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Wordsworth After War

Wordsworth After War
Open Access

Wordsworth After War

Recovering Peace in the Later Poetry
Philip Shaw, University of Leicester
March 2025
Available
Paperback
9781009363167

    William Wordsworth's later poetry complicates possibilities of life and art in war's aftermath. This illuminating study provides new perspectives and reveals how his work following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars reflects a passionate, lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace. Focusing on works from between 1814 and 1822, Philip Shaw constructs a unique and compelling account of how Wordsworth, in both his ongoing poetic output and in his revisions to earlier works, sought to modify, refute, and sometimes sustain his early engagement with these issues as both an artist and a political thinker. In an engaging style, Shaw reorients our understanding of the later writings of a major British poet and the post-war literary culture in which his reputation was forged. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

    • Sets out a chronological account of the development of Wordsworth's later poetry, focusing on works written or published between 1814 and 1822
    • Demonstrates how Wordsworth's poetry responds to the aftermath of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and sustained, modified, or rejected his early engagement with the poetics and politics of peace
    • Challenges the distinction between 'early' and 'late' Wordsworth, exploring the poet's revisions to earlier works and the significance of the reception of these works following their publication in the post-war period

    Reviews & endorsements

    ‘… this is a book of richly detailed readings of lesser-known poems that consistently illuminates their inner tensions by reconstructing the personal and public contexts in which they were written and read. ’ Tim Fulford, The Charles and Mary Lamb Journal

    See more reviews

    Product details

    March 2025
    Paperback
    9781009363167
    295 pages
    229 × 152 × 16 mm
    0.434kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. Conscripting 'The Recluse'
    • 2. Peace out of time: The White Doe of Rylstone
    • 3. Thanksgiving after war
    • 4. 'Returning, like a ghost unlaid': Peter Bell and The Waggoner
    • 5. Violent waters: The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches
    • 6. Wordsworth after Byron: Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820
    • After Wordsworth.
      Author
    • Philip Shaw , University of Leicester

      Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on Romantic-period literature, specialising in literary and visual responses to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. His books include Romantic Wars (2000), Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), The Sublime (2006/2017), and Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (2013).