After explaining his new methodology, Bidney identifies and discusses epiphanies in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walter Pater, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Bidney postulates that any writer’s epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes. Bachelard’s analytic approach involves studying patterns of perceived experience—phenomenology—but unlike most phenomenologists, Bidney does not speculate on internal processes of consciousness. Instead, he concentrates on literary epiphanies as objects on the printed page, as things with structures that can be detected and analyzed for their implications.
Bidney, then, first identifies each author’s paradigm epiphany, finding that both the Romantics and the Victorians often label such a paradigm as a vision or dream, thereby indicating its exceptional intensity, mystery, and expansiveness. Once he identifies the paradigm and shows how it is structured, he traces occurrences of each writer’s epiphany pattern, thus providing an inclusive epiphanic portrait that enables him to identify epiphanies in each writer’s other works. Finally, he explores the implications of his analysis for other literary approaches: psychoanalytical, feminist, influence-oriented or intertextual, and New Historical.
In Romantic Complexity, Jack Stillinger examines three of the most admired poets of English Romanticism--Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth--with a focus on the complexity that results from the multiple authorship, the multiple textual representation, and the multiple reading and interpretation of their best works.
Specific topics include the joint authorship of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, an experiment of 1798 that established the most essential characteristics of modern poetry; Coleridge's creation of eighteen or more different versions of The Ancient Mariner and how this textual multiplicity affects interpretation; the historical collaboration between Keats and his readers to produce fifty-nine separate but entirely legitimate readings of The Eve of St. Agnes; and a number of practical and theoretical matters bearing on the relationships among these writers and their influences on one another.
Stillinger shows his deep understanding of the poets' lives, works, and the history of their reception, in chapters rich with intriguing questions and answers sure to engage students and teachers of the world's greatest poetry.
This book presents not just the Romantic Wordsworth, but Wordsworth as part of a large historical movement in poetry, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to the present day. It concentrates on the difficult, much discussed, but little analyzed problem of "sincerity" in poetry, which it treats both critically and historically, as a demand relatively new in Wordsworth's time and still with us. It contains an extended criticism of Wordsworth's later poems, and explores the vexing question of why the mode of his poetry changed as he grew older.
The author shows that the ideal of sincerity has influenced poets, critics, and common readers from Wordsworth to now, and describes the problems raised for poets by this new challenge. The first problem is the adequacy of language--does the very structure and fact of language stand as an obstacle to a complete sincerity? Perkins says: "One can hardly explain the history of poetic style or, indeed, of literature since Wordsworth, unless one keeps in mind that there has been a continuing mistrust of language. By words, it is feared, we chop realities into categories. The categories are arbitrary, or, even if they are not, their generality strips our experience of its unique aspects."
Another problem raised by the challenge of sincerity is the distrust of poetic form. How can you write with a personal sincerity when you have to use meters and stanzas? Or, more fundamentally, how can you be honest to the complexity and uncertainty of your own experience, when a poem must always be more limited than the consciousness from which it arises? Still another problem is the distrust of poetic conventions and traditions. The author says, "The wish to be sincere is challenged and baffled by the fact that poetry is a learned performance, that all poetic expression depends on traditions and conventions peculiar to the art and inherited from the past...Yet if you imitate the great achievements of the past, how can your poem be thought a sincere personal utterance? The question of imitation is only the most obvious result of this anxiety. For a fanatic sincerity may suppose that merely to be influenced by other writers--in fact, to be influenced by anything at all--somehow clouds the purity of self-expression."
Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics—"Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "Elegiac Stanzas." Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical poet of the Romantic period, and perhaps in the English language, readers naturally take the speaker to be the poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, "the poet in his own person."
Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in the characterization of the speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical, or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines the critical issues posed by these different understandings of the speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical "I" that deals with the dramatic and psychological complexities of the speaker's act of self-representation.
Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining the speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that the lyrical "I" in each poem is a transitional self of the poet. The poem offers, in the suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which the speaker attempts to act out, in the sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of the self.
In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, the book shows that the major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and the self- dramatizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of the subjectivity he represents.
Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical "I" requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to the art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This important new work will be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.
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