In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or-more recently-political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.
Fry argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes "our widest commonality" in the simple fact that "we are" in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in the presence of being is what makes him original, Fry shows, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called "the hiding place of his power."
- ISBN10 6612352205
- ISBN13 9786612352201
- Publish Date 1 October 2008 (first published 1 January 2008)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 16 March 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 240
- Language English