Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Wordsworth: the shape of the poetic career
- 2 Wordsworth's poetry to 1798
- 3 Poetry 1798-1807
- 4 'The noble living and the noble dead'
- 5 Wordsworth and The Recluse
- 6 Wordsworth and the meaning of taste
- 7 Wordsworth's craft
- 8 Gender and domesticity
- 9 The philosophic poet
- 10 Wordsworth and Coleridge
- 11 Wordsworth and the natural world
- 12 Politics, history, and Wordsworth's poems
- 13 Wordsworth and Romanticism
- 14 Wordsworth and America
- 15 Textual issues and a guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
7 - Wordsworth's craft
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Wordsworth: the shape of the poetic career
- 2 Wordsworth's poetry to 1798
- 3 Poetry 1798-1807
- 4 'The noble living and the noble dead'
- 5 Wordsworth and The Recluse
- 6 Wordsworth and the meaning of taste
- 7 Wordsworth's craft
- 8 Gender and domesticity
- 9 The philosophic poet
- 10 Wordsworth and Coleridge
- 11 Wordsworth and the natural world
- 12 Politics, history, and Wordsworth's poems
- 13 Wordsworth and Romanticism
- 14 Wordsworth and America
- 15 Textual issues and a guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Composition and craft
If you consult 'craft' in a Wordsworth concordance or a database, the report is not often cheering. There is much to do with contrivance, debased art, suspect artfulness: the 'dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice / To make of them a nature to the heart' (Prel.1805 vi 130-2), the 'craft' of 'gilded sympathies' in affected 'dreams and fictions' (vi 481-3), 'the marvellous craft /Of modern Merlins' (vii 686-7), 'the Wizard's craft' ('The Egyptian Maid' 44), modern 'Life' decked out by 'the mean handywork of craftsman' ('London 1802' 4), assassins led by those 'whose craft holds no consent /With aught that breathes the ethereal element' (Dion 54-5), the 'craft of age, seducing reason' (Borderers 363) or 'the craft / Of a shrewd Counsellor' ('Wars of York and Lancaster' 1-2). About as good as it gets is a rare reverence for 'the painter's true Promethean craft' ('Lines suggested' 24) or the poet's hope that his own 'Imagination' has 'learn'd to ply her craft / By judgement steadied' (Prel.1805 xiii 290-4). Making rigorous inquisition intoWordsworth and poetic craft might even seem perversity, for he is, legendarily, the antithesis. What care for craft can there be in his praise for 'Poets . . . sown / By Nature; Men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine, / Yet wanting the accomplishment of Verse' (The Excursion i 81-4) - 'wanting' signifying no urgent desire but an unimportant, accidental lack?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth , pp. 108 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
- 3
- Cited by