Synopses & Reviews
From 1787 to 1842, Wordsworth is preoccupied with the themes of loss and death, and with "natural piety" in the lives of people and nations. Beginning with his consciousness of the Bards and Druids of Cumbria, this book treats Wordsworth's oeuvre, including the "Gothic" juvenilia,
The Ruined Cottage, Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion, and the
Poems of 1842, as unified by a Bardic vocation, to bind "the living and the dead" and to nurture "the kind".
About the Author
Richard Gravil is Reader in Literature, University College of St.Mark and St.John.
Table of Contents
Introduction *
Part 1: The World of Shades * Wordsworth among the 'men of old' * 'Indignant Hills' and 'Unforgotten Lays' * 'Helvellyn's Womb' and 'Glamara's inmost caves' *
Part 2: The Bond of Nature * 'And of the Poor' * 'The Pathos of Humanity' * The Poem upon the Wye * Wordsworth and 'the man to come' *
Part 3: The Living and the Dead * The Peopling of Cumbria * Who is Lucy:
What is She? * 'The Sunless Land': Wordsworth and Hades *
Part 4: Two Consciousnesses * 'Of the foundations of a human spirit' * 'A Country in Romance' * 'Genuine Liberty' *
Part 5: Wordsworth and the Kind * The Poem to Lord Lonsdale * Nationhood and 'Natural Piety' * 'The steps which I have trod' * Epilogue: Wordsworth's 'Second Selves' Index