What is it about?
The article is about a curious discrepancy in the poetic and prose writings of William Wordsworth and concerns his treatment of religion. Did you realize that religion is the second most important source of inspiration behind his poetry? (nearly 500 of his poems - early and late, minor and major - contain references to religious subjects and motifs). On the other hand, religion as a topic is practically nonexistent in his prose writings.
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Why is it important?
The article reveals a disturbing split in the mind of William Wordsworth: its division into the „prose mind” and the „mind poetic". This is particularly surprising in the writer who claimed (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) that "there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition."
Perspectives
To me the split discussed in this article is truly fascinating: "They [prose and poetry] both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance", he says in his Preface, but is not able to support these claims with his own writings. One more detail concerning my article that is important: it provides astounding statistics - an outcome of several years of research!
Dr Eliza Borkowska
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘But I am too particular for the limits of my paper’: Religion in Wordsworth's Poetry, Prose and Talk, Romanticism, April 2015, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/rom.2015.0207.
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