William Wordsworth

Bloom's Classic Critical Views

by Harold Bloom (Editor)

William Wordsworth was largely responsible for the Romantic Movement, and is perhaps the most durable figure of the style. His poetry, including Tintern Abbey, is studied extensively in this volume. This title, William Wordsworth, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of William Wordsworth through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on William Wordsworth, a chronology of the author s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

Genres: Poetry

206 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[Stan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another installment in Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Views about which I have mixed views.

I suspect that most readers (like myself) who know little about Wordsworth pick up a book like this to get an introduction to the author under review, to learn who he/she was and why their output warrants continuing to pay attention to it.

By reading this book I learned something, but more often than not I was frustrated by the essays reprinted herein. Too often I felt that the discussion was overly narrow, too much of the sort of "insider baseball" that would only interest graduate school students and their bosses. The essays by Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Thomas Weiskel did more to extinguish, rather than fuel, my interest in Wordsworth.

On the positive side, I can report that I liked (and learned from) reading Bloom's Introduction (3,000 words), M. H. Abrams's essay (4,400 words), and Thomas McFarland's "Wordsworthian Rigidity" (8,000 words) — I liked their general (as opposed to narrow) appreciation of Wordsworth's oeuvre.

The book is available here:

https://archive.org/details/williamwo...

Bloom's MCVs typically do not number the essays in the Table of Contents (sigh). Nevertheless, here are the essays in his book in the order of their appearance:

1 Introduction
by Harold Bloom 1

2 The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth
by Frederick A. Pottle 9

3 Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image
by Paul de Man 23

4 The Romance of Nature and the Negative Way
by Geoffrey Hartman 37

5 Wordsworth and the Music of Sound
by John Hollander 55

6 Two Roads to Wordsworth
by M. H. Abrams 81

7 Wordsworth and the Defile of the Word
by Thomas Weiskel 93

8 The Scene of Instruction: Tintern Abbey
by Harold Bloom 113

9 The “Immortality Ode”
by Frances Ferguson 137

10 The Wordsworthian Rigidity
by Thomas McFarland 151

11 “Home at Grasmere” in 1800
by Kenneth R. Johnston 173

Chronology 193
Contributors 195
Bibliography 197
Acknowledgments 201