Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reframing Lyrical Ballads (1800/1798)
- 2 Textual Travelling in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads
- 3 Short-Circuiting Wordsworth's 1807 Poems: Richard Mant's The Simpliciad
- 4 Wordsworth's ‘Library of Babel’: The Excursion and the 1815 Poems
- 5 Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
- 6 J. H. Reynolds's ‘Peter Bell’ and the Wordsworthian Reputation
- 7 The River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth's Canonical Ascent
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - The River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth's Canonical Ascent
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reframing Lyrical Ballads (1800/1798)
- 2 Textual Travelling in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads
- 3 Short-Circuiting Wordsworth's 1807 Poems: Richard Mant's The Simpliciad
- 4 Wordsworth's ‘Library of Babel’: The Excursion and the 1815 Poems
- 5 Opening up Chapter 13 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
- 6 J. H. Reynolds's ‘Peter Bell’ and the Wordsworthian Reputation
- 7 The River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth's Canonical Ascent
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
He has raised to himself a deathless monument of glory; he has fixed it as the landmark of future ages, to show where the spirit of poesy remains enshrined, and the sensibilities of nature are consecrated; and while in his voyage down the stream of life toward the regions of immortality, his genius gathers glory as it proceeds, the bards of other times, who have so often been the themes of his praise and the subjects of his adoration, shall welcome him home to the everlasting temple of fame, as the brightest and the purest offering of Time to Eternity.
1820 was a good year for Wordsworth's literary reputation. He published the single volume The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia and Other Poems. To which is Annexed, a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England, the four-volume Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth and a second edition of The Excursion. Wordsworth's books of poetry were selling better than ever, and, as Jeffrey Cox maintains, these publications came at a time when broad conceptions about a ‘pantheon of living poets’ were giving way to periodical debates and public lectures about canonizing a more select body of writers who defined the age. Wordsworth's single-volume The River Duddon would solidify his place in that canon.
The River Duddon played a significant role in Wordsworth's designs to collect together all of his works and build his readership.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014