Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833

"Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833" uses extensive manuscript study of Wordsworth’s poems to present, for the first time, an account of his poetics during the supposedly "fallow" years, 1825-1833. Wordsworth wrote no manifestos during the later years and as a result the book turns to a manuscript page, unique among his dozens of notebooks, that when read spatially and in conjunction with other manuscripts and poems from the same period reveals a poetics in the making. ‘Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833’ develops a radical process of reading and interpreting, relying less on discursive prose and more on the conscious acknowledgement of the play of signifiers on the manuscript page that has led Robinson to capture a "world" of Wordsworth (1825–1833) beginning with the manuscript and spreading outwards to include the geography and topography relevant to his writing, the dwellings in which he worked, the well-known cottage industry of amanuenses who helped him produce his poems, the contemporary journals and poems of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, and the social issues (Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform) that often occasioned them. Finally, the book presents a cluster of more-or-less unread poems but most worthy of inclusion in the Wordsworth canon.

In order to emulate for readers Wordsworth’s spatial vision of poetry and the poetic process, and the often-playful experience of reading these manuscripts, Robinson has, with the collaboration of book designer and award-winning scholar of the image in modern fiction Karen Jacobs, developed a book design that stresses a paratext (including footnotes) so that the reader is asked to read across as much as to read vertically. The poems presented and discussed in the text appear with an image background to enhance the idea that poems themselves are events in space. Images, both of geographical and architectural space and of highlightings of manuscript detail, saturate the text as a whole. Finally, the intensity and simultaneous playfulness of Wordsworth’s nearly obsessive revisionary process has dictated the production of twenty-two original ‘found’ poems based on materials from Wordsworth’s manuscripts; these also appear throughout the book against an image background.

The book’s design, by Karen Jacobs, echoes Robinson’s argument that Wordsmith’s late poetry both involves and evokes multi-layered responses.