Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry

1793–1803

Richard E. Matlak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780367715427
• eBook ISBN: 9781040035573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Based upon the testimony of Thomas Carlyle, most biographers acknowledge that Wordsworth witnessed the beheading of the journalist Antoine Gorsas in October 1793 during the Reign of Terror. But they go no further. This study reads the Poet's reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated by guilt for abandoning his French lover and their child a year earlier. Following a chronological arc from October 1793, when the trauma began, until its conclusion in October 1803, when Wordsworth became a poet-soldier, I examine poetic works from The Borderers (1796), the "Discharged Soldier' (1798), the Two-Part Prelude (1799), Home at Grasmere (1800), and the Liberty sonnets (1803), to follow the Poet working through anxiety, fear, and remorse to a resolution.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Wordsworth’s Trauma: October 1793
• 2 French Heroes and a Poet Recluse, 1795
• 3 Beaupuy and Godwin in The Borderers, 1796
• 4 “The Discharged Soldier” of Alfoxden, 1798
• 5 Revolutionary Foreboding in the Spots of Time, 1799
• 6 Finding a Home at Grasmere, 1800
• 7 Making Amends, 1802
• 8 A Poet-Soldier: “October 1803”
• Bibliography
• Index