Naslov
Visualizing Poverty in Wordsworth's Poetry

Autori
Domines Veliki, Martina

Izvornik
Umjetnost riječi : časopis za znanost o književnosti (0503-1583) LXIII (2019), 3-4; 161-178

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Wordsworth, the picturesque, poverty studies

Sažetak
This essay departs from an assumption that Wordsworth's poetry is visual in the sense that Coleridge linked his inspiration to the 'despotism of the eye'. Indeed, for Wordsworth eyes and ears were his gates of perception and the visual quality of his best poetry is best summarized by his lines from 'Expostulation and Reply' where 'The eye it cannot choose but see' (17). In that sense there is a clear link between words and images that these words convey to a late eighteenth-century middle- class reader. If Wordsworth was at the time ‘sketching his intellectual landscape’ (Keats’s phrase), he was able to do so from the position of material security and his middle-class aesthetic competence. Therefore, it becomes essential to examine how such competence relates to the poor characters, he so often depicted in his poetry. (i.e. 'Resolution and Independence', 'The Old Cumberland Beggar', ‘Michael’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’) In other words, this essay seeks to examine what Wordsworth chose not to see and how such strategy of un-knowing links to the Romantic need to visualize landscape in a picturesque form. By addressing some New Historicist readings of such poems (Campbell, Siskin, Simpson, Pfau) together with the philosophical framework of the so-called New Poverty Studies, the essay hopes to dismantle the concept of Romantic selfhood only to show its class- related existence.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA