William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic

Contesting Poetry after Waterloo

Jeffrey Cox

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108837613
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108950015
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic provides a truly comprehensive reading of 'late' Wordsworth and the full arc of his career from (1814–1840) revealing that his major poems after Waterloo contest poetic and political issues with his younger contemporaries: Keats, Shelley and Byron. Refuting conventional models of influence, where Wordsworth 'fathers' the younger poets, Cox demonstrates how Wordsworth's later writing evolved in response to 'second generation' romanticism. After exploring the ways in which his younger contemporaries rewrote his 'Excursion', this volume examines how Wordsworth's 'Thanksgiving Ode' enters into a complex conversation with Leigh Hunt and Byron; how the delayed publication of 'Peter Bell' could be read as a reaction to the Byronic hero; how the older poet's River Duddon sonnets respond to Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'; and how his later volumes, particularly 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837', engage in a complicated erasure of poets who both followed and predeceased him.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Cockney Excursions
• Chapter 2 Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode”: An Engaged Poetics and the Horrors of War
• Chapter 3 “This Potter-Don-Juan”: Peter Bell in 1819
• Chapter 4 Thinking Rivers: The Flow of Influence, Wordsworth–Coleridge–Shelley
• Chapter 5 Late “Late Wordsworth”
• Postscript Wordsworth in 1850: The Prelude, “this posthumous yet youthful work”
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index