Bloom's Modern Critical Views - William Wordsworth (2007) (289p) [Inua].pdf

Title: William Wordsworth (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) by Harold Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); 2 Updated edition (January 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791093182
ISBN-13: 978-0791093184

Description:
My introduction centers upon Wordsworth’s exaltation of the natural man, particularly in the sublime poignance of “The Old Cumberland Beggar.”
M.H. Abrams, dean of Romantic scholar-critics, contrasts the two traditions of Wordsworth criticism, Matthew Arnold’s “Poet of Nature” and A.C. Bradley’s Hegelian sense of Wordsworthian Sublimity.
My interpretation of “Tintern Abbey” explores the poem’s triumph over its own myth of memory, while Frances Ferguson subtly finds implicit in The Prelude a poetically enabling “extensive chain of affections.”
The “Intimations of Immortality” Ode is seen by Paul H. Fry as mediating between the Simple Wordsworth (Arnoldian) and the Sublime Wordsworth (Bradleyan).
Thomas Weiskel provides an appropriate Romantic Sublime exegesis of The Prelude’s Simplon Pass passage in Book 6, after which Geoffrey Hartman, luminary of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism, demonstrates the alliance between radical inwardness and expressionistic power in The Prelude.
The affinity between Wordsworth and Emerson, despite their different visions of the self, is analyzed by David Bromwich, while Kenneth Johnston examines early poetic influences upon the young Wordsworth.
Something of the complex differences between the separate versions of The Prelude is given by Jonathan Wordsworth, after which Dennis Taylor argues for a Catholic element in Wordsworth’s achievement.
In this volume’s final essay, Sally Bushell traces connections between Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers and his long narrative poem The Excursion. (from de Introduction, by Harold Bloom)

About the Author:
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.