Abstract
All in all Wordsworth wrote some 535 sonnets. In the years 1818–1822 alone, he composed nearly two hundred and, as Lee Johnson notes, the sonnet was indeed the ‘principal form of utterance’ in the later phase of the career.1 To understand the difference and appreciate the specificity of Wordsworth’s later work, we must understand both why he turned so emphatically to the sonnet and what he turned it into. What compelled this allegedly ‘simple’ poet of nature, who claimed to compose in ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men’ (Brett & Jones, 254), to invest so heavily in the stylised, artificial and conventional sonnet form he at one point thought of as ‘egregiously absurd’? (LY 1, 125).
It will easily be perceived that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics.
—Wordsworth on Gray in Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
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Notes
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), pp. 49, 39.
Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( New York and Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1895 ), p. 30.
Juliet Sychrava, From Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989 ), p. 60.
Quoted in Harold G. Merriam, Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets ( New York: Columbia UP, 1939 ), p. 76.
Wendy Steiner, The Colours ofRhetoric: Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1982), p. xiii.
David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose: Or the Trumpet of a Prophecy ( Albuquerque: The U of New Mexico P, 1966 ), p. 294.
Richard Shusterman, Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture ( Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002 ), p. 163.
Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant, Typographical Printing-Surfaces: The Technology and Mechanism of their Production ( London: Longman, 1916 ), pp. 95–96.
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© 2007 Peter Simonsen
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Simonsen, P. (2007). The Sonnet as Visual Poetry: Italics in ‘After-Thought’. In: Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590748_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230590748_5
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