Wordsworth's classical education presents an amazing paradox. Gifted teachers trained him in the full rigours of classical Latin and Greek. But Wordsworth's schoolmasters were enlightened, liberal and advanced. They were committed to the Classics and to modern literature. In their enthusiasm they shared their volumes of contemporary poetry with Wordsworth. His was a holistic literary education. Wordsworth developed a profound love for the Classics and thus an enlightened zeal for a new poetry, a poetry capable of being compared with and even daring to compete with the Classical texts he so dearly loved. Richard Clancey's meticulously researched study presents new biographical information on Wordsworth's classical education and new facts about the education of his teachers.

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.

"Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly-revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth's poetry, with such broadly-felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth's old age in relation to his earlier work. Tim Fulford is the author of many books and articles on the literature and history of the Romantic Period (1780-1840), and is the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2022). His monograph Wordsworth's Poetry 1815-45 (2019) won the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Scholarship 2020. His edition The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (co-edited with Sharon Ruston) (2020) won an honourable mention in the MLA biennial Morton N. Cohen Award For A Distinguished Edition Of Letters"--

"The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

William Wordsworth's later poetry complicates possibilities of life and art in war's aftermath. This illuminating study provides new perspectives and reveals how his work following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars reflects a passionate, lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace. Focusing on works from between 1814 and 1822, Philip Shaw constructs a unique and compelling account of how Wordsworth, in both his ongoing poetic output and in his revisions to earlier works, sought to modify, refute, and sometimes sustain his early engagement with these issues as both an artist and a political thinker. In an engaging style, Shaw reorients our understanding of the later writings of a major British poet and the post-war literary culture in which his reputation was forged. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

A groundbreaking study of how abstract linguistic signs circulate in literature, intellectual history, and popular culture. Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us and the ways we interpret the world. Yet prevalent assumptions about language and the constraints of print-finding tools have kept linguistic forms and their histories hidden from view. Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of language—word order, syntax, categorization—discarded by the “bag of words” quantitative methods that are dominant in the digital humanities. While scholars across the humanities have long explored the histories of words and phrases, Shore argues that increasingly sophisticated search tools coupled with growing full-text digital archives make it newly possible to study the histories of linguistic forms. In so doing, Shore challenges a range of received metanarratives and complicates some of the most basic concepts of literary study. Touching on canonical works by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Kant, even as it takes the full diversity of digitized texts as its purview, Cyberformalism asks scholars of literature, history, and culture to revise nothing less than their understanding of the linguistic sign.

Imitating Authors is a major study of the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from antiquity to the present day. It extends from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans, and illuminates both the theory and practice of imitation. At its centre lie the imitating authors of the English Renaissance, including Ben Jonson and the most imitated imitator of them all, John Milton. Imitating Authors argues that imitation was not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learnt practices from earlier writers. They imitated the structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enabled them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That made imitation an engine of literary change. Imitating Authors also shows how the metaphors used by theorists to explain this complex practice fed into works which were themselves imitations, and how those metaphors have come to influence present-day anxieties about imitation human beings and artificial forms of intelligence. It explores relationships between imitation and authorial style, its fraught connections with plagiarism, and how emerging ideas of genius and intellectual property changed how imitation was practised. In refreshing and jargon-free prose Burrow explains not just what imitation was in the past, but how it influences the present, and what it could be in the future. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of Plato, Roman rhetorical theory, Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism studies marriage in two sets of literary texts from the Regency decade: the novels of Jane Austen—who avoided marriage in her own life but seems to have written about nothing else—and a set of non-canonical and generally unfamiliar poems by William Wordsworth, who seems never to turn to the subject of his own marriage. With other Romantic writers who also figure in this study, Austen and Wordsworth confronted the impossibility of writing about anything other than marriage and the imperative either to celebrate or condemn it. Thanks to the latest scholarly editions of Wordsworth, Walker introduces previously undiscussed material. Walker reads conjugality as the compulsory ground of modern identity, an Enlightenment legacy we still grapple with today, and offers new perspectives on literature through the writing of Austen and Wordsworth and theories of marriage in Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and, in our time, Adam Phillips and Stanley Cavell.