The unifying thrust of the book is an exploration of the tension in Coleridge's theory and practice between the Imagination and the Natural, and a delineation of the particular profile of Coleridge's imagination as compared to that of Wordsworth. There are challenging reassessments of Dejection: an Ode, Christabel and Kubla Khan, among other poems; a cluster of essays on the relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth; a strikingly original examination of Coleridge's imagination at work in the privacy of his notebooks; and an intriguing study of the neglected imagination of Mrs Coleridge. The...

This book examines the connection between William Wordsworth and the work of Helen Maria Williams and the effect this connection may have had on his reception by such hostile critics as Francis Jeffrey. Why did Wordsworth write his first published poem to Helen Maria Williams? What role did she play in forming his views of poetry, and of the French Revolution? Why was Wordsworth able to recite in 1820 a poem by Miss Williams that he first read in 1790? Was his own poetical sensibility comparable with that of the older woman? Did the reception of Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes by Francis...

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a...

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the...

Part 1 of this book examines the English contribution to the 'American Revolution', and the various models of relationship between Britain and America that existed for writers in the 'American Renaissance'. Part 2 considers the politics of James Fenimore Cooper, and the inspirational role of the English Romantics in the thinking of Emerson and the art of Bryant, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. An epilogue explores how Dickinson and Whitman responded to the seductive music of Alfred Lord Tennyson. "How this study is received will say as much about the recovery of...