This chapter opens with a discussion of the composition, publishing, and reception histories of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, poems dating from the late 1790s and early 1800s but not published until 1819. In a reading of Peter Bell, the chapter reflects on the representation of violence and on the poem’s attempts to negotiate the terms of a peaceable relationship between the human and the non-human. In the discussion of The Waggoner, the focus turns to the poem’s meditation on creative failure, artistic isolation, and the potential for cooperative living in the aftermath of war. Picking up on the conative entanglement of human and non-human entities addressed in Peter Bell, the chapter concludes with a consideration of how Benjamin’s waggon works like a peaceable commonwealth to realise the potential of its component parts in ways that advance the well-being of the whole.

While written in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was only published in 1819 as part of his effort to contest the dominance of Scott and Byron in narrative poetry. As contemporary responses make clear, the poem could be read as a rebuke to Byron’s celebration of villain-heroes: what came to be known as Byronic heroes, morally mixed but charismatic men. Wordsworth’s earlier participation in a collective satire on Byron suggests how Peter Bell responds to Byron and helps make sense of the ways in which Byron, Shelley, and Hunt saw the poem as a rejection of their ongoing work. While Wordsworth offered the poem as an example of the ways in which natural experiences can lead to spiritual reform, his turn to a Methodist preacher at the climax of the poem enraged his younger contemporaries, who saw Methodism as a key force in reactionary culture. In Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third, in Byron’s Don Juan, and in satires and reviews of Peter Bell and related works by Keats, Reynolds, and Hunt we see a collective attempt by the Cockney School to answer the challenge they heard in Peter Bell.