Book contents
- Wordsworth After War
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Wordsworth After War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conscripting ‘The Recluse’
- Chapter 2 Peace Out of Time
- Chapter 3 Thanksgiving after War
- Chapter 4 ‘Returning, Like a Ghost Unlaid’
- Chapter 5 Violent Waters
- Chapter 6 Wordsworth after Byron
- After Wordsworth
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies In Romanticism
After Wordsworth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2023
- Wordsworth After War
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Wordsworth After War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conscripting ‘The Recluse’
- Chapter 2 Peace Out of Time
- Chapter 3 Thanksgiving after War
- Chapter 4 ‘Returning, Like a Ghost Unlaid’
- Chapter 5 Violent Waters
- Chapter 6 Wordsworth after Byron
- After Wordsworth
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies In Romanticism
Summary
The conclusion to this book offers a perspective on Wordsworth’s cultural afterlife, finding in the postscript to Leigh Hunt’s pacificist polemic, Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835; revised 1849), and Thomas De Quincey’s pro-Crimean essay, ‘On War’ (1848; revised 1854), the resources for a reading of the politics and poetics of late Romanticism that responds to the contradiction in Wordsworth’s poetry revealed in these polarised works: the clash between the hope for perpetual peace and the grim satisfaction of eternal war. Whereas De Quincey, citing the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, remains obdurate in his support for the ‘dreadful doctrine’ that war is ‘amongst the evils that are salutary to man’, Hunt joins with those later generations of readers who, experiencing war at first hand, found solace in poems celebrating the life of rivers, mountains, and flowers. Though Wordsworth’s poems do not flinch from violent imaginings, for such readers it yet remains possible that peace will come.
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- Wordsworth After WarRecovering Peace in the Later Poetry, pp. 209 - 220Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023