Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry

Wordsworth’s Trauma and Poetry
Author: Richard E. Matlak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total 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.

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001
Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total 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.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude

William Wordsworth's The Prelude
Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total 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.

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure
Author: Alexander Freer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198856989

Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.

Trauma and Literature

Trauma and Literature
Author: J. Roger Kurtz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316821277

As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

Wordsworth and Feeling

Wordsworth and Feeling
Author: G. Kim Blank
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total 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 as Survival

Poetry as Survival
Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820340111

Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

And We Stay

And We Stay
Author: Jenny Hubbard
Publisher: Ember
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0385740581

A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner in the vein of This is Where It Ends “A gentle, lyrical story of incomprehensible sorrow faced with quiet courage.”—ELIZABETH WEIN, New York Times bestselling author “Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand.”—JOHN COREY WHALEY, author of Where Things Come Back, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow students and the spirit of Emily Dickinson offer helping hands. But it is up to Emily Beam to heal her own damaged self, to find the good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow. A Boston Globe Best YA Novel of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A Tayshas High School Reading List Selection A North Carolina Young Adult book Award Nominee * "As graceful as a feather drifting down, this lyrical story delivers a deep journey of healing on a tragic theme.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred * "And We Stay is a little gem of a book. . . . there is certainly something for anyone looking for a good read with a strong, believable female lead who is working her hardest to overcome tragedy.”—School Library Journal, Starred “Hubbard’s writing is elegant and emotional.”—Publisher’s Weekly “This novel is accomplished, polished, and mixes prose and poetry to stunning effect.”—Booklist “Hubbard . . . captures perfectly the turbulence of young love, the bonds of friendship, and the push-and-pull dynamic between teens and adults.”—VOYA

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845

Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845
Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812250818

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.