What is it about?
This essay is about Percy Shelley's public mourning -- openly in his poetry and indirectly in his prose--of the death of the still-living William Wordsworth. It argues that Shelley abjures Wordsworth for his love of inanimate things, but that Shelley's work is also powerfully drawn to Wordsworth's distinctive forms of non-life.
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Why is it important?
The essay demonstrates how expressions of love and disavowal, and the dynamics of blessing and curse -- both important linguistic forces in Shelley's poetry --are linked to questions of biopoetics: the critical poetics of life and non-life.
Perspectives
This essay first started as a 2013 Wordsworth Winter School talk. It develops and broadens ideas in my essay, "To Wordsworth and the White Obi." Along with the chapter on Shelley in my book, Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (Palgrave 2011), these two essays seek to raise the scholarly profile of Shelley's most-underrated poem, "Peter Bell the Third."
Eric Lindstrom
University of Vermont
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mourning Life: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism, April 2017, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/rom.2017.0305.
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