Wordsworth's poetic collections, supplementary writing and parodic reception PDF
Preview Wordsworth's poetic collections, supplementary writing and parodic reception
WORDSWORTH’S POETIC COLLECTIONS, SUPPLEMENTARY WRITING AND PARODIC RECEPTION The History of the Book Series Editor: Ann R. Hawkins Titles in this Series 1 Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis Jonathan Cutmore (ed.) 2 Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–1825 Jonathan Cutmore 3 Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, 1873–1874 Susan R. Hanes 4 William Blake and the Art of Engraving Mei-Ying Sung 5 Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse Simon P. Hull 6 Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.) 7 Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London Malcolm Richardson 8 Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality Graham Allen, Carrie Griffi n and Mary O’Connell (eds) 9 Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page Alex Watson Forthcoming Titles Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 Jason D. Martinek Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History Ben P. Robertson Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950 Dean Baldwin www.pickeringchatto.com/HoB WORDSWORTH’S POETIC COLLECTIONS, SUPPLEMENTARY WRITING AND PARODIC RECEPTION by Brian R. Bates PICKERING & CHATTO 2012 Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfi eld, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2012 © Brian R. Bates 2012 To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every eff ort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions. british library cataloguing in publication data Bates, Brian R. Wordsworth’s poetic collections, supplementary writing and parodic reception. – (Th e history of the book) 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Technique. 2. Wordsworth, Wil- liam, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Parodies, imitations, etc. 4. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Appreciation. 5. Authors and readers – England – History – 19th century. I. Title II. Series 821.7-dc23 ISBN-13: 9781848931961 e: 9781848931978 ∞ Th is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Reframing Lyrical Ballads (1800/1798) 21 2 Textual Travelling in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads 39 3 Short-Circuiting Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems: Richard Mant’s Th e Simpliciad 57 4 Wordsworth’s ‘Library of Babel’: Th e Excursion and the 1815 Poems 77 5 Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria 101 6 J. H. Reynolds’s ‘Peter Bell’ and the Wordsworthian Reputation 121 7 Th e River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth’s Canonical Ascent 141 Notes 161 Works Cited 217 Index 231 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Th is book has benefi ted greatly from the continual support of Jessica Munns, who has lent a keen eye to several chapters and has provided helpful advice about my professional development. Initial thoughts on this project grew out of conversations with Jeff rey Robinson, Andrew Franta and Douglas Wilson. Jeff Cox has generously off ered helpful suggestions about shaping this project into a book manuscript as well as providing insightful feedback on several chapters. During the book’s preparation for press, I was fortunate to work with Stephina Clarke whose careful attention, patience and diligence have been remarkable. I am also grateful for the kind attention of Charles Rzepka, which came at a cru- cial moment in the development of the book, and for the warm encouragement of the series editor Ann Hawkins whose humour, critical insights and forthright- ness I continue to appreciate. I would particularly like to thank Scott Howard who has been a wonderfully supportive colleague and friend, and a model of honesty, fairness and integrity. Finally, I off er my most heartfelt thanks and grati- tude to Jennifer Kearny, my best reader in so many ways. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I have adapted and expanded several previously pub- lished essays. Early versions of Chapter 4 were published as ‘Wordsworth’s Library of Babel: Bibliomania, the 1814 Excursion and the 1815 Poems’, Romantic Textu- alities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 14 (Summer 2005), at http:// www.cf.ac.uk/encap/romtext/articles/cc14n01.pdf, and as ‘Activating “Tintern Abbey” in 1815’, in M. Lussier and B. Matsunaga (eds), Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), pp. 69–81. An early version of Chapter 5 was published in D. Lewes (ed.), Double Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 83–102. Th e fi nal section of Chapter 6 was published as ‘Wordsworth, Milton, and Parodic Sonnets’, Appositions: Studies in Early Modern Literature & Culture, 1 (Spring 2008), at http://appositions.blogs- pot.com/, and more completely as ‘J. H. Reynolds Re-Echoes the Wordsworthian Reputation: “Peter Bell,” Remaking the Work and Mocking the Man’, Studies in Romanticism, 47:3 (Fall 2008), pp. 273–97. – vii – INTRODUCTION Th is study focuses on the poetry and prose relations, bibliographic forms, competitive poetry markets, readerly negotiations and parodic responses that informed the creation of Wordsworth’s published collections of poetry from 1800 to 1820. Two intertwined stories govern the chapters that follow. Th e fi rst describes how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections from Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800), to Poems, in Two Volumes, by William Wordsworth (1807), Th e Excursion (1814), Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) and Th e River Duddon volume (1820).1 Th e second relates how Wordsworth’s critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the designs of those collections. Beginning with the publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth employed a variety of supplementary writings to make a case for his poetry as a valuable addition to the ‘Old Canon’ of poets, an innovation on ballad col- lecting, and a means of lending authority to his singular poetic credentials.2 Th rough prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other paratexts,3 Wordsworth not only presented himself as an important contemporary poet, but as an editor, anthologist, literary and cultural critic. Th e prose interlacing Wordsworth’s collections from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to his 1820 Th e River Duddon volume provided him with oppor- tunities to guide readers through his poems and draw their attention to how his work as a collector and commentator added aesthetic, cultural and historic depth to his books of poetry. As much as Wordsworth’s supplementary writings chart how readers might engage with his poetry, they also play out his struggles in the fi rst two decades of the nineteenth century to frame, reframe, combat and absorb the myriad responses of reviewing critics and parodists into his poetic collections. In those publications Wordsworth exercises two principal supplementary strategies – one that encourages connective sympathetic readings of his poetry and another that attempts to stave off reductive criticism. Th ese vacillating interactions between poetry and prose, a poet and his readers, not only shaped Wordsworth’s poetic – 1 –
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