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
6 - J. H. Reynolds's ‘Peter Bell’ and the Wordsworthian Reputation
- 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
In the short term Coleridge's mixed defence of Wordsworth's genius, criticisms of his poetic diction and subject matter and parodic treatment of his poetic system did little to dissuade – and may have fuelled – further attacks by reviewing critics and parodists who scoffed at Wordsworth's elaborate claims for how and why his poems were ‘bound each to each’. Along with J. H. Reynolds's ‘Peter Bell, A Lyrical Ballad’ (1819), a handful of other Regency parodies call attention to the laborious and repetitious construction of Wordsworth's poetic oeuvre by singling out a particular Wordsworth poem as a pathetic, simplistic and ridiculous microcosm of his entire poetic works. Undoubtedly, they developed this satirical part/whole focus in response to Wordsworth's own prose remarks about how to read his poetry in his ‘Preface to The Excursion’ (1814) and in the supplementary prose surrounding his 1815 Poems. Most troubling for many of these critics were Wordsworth's claims in the preface that The Excursion acts as the completed centrepiece for his fragmentary, unpublished epic The Recluse and connects together all of his minor poetic pieces. Responding to Wordsworth's amalgamating poetic system, these parodists sought to effect a wholesale revision of the relationship between the part (a particular poem) and the whole (the entire projected Wordsworthian oeuvre).
While an earlier parody like The Simpliciad attempts to reduce the whole of Wordsworth's poetic oeuvre into inconsequential parts, Reynolds's ‘Peter Bell’ expands a part into an empty and displaced whole.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014