Retracing the Revolutions: Wordsworth's Poetry 1793 - 1797

Abstract

This developmental study of the poetry of William Wordsworth begins in 1793 and charts Wordsworth's long walk out of convention towards the radical experiments he would undertake with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Lyrical Ballads (1798). While a still-popular critical narrative characterises Wordsworth's taking up of poetry as part of a recoil from revolutionary politics, this thesis argues instead that the myriad stylistic changes Wordsworth made over these years are provoked by an initial clash between Wordsworth's radical politics and an inherently conservative set of poetic conventions, and driven by his attempts to adapt or invent a poetry compatible with democratic politics. The link between the radical politics of the 1790s and Wordsworth's poetry is the question of representation. As radicals in Britain agitated to extend the representative range of government, Wordsworth attempted to extend the representative range of poetry. With the outbreak of war and the crackdown on press freedom, radicalism, and reform instigated by the Pitt Ministry, this task became more difficult even as it became more urgent. From the end of 1793 onwards, Wordsworth's poetry would be informed by the consultative method of democracy as a means of both inaugurating a poetry capable of representing poor and common subjects, and as an attempt to simulate and preserve an increasingly unsayable politics. Concluding in 1797 with the first working prototype of this democratic poetic, The Ruined Cottage, this thesis retraces the revolutions, both political and stylistic, that lead, ultimately, to the major artistic and political intervention announced by Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads.