Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry
Title | Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Richard E. Matlak |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 173 |
Release | 2024-07-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1040035574 |
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.
Wordsworth's Trauma and Poetry
Title | Wordsworth's Trauma and Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | RICHARD E. MATLAK |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2024-06-12 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780367715427 |
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.
Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust
Title | Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust PDF eBook |
Author | T. Brennan |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 214 |
Release | 2011-01-03 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0230117546 |
Thomas Brennan finds roots of the 'sensibility of trauma' by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses - the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.
Wordsworth and Feeling
Title | Wordsworth and Feeling PDF eBook |
Author | G. Kim Blank |
Publisher | Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 1995 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780838636008 |
Wordsworth and Feeling returns to Wordsworth's personal history in order to locate and contextualize some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language. In this study, G. Kim Blank details how this poetry evolves out of Wordsworth's radical subjectivity, but the most pressing feature of that subjectivity is the cluster of subjects - loss, guilt, suffering, endurance, death - which appears throughout much of his poetry up until 1802-4.
Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001
Title | Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 PDF eBook |
Author | Carolyn Forché |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Pages | 672 |
Release | 2014-01-27 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 0393347664 |
A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.
The 'gentle Shock of Mild Surprize'
Title | The 'gentle Shock of Mild Surprize' PDF eBook |
Author | Katie Harland |
Publisher | |
Pages | 326 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
William Wordsworth's The Prelude
Title | William Wordsworth's The Prelude PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen Gill |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2006 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780195180923 |
William Wordsworth's poem 'The Prelude' is a fascinating work, both as an autobiography and as a fragment of historical evidence from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years. This volume gathers together 13 essays on 'The Prelude', and is useful as a companion for students and general readers of Wordsworth's greatest poem.