Peter Simonsen

Italic Typography and Wordsworth's Later Sonnets as Visual Poetry

The later Wordsworth understood the sonnet as a form of visual poetry. This essay investigates this in relation to Wordsworth’s sense of layout in his 1838 book of sonnets; his conceptualization of the sonnet as “picture,” “frame,” and “monument”; and his use of italic typeface in printings of the sonnet “After-Thought” after 1827. The positive sense of the visual thus articulated by the poet in his later sonnets constitutes one way in which he swerves from his earlier self. The essay argues, in contrast to traditional readings of Wordsworth’s career, that this poetic visuality enriches even as it complicates our understanding of his work.

To Age With Honour: Charlotte Strandgaard's Welfare State Poetry of Ageing in No Man's Land

This article provides a reading of Charlotte Strandgaard’s collection of poetry, No Man’s Land (2015), as a piece of Danish welfare state poetry. This collection of poetry articulates certain anxieties associated with maintaining one’s honour as an elderly woman in the contemporary welfare state that embraces economic values of speed, efficiency, growth and (re)productivity. In the welfare state the elderly are kept out of traditional functions. In a utilitarian sense, they feel useless, and it becomes difficult to ‘age with honour’ in the sense of maintaining their sense of dignity as an effect of maintaining their personal autonomy.

Velfærdsforestillinger om sund aldring: Eksempler i tekster af Sundhedsstyrelsen, Dorrit Willumsen og Lars Skinnebach

Abstract The essay discusses a crucial notion in the modern biopolitical welfare state: that good health is beneficiary both for the individual and for society at large. It compares and juxtaposes this hegemonic idea to literary works by the Danish authors, Dorrit Willumsen and Lars Skinnebach, who in various ways articulate dissent from this notion. Special attention is given to the topic of healthy ageing and longevity.

The Book of Ekphrasis: Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems

Wordsworth’s turn to ekphrasis was fully realised in what is probably the most important publication from his later period, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835). His first book containing new poetry since 1822,Yarrow Revisited reflects the turn in a number of ways.1 The book signals a hesitant recuperation of a Neoclassical conception of poetic language in the motto inscribed on the title page: ‘Poets… dwell on earth/To clothe whate’er the soul admires and loves/With language and with numbers’.2 Taken from the end of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772), this motto suggests a surprising return to an understanding of poetic language that Wordsworth had resisted in the Essays upon Epitaphs, where language as ‘clothing’ was presented as an artificial counter-spirit and opposed to an authentic poetic language, which incarnates thought in an organic manner (see PrW 2, 84–85). The clothes metaphor foregrounds exteriority and visuality in a manner which suggests a decentring of the idealist presuppositions of the earlier Wordsworth and signals that much of what Yarrow Revisited contains is an ‘artificial’ poetry of exteriors that responds to visual pleasures and is intended for the ‘bodily eye’.

The Return of the Visible and Romantic Ekphrasis: Wordsworth in the Visual Art Culture of Romanticism

Wordsworth is often identified with a deep iconoclastic scepticism regarding sight and visual phenomena. In The Prelude, he refers to the eye as ‘The most despotic of our senses’ and recalls a time when it had ‘gained/Such strength in me as often held my mind/In absolute dominion’ (1805, XI, ll. 171–176). As he continues by saying that he would ‘Gladly’ ‘endeavour to unfold the means/Which Nature studiously employs to thwart/This tyranny’ (ll. 176–180), Wordsworth encourages the identification enabling W. J. T. Mitchell, for instance, to state that ‘the first lesson we give to students of romanticism is that, for Wordsworth… “imagination” is a power of consciousness that transcends mere visualization. We may even go on to note that pictures and vision frequently play a negative role in romantic poetic theory’.1 One reason among many why the eye is a touchy subject in Wordsworth is no doubt that from January 1805 and for the rest of his life he suffered from attacks of severe inflammation of the eyelids that made him hypersensitive to light and inhibited poetic composition.2 Yet, while his bad eyes thus put a strain on composition, they also undoubtedly caused Wordsworth to become increasingly aware and appreciative of the gift of seeing, and consequently contributed to the foregrounding of the visible and the turn to descriptive and ekphrastic writing in the later career: a turn that was coterminous with what Alan Liu calls the later Wordsworth’s ‘effort to criticize the flight of imagination’ resulting in predominantly ‘disimaginative work’ that revises the early visual scepticism which informs much of the Great Decade poetry.3

‘If Mine Had Been the Painter’s Hand’: Wordsworth’s Collaboration with Sir George Beaumont

William Hazlitt first noted Wordsworth’s visual turn to ekphrasis. Hazlitt’s criticism of Wordsworth is justly famous for the strong correlation he made between the poetic principles of the Lake School poets and the French Revolution when he suggested in Lectures on the Living Poets that they ‘went hand in hand’.1 In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt repeated his well-known characterisation of the levelling tendencies of Wordsworth’s early poetry and said that his revolutionary ‘first’ poetic principles generated a nature poetry, wherein objects were described ‘in a way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him’. This made Wordsworth ‘the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere’.2 What is rarely mentioned in the discussion of Hazlitt’s reception of Wordsworth is that he registered a change in Wordsworth, and that the change and the duplicities it entailed may in fact be what Hazlitt means by the problematic phrase, ‘the spirit of the age’.

Typographic Inscription: The Art of ‘Word-Preserving’ in Wordsworth’s Later Inscriptions

One of the most interesting and productive paradoxes in Wordsworth is that he was, on the one hand, a self-proclaimed ‘man speaking to men’, who seems to have abhorred the physical act of writing and in ‘The Tables Turned’ (1798) biblioclastically associated books with ‘a dull and endless strife’ (Brett & Jones, 105). And yet, on the other hand, he was deeply fascinated by the visible, tactile and permanent language of material inscriptions and epitaphs, and in ‘Personal Talk’ (1807) impersonated the bibliolater:

‘The Marble Index of a Mind’: Frontispiece Portraiture and the Image of Late Wordsworth

One of Wordsworth’s very first poems is a juvenile imitation of one of Anacreon’s odes. First published in 1940, dated Hawkshead, 7 August 1786, ‘Anacreon (Imitation)’ reveals his early fascination with enargeia and long-standing attraction to portraiture. The poem calls upon Joshua Reynolds and challenges him to paint a portrait the poem then describes in vivid detail ending with the Pygmalian and gothic fantasy of the portrait coming alive (PW 1, 261–262). It belongs to one of the most radical forms of ‘notional ekphrasis’: the so-called advice-to-a -painter poem where a poet describes a painting to a painter intending the painter to realise the description visually.2 The advice-to-a-painter poem derives from three Hellenistic Anacreontea, two of which are instructions for a portrait. In the Renaissance, poems that instruct a painter to paint portraits resurfaced and became objects of imitation. After Waller and Marvell’s famous examples from the 1660s, the genre decreased in importance but did not die out.3 That Wordsworth came across it at the age of sixteen is both evidence that it was part of the stock of classical texts that was being preserved in the educational system, and that the subject of portraiture claimed a special attraction for him.

The Sonnet as Visual Poetry: Italics in ‘After-Thought’

All in all Wordsworth wrote some 535 sonnets. In the years 1818–1822 alone, he composed nearly two hundred and, as Lee Johnson notes, the sonnet was indeed the ‘principal form of utterance’ in the later phase of the career.1 To understand the difference and appreciate the specificity of Wordsworth’s later work, we must understand both why he turned so emphatically to the sonnet and what he turned it into. What compelled this allegedly ‘simple’ poet of nature, who claimed to compose in ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men’ (Brett & Jones, 254), to invest so heavily in the stylised, artificial and conventional sonnet form he at one point thought of as ‘egregiously absurd’? (LY 1, 125).