Table Of ContentWORDSWORTH’S POETIC COLLECTIONS,
SUPPLEMENTARY WRITING AND
PARODIC RECEPTION
The History of the Book
Series Editor: Ann R. Hawkins
Titles in this Series
1 Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis
Jonathan Cutmore (ed.)
2 Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–1825
Jonathan Cutmore
3 Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, 1873–1874
Susan R. Hanes
4 William Blake and the Art of Engraving
Mei-Ying Sung
5 Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse
Simon P. Hull
6 Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition
Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.)
7 Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London
Malcolm Richardson
8 Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality
Graham Allen, Carrie Griffi n and Mary O’Connell (eds)
9 Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page
Alex Watson
Forthcoming Titles
Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920
Jason D. Martinek
Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History
Ben P. Robertson
Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
Dean Baldwin
www.pickeringchatto.com/HoB
WORDSWORTH’S POETIC COLLECTIONS,
SUPPLEMENTARY WRITING AND
PARODIC RECEPTION
by
Brian R. Bates
PICKERING & CHATTO
2012
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
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© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2012
© Brian R. Bates 2012
To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every eff ort has been made to contact
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Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions.
british library cataloguing in publication data
Bates, Brian R.
Wordsworth’s poetic collections, supplementary writing and parodic reception.
– (Th e history of the book)
1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Technique. 2. Wordsworth, Wil-
liam, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Wordsworth, William,
1770–1850 – Parodies, imitations, etc. 4. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850
– Appreciation. 5. Authors and readers – England – History – 19th century.
I. Title II. Series
821.7-dc23
ISBN-13: 9781848931961
e: 9781848931978
∞
Th is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American
National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Reframing Lyrical Ballads (1800/1798) 21
2 Textual Travelling in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads 39
3 Short-Circuiting Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems: Richard Mant’s
Th e Simpliciad 57
4 Wordsworth’s ‘Library of Babel’: Th e Excursion and the 1815 Poems 77
5 Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria 101
6 J. H. Reynolds’s ‘Peter Bell’ and the Wordsworthian Reputation 121
7 Th e River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth’s Canonical Ascent 141
Notes 161
Works Cited 217
Index 231
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Th is book has benefi ted greatly from the continual support of Jessica Munns,
who has lent a keen eye to several chapters and has provided helpful advice
about my professional development. Initial thoughts on this project grew out of
conversations with Jeff rey Robinson, Andrew Franta and Douglas Wilson. Jeff
Cox has generously off ered helpful suggestions about shaping this project into
a book manuscript as well as providing insightful feedback on several chapters.
During the book’s preparation for press, I was fortunate to work with Stephina
Clarke whose careful attention, patience and diligence have been remarkable. I
am also grateful for the kind attention of Charles Rzepka, which came at a cru-
cial moment in the development of the book, and for the warm encouragement
of the series editor Ann Hawkins whose humour, critical insights and forthright-
ness I continue to appreciate. I would particularly like to thank Scott Howard
who has been a wonderfully supportive colleague and friend, and a model of
honesty, fairness and integrity. Finally, I off er my most heartfelt thanks and grati-
tude to Jennifer Kearny, my best reader in so many ways.
In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I have adapted and expanded several previously pub-
lished essays. Early versions of Chapter 4 were published as ‘Wordsworth’s Library
of Babel: Bibliomania, the 1814 Excursion and the 1815 Poems’, Romantic Textu-
alities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 14 (Summer 2005), at http://
www.cf.ac.uk/encap/romtext/articles/cc14n01.pdf, and as ‘Activating “Tintern
Abbey” in 1815’, in M. Lussier and B. Matsunaga (eds), Engaged Romanticism:
Romanticism as Praxis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008),
pp. 69–81. An early version of Chapter 5 was published in D. Lewes (ed.), Double
Vision: Literary Palimpsests of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 83–102. Th e fi nal section of Chapter 6 was
published as ‘Wordsworth, Milton, and Parodic Sonnets’, Appositions: Studies in
Early Modern Literature & Culture, 1 (Spring 2008), at http://appositions.blogs-
pot.com/, and more completely as ‘J. H. Reynolds Re-Echoes the Wordsworthian
Reputation: “Peter Bell,” Remaking the Work and Mocking the Man’, Studies in
Romanticism, 47:3 (Fall 2008), pp. 273–97.
– vii –
INTRODUCTION
Th is study focuses on the poetry and prose relations, bibliographic forms,
competitive poetry markets, readerly negotiations and parodic responses that
informed the creation of Wordsworth’s published collections of poetry from
1800 to 1820. Two intertwined stories govern the chapters that follow. Th e fi rst
describes how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage
readers in his poetic collections from Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800),
to Poems, in Two Volumes, by William Wordsworth (1807), Th e Excursion (1814),
Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) and Th e River Duddon volume (1820).1
Th e second relates how Wordsworth’s critics and parodists responded to and
were connected with the designs of those collections.
Beginning with the publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
employed a variety of supplementary writings to make a case for his poetry as
a valuable addition to the ‘Old Canon’ of poets, an innovation on ballad col-
lecting, and a means of lending authority to his singular poetic credentials.2
Th rough prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs,
advertisements and other paratexts,3 Wordsworth not only presented himself
as an important contemporary poet, but as an editor, anthologist, literary and
cultural critic. Th e prose interlacing Wordsworth’s collections from the 1800
Lyrical Ballads to his 1820 Th e River Duddon volume provided him with oppor-
tunities to guide readers through his poems and draw their attention to how
his work as a collector and commentator added aesthetic, cultural and historic
depth to his books of poetry.
As much as Wordsworth’s supplementary writings chart how readers might
engage with his poetry, they also play out his struggles in the fi rst two decades
of the nineteenth century to frame, reframe, combat and absorb the myriad
responses of reviewing critics and parodists into his poetic collections. In those
publications Wordsworth exercises two principal supplementary strategies – one
that encourages connective sympathetic readings of his poetry and another that
attempts to stave off reductive criticism. Th ese vacillating interactions between
poetry and prose, a poet and his readers, not only shaped Wordsworth’s poetic
– 1 –
