Abstract
As will be seen, Wordsworth is the first poet fully to enter the cluster of attitudes to self, poetry and feeling which were described in the last chapter. But no one poet starts a tradition from nothing. For centuries poems have been written that move toward some of these features. The Old English poem The Seafarer’ is a searing poem of toughness and fear in face of rock, sea, wind and winter. William Langland’s Piers Plowman (late fourteenth century) precurses The Prelude just enough to be intriguing, with its ‘field full of folk’ and its poet wandering on the Malvern hills. Robert Burton’s prose text The Anatomy of Melancholy appeared in 1621, and the melancholic refugees in the forest pervade Shakespeare’s As You Like It. John Donne occasionally touched a combination of dejection and natural setting typical of the nineteenth century:
And that this place may thoroughly be thought True paradise, I have the serpent brought. (‘Twicknam Garden’)
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Notes and References
See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare And The English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989)
Matthew Arnold, ‘Preface to the First Edition of Poems’ in Poetical Works, eds Kenneth and Miriam Allott (Longman, 1979), p. 655.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries: English Literature And Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1981), esp. ch. 1, pp. 11-38.
Samuel Johnson, Lives Of The Most Eminent English Poets (Frederick Warne, 1911), p. 34.
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry Of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue In Modern Literary Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1957, 1985).
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Penguin Books, 1985), p. 201.
Jerome J. McGann, ‘George Crabbe: Poetry and Truth’ in London Review Of Books 16 March 1989; Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, p. 121. However, another major biographer of Hardy, Michael Milgate, appears sceptical that Hardy actually learnt from Crabbe. (For details of biographies of Hardy cf. ch. 7, note 4.)
Samuel Johnson, op. cit., p. 502; F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition And Development In English Poetry (Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 106.
Stephen Bygrave, ‘Gray’s “Elegy”: Inscribing the Twilight’, in Post-Structuralist Readings Of English Poetry, eds Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 164.
I take De Man’s suggestion, that traditional criticism necessarily has a blindness at its moment of greatest insight, parallels this idea of the ‘blind seer’ in poetry. However, because (as De Man says) the poet uses language in the only way that acknowledges its fictional character, the poet’s insight emerges as blindness’s deliberate result: Paul De Man, Blindness And Insight: Essays In The Rhetoric Of Contemporary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1971).
Milgate, op. cit. (see ch. 7, note 4), p. 400.
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© 1991 John Powell Ward
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Ward, J.P. (1991). Wordsworth’s Precursors. In: The English Line. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21481-5_2
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