Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:09:31.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Wordsworth's Images of Language: Voice and Letter in The Prelude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

J. Douglas Kneale
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 3 , May 1986 , pp. 351 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. Urmson, J. O. and Sbisa, Marina. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest. “Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet.” Philological Quarterly 44 (1965): 503–18.Google Scholar
Bishop, Jonathan. “Wordsworth and the ‘Spots of Time.‘” Wordsworth: The Prelude. Ed. Harvey, W. J. and Gravil, Richard. London: Macmillan, 1972. 134–53.Google Scholar
Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. Erdman, David V. Commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Doubleday, 1965.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT P, 1965.Google Scholar
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Trask, Willard R. New York: Pantheon, 1953.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.Google Scholar
de Selincourt, Ernest, ed. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind. By William Wordsworth. 2nd ed. Rev. Helen Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Frances. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Fraser, W. G. Letter. Times Literary Supplement 4 Apr. 1929: 276.Google Scholar
Fry, Paul H. “The Absent Dead: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Epitaph.” Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978): 413–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random, 1968.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Unmediated Vision. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” Beyond Formalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. 206–30.Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey H. Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Havens, Raymond Dexter. The Mind of a Poet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1941.Google Scholar
Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 62–85.Google Scholar
Hulbert, James, trans. “Coming into One's Own.” By Jacques Derrida. Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 114–48.Google Scholar
Kneale, Douglas. “The Rhetoric of Imagination in The Prelude.” Ariel 15 (1984): 111–27.Google Scholar
Kroeber, Karl. “‘Home at Grasmere’: Ecological Holiness.” PMLA 89 (1974): 132–41.10.2307/461676CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.” Structuralism. Ed. Ehrmann, Jacques. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1970. 101–37.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth.” New Literary History 2 (1971): 297–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Stone and the Shell: The Problem of Poetic Form in Wordsworth's Dream of the Arab.” Mouvements premiers: Etudes critiques offertes à Georges Poulet. Paris: Corti, 1972. 125–47.Google Scholar
Ogden, John T. “The Structure of Imaginative Experience in Wordsworth's Prelude.” Wordsworth Circle 6 (1975): 290–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pottle, Frederick A. “The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth.” Wordsworth: Centenary Studies. Ed. Dunklin, Gilbert T. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951. 23–42.Google Scholar
Rawnsley, H. D. Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmoreland. London: Dillon's, 1968.Google Scholar
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.Google Scholar
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Bally, Charles and Albert Sechehaye in collab. with Albert Riedlingen Trans. Baskin, Wade. New York: McGraw, 1966.Google Scholar
Shelley, P. B. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Powers, Sharon B. New York: Norton, 1977.Google Scholar
Simpson, David. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry. Totowa: Rowman, 1979.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, Jonathan, Abrams, M. H., and Gill, Stephen, eds. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. By William Wordsworth. New York: Norton, 1979.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Poems. Ed. Hayden, John O. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: A Parallel Text. Ed. Maxwell, J. C. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, Jane Worthington. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.Google Scholar