In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or--more recently--political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.
Fry argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or...

Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest and building to a new reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.