Wordsworth & Word-Preserving Arts

By looking at the later Wordsworth’s ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth’s sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth’s ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth’s sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

PETER SIMONSEN received his PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern Denmark.

Introduction * Romantic Ekphrasis and the Return of the Visible: Wordsworth in the Visual Art Culture of Romanticism * Typographic Inscription: The Art of ‘Word-Preserving’ in Wordsworth’s Later Inscriptions * ‘If Mine Had Been the Painter’s Hand’: Wordsworth’s Collaboration with Sir George Beaumont * The Sonnet as Visual Poetry: Italics in ‘After-Thought’ * The Book of Ekphrasis: Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems * ‘The Marble Index of a Mind’: Romanticism, Frontispiece Portraiture and the Image of Late Wordsworth * Bibliography * Index