William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic
Contesting Poetry after Waterloo

Comprehensive reading of 'late' Wordsworth, considering his work in dialogue with the poetic, cultural and political battles of his day.

Jeffrey Cox (Author)

9781108931236, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 June 2023

293 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.429 kg

'… a brave, insightful, formidably well-researched study.' Robin Jarvis, Review 19 (http://www.review19.org)

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.

1. Cockney excursions
2. Wordsworth's 'Thanksgiving Ode': An engaged poetics and the horrors of war
3. 'This Potter-Don-Juan': 'Peter Bell' in 1819
4. Thinking rivers: The flow of influence, Wordsworth-Coleridge-Shelley
5. Late 'Late Wordsworth'
6. Postscript: Wordsworth in 1850: The Prelude, 'this posthumous yet youthful work'.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS]