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Article: Wordsworth writing.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Wordsworth Circle
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
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There's a paradox at the heart of Wordsworth's reception, the paradox that he was a poet who didn't write poetry. It's a paradox linked, I think, to that other paradox in Wordsworth's reception, the idea that despite what his name might suggest his words are not worth much, that he's not a poet who cares too much for the material of his art. In the mid-twentieth-century, in particular, there seems to have been a consensus that Wordsworth cared little for words--despite his declaration in Book 5 of The Prelude (1805) that "words themselves / Move us with conscious pleasure" (567-8) and his assertion that at the age of thirteen his "ears began to open to the charm / Of ...