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Article: Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" and Crabbe's The Parish Register: poetry and anti-census.(William Wordsworth, George Crabbe)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in Romanticism
- Article date:
- March 22, 2009
- Author:
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WORDSWORTH'S "WE ARE SEVEN"--AN EARLY, PERHAPS EVEN SELF-teaching poem, and not his final statement about poetry and quantification, if there was one--dramatizes ballad form, its "lowliest" meters and their risk of doggerel, as a stubborn register of conflicts between old and new counts. A very few people inhabit a small scene. By unusually silent implication, it makes poetry, not prose, the first, most dangerously concise medium through which to record conflicts over "population" in the larger scene. Randall Jarrell once made fun of academic village explainers of this poem as bad Magi visiting with bad gifts. Whatever the fun of that laughter, the poem, like some other ...