 | 42. Ibid, 423.
|
| 43. "There was a Boy" (1798), published in
Lyrical Ballads
(2d edition, 1800), then placed first among the "Poems of the Imagination" in 1815; also incorporated into
The Prelude
(see
Poetical Works,
2:206).
|
| 44. Francis Jeffrey, review of Poems by the Reverend George Crabbe,
Edinburgh Review,
April 1808, 135.
|
| 45. George Crabbe,
The Parish Register
(1807) part iii, 199ff.
|
| 46. "Remains of Henry Kirke Whitewith an Account of his Life by Robert Southey (London: Vernor Hood & Sharpe, 1807).
|
| 47. Coleridge, Letter to Wordsworth, 10 Dec. 1798. See
The Prelude
in
Poetical Works
, 2:546.
|
| 48. De Quincey, "William Wordsworth," in
Taits Magazine
, 1839. See
De Quincey as Critic
, ed. John E. Jordan (London: Routledge, 1973), 443.
|
| 49. The suggestion that Wordsworth can be seen as a poet of the primary imagination derives from A. D. Nuttall,
A Common Sky
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), chap. 3: V (119ff.).
|
| 50. Among the ingenious critics I will single out Geoffrey Hartman, who offers several explanations for why the boy dies: first and simplest, readers would wonder why the boy is worth writing about: "There was a boyand what happened to him?" (This could be seen as a kind of anticipatory reply to Jeffrey); seond, the poet is mourning the loss of a prior mode of being (this would connect the poem to the Immortality Ode); thirdand most interesting and puzzling"growing further into consciousness means a simultaneous development into death." A similar point seems to be made by Kenneth Johnston when he suggests "that this death somehow represents a triumph for the imagination." These suggestions have a convincing ring to them; yet because Book 5 of
The Prelude
is about education, we would expect it to demonstrate preparation for life, not anticipations of death. The mysterious power of the episode seems to elude the poem's argument. See Geoffrey H. Hartman,
Wordsworth's Poetry 17871814
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1:2; and Kenneth R. Johnston,
Wordsworth and The Recluse
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 142.
|
| 1.
Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son
(1848), chapter 1. All Dickens quotations are taken from
The Oxford India Paper Dickens
, 17 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, n.d.).
|
| 2. Tennyson to Robert Monteith, 24 April 1851,
The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson
, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19811990), 15.
|
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