Understanding 'The Prelude' , livre ebook

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2021

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W. J. B. Owen

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350

pages

English

Ebook

2021

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Publié par

Humanities eBooks

Date de parution

11 janvier 2021

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781847600011

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

A new collection of the author's essays, written over a twentyyear period, on the meaning of The Prelude.

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Publié par

Humanities eBooks

Date de parution

11 janvier 2021

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781847600011

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

European Literary criticism

W. J. B. Owen

UnderstandingThe Prelude

Humanities Ebooks, 2007

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Publication Data

The Estate has asserted the right of W. J. B. Owen to be identified as the Author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Published electronically in 2007 byHumanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-001-1

UnderstandingThe Prelude

W. J. B. Owen

Humanities Ebooks

For Betty

W J B Owen receiving an honorary degree, 19??

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. UnderstandingThe Prelude2. The Sublime and the Beautiful 3. Literary Echoes inThe Prelude 4. Wordsworth’s Aesthetics of Landscape5. ‘A Shock of Mild Surprise’ 6. Two Wordsworthian Ambivalences 7. Wordsworth’s Imaginations 8. ‘The Charm More Superficial’ 9. The Object the Eye and the Imagination 10. ‘The Ascent of the Mind’ 11. ‘The Poetry of Nature’ 12. ‘The Most Despotic of our Senses’ 13. ‘Such Structures as the Mind builds’ 14. ‘The Perfect Image of a mighty Mind’ 15. The descent from Snowdon16. ‘A Sense of the Infinite’ 17. ‘Prose’

12 31 57 74 91 112 131 155 174 188 215 237 258 274 292 313 333

Preface

With one exception, the essays in this volume have appeared hitherto only in the pages ofThe Wordsworth Circle, Professor Owen having been little given to self-promotion. They are collected here as a service to students and to scholarship. W. J. B. Owen was a scholar to his fingertips, and his quiet assurance in any matter to do with Wordsworth’s texts could be relied upon implicitly. Like many habitués of the Wordsworth Summer Conference, founded in 1970 by Richard Wordsworth, I have long felt that they deserved a wider audience, and re-reading them in the process of formatting raw scans into finished text, I came across numerous reminders of why I did so. On the surface they share little with the critical procedures dominant in the 70s and 80s of the last century, and they are mercifully free of theoretical jargon, yet their refusal to submit passively to the poet’s claims, is a strength Professor Owen’s work shares with such sceptical methodologies as deconstruction or new historicism. The essays dwell on a limited range of themes, mostly to do with matters of aesthetic definition, or of psychological exactitude in pinning down just what it is that given Wordsworth passages—usually the absolutely central passages—are about. They frequently return, ruminatively—as do the essays of many other critics—to the same teasing problems. Their style is quiet, unflamboyant, methodical, and flavoured with a dry humour which is sometimes barely detectable, and is most evident, perhaps, in the opening essay of this collection—a starting point nominated by Professor Owen himself when considering such a collection. Yet their substance bears, very often, upon the most debated aspects of Wordsworth’s mind and art. They probe deeply into questions that most readers of Wordsworth would never have formulated, or recognized as problematic. What is meant by ‘the poetry of nature’? How exactly does the symbolism of the Snowdon episode work? What does Wordsworth mean by ‘Imagination’, and what reflections led him to place one poem under ‘Poems of Imagination’ while another, equally imaginative, appears under ‘Poems dealing with the Affections’? Do the processes involved in writing or experiencing ‘A Night-Piece’ deserve the term Imagination as defined by either Wordsworth or Coleridge? Exactly how does the great English poet of the natural

Sublime relate to Edmund Burke, the most quoted theorist of the Sublime? Are the terms Fancy and Imagination discriminations of relative value? What weight should we attach to each of the words in ‘a shock of mild surprise’ and how does this experience relate to other Wordsworthian intensities? How, in practice, does the dispute between Coleridge and Wordsworth vis-à-vis the language of prose bear upon his own practice inThe Prelude, as opposed to the lyric experiments of 1798– 1800? As the editor ofLyrical Ballads,Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism,The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, and the Cornell edition ofThe Fourteen-Book Prelude, and as the author ofWordsworth as Literary Critic, Jack Owen had unequalled resources for finding the apt illustration of any question one might ask. A debate was once held at the Wordsworth Summer Conference concerning the relative merits of the 1805 and 1850 versions ofThe Prelude. Five learned persons were divided by the question whether the appearance in Book 3 of the 1850 text of the poetical expression ‘an arrow’s flight’ as a measure of distance was, or was not, proof of the artificiality of the later text. It required Professor Owen to point out quietly that the only reason that the phrase did not appear at the same point in the 1805 text was that it was, at that date, still reserved for use in the Book 4 account of the Discharged Soldier, having been part of that narrative since 1798. Only someone who knew both texts through and through (not merely his personal favourite) could make that point. And the opening essay in this collection takes off from a witty exploration of precisely that curious issue, into its disquisition into what it means to really readThe Prelude. T. S. Eliot once said that the most valuable contribution a critic can make to literary appreciation is to draw one’s attention to a fact, and literary contracts often require authors (somewhat optimistically, perhaps) to attest that any statement in their work ‘purporting to report a fact is true’. Critical inquiry which concerns itself methodically with establishing what is the case deserves to be relished. In its quiet way, also, Professor Owen’s book offers an alternative view of editorial process from that which is current. As a participant in the editorial work of the Cornell Wordsworth—he edited theFourteen-Book Prelude—Professor Owen was, of course, engaged in some sense in restoring the earliest possible text, or at least the earliest version of a late text. But in this case, as he points out, his task was to restore the poet’s text of the so-called1850 Prelude, as opposed to the family text, rather than to advance a text based on the critic’s claim to superior judgment.

I do not propose to summarise the essays in this volume. But I will call attention to a personal favourite. The essay entitled ‘The Descent from Snowdon’ takes the characteristic (and subversive) position that a passage is not necessarily profound and valuable, or even lucid, merely because the poet chose to give it some prominence. One may enjoy the essay simply for its quiet irreverence in that respect. But the argument that in 1805 Wordsworth was adopting values that had little to do with the way his poetry had been created, and advancing these as if they were unproblematic values, is an important one, and wittily expressed. It is ironic, Professor Owen argues, that ‘the vision from Snowdon … should be the starting-pointing for a tedious and obscure argument which will tell you that the very power which conceived that vision is not enough; is, in a sense, undesirable, is in need of taming, is in need of supplementing and balancing by characteristics which are often those of a minor poet.’ Moreover, ‘a man “in mental repose” will no longer discover the types and symbols of eternity in an Alpine pass, or the perfect image of a mighty mind in a Welsh cloudscape, or the sublimity of the Cumbrian mountains echoed in the man-made sublimity of a great city—he will not discover these, for being complete he no longer needs to discover anything, and the excitement of discovery, the sense of what Wordsworth often calls “admiration,” will no longer emerge in poetry.’ It is a challenging point for one peroration to level at another. A sub-theme of this argument is that Wordsworth has been persuaded by his post-revolutionary recuperation to value sublimity less and beauty more than a great poet ought. One could, of course, disagree with that point of view on several grounds. But did Wordsworth? My own reading of some of the revisions toThe Preludesubsequent years suggests otherwise. At key moments in the poem his in afterthoughts accentuate grandeur and add quietly to sublime effects. In the skating ‘spot of time’, for instance, a propos of mountain echoes, Wordsworth changes the phrase ‘with the din, meanwhile’ to ‘with the dinsmitten’, substituting a word of power for a peculiarly lame expression. In the boating ‘spot’, merely by changing ‘with trembling hands’ to ‘with trembling oars’ he quadruples the sublime leverage of that image and directs one’s visualizing imagination back to the natural sublime. Perhaps Wordsworth came to see the justice of Professor Owen’s view. Richard Gravil

Acknowledgements

The essays in this volume were first published inThe Wordsworth Circle, ed. Marilyn Gaull, between 1972 and 1997 and are reproduced in this format by kind permission of Professor Gaull.

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