston
William Wordsworth, The Prelude 191
Jonathan Wordsworth
Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins 207
Dennis Taylor
The Excursion:
Dramatic Composition, Dramatic Definition 225
Sally Bushell
Chronology 245
Contributors 255
Bibliography 259
Acknowledgments 267
Index 269
Editor’s Note
My introduction centers upon Wordsworth’s exaltation of the natural man,
particularly in the sublime poignance of “The Old Cumberland Beggar.”
M.H. Abrams, dean of Romantic scholar-critics, contrasts the two
traditions of Wordsworth criticism, Matthew Arnold’s “Poet of Nature” and
A.C. Bradley’s Hegelian sense of Wordsworthian Sublimity.
My interpretation of “Tintern Abbey” explores the poem’s triumph
over its own myth of memory, while Frances Ferguson subtly finds implicit
in The Preludea poetically enabling “extensive chain of affections.”
The “Intimations of Immortality” Ode is seen by Paul H. Fry as
mediating between the Simple Wordsworth (Arnoldian) and the Sublime
Wordsworth (Bradleyan).
Thomas Weiskel provides an appropriate Romantic Sublime exegesis
of The Prelude’s Simplon Pass passage in Book 6, after which Geoffrey
Hartman, luminary of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism,
demonstrates the alliance between radical inwardness and expressionistic
power in The Prelude.
The affinity between Wordsworth and Emerson, despite their different
visions of the self, is analyzed by David Bromwich, while Kenneth Johnston
examines early poetic influences upon the young Wordsworth.
Something of the complex differences between the separate versions of
The Prelude is given by Jonathan Wordsworth, after which Dennis Taylor
argues for a Catholic element in Wordsworth’s achievement.
In this volume’s final essay, Sally Bushell traces connections between
Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers and his long narrative poem The
Excursion.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
There is a human loneliness,
A part of space and solitude,
In which knowledge cannot be denied.
In which nothing of knowledge fails,
The luminous companion, the hand,
The fortifying arm, the profound
Response, the completely answering voice....
—Wallace Stevens
The Prelude was to be only the antechapel to the Gothic church of The
Recluse, but the poet Wordsworth knew better than the man, and The Prelude
is a complete and climactic work. The key to The Prelude as an internalized
epic written in creative competition to Milton is to be found in those lines
(754–860) of the Reclusefragment that Wordsworth prefaced to The Excursion
(1814). Wordsworth’s invocation, like Blake’s to the Daughters of Beulah in
his epic Milton, is a deliberate address to powers higher than those that
inspired Paradise Lost:
Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
1