Extract

Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815-1845 offers a chronological continuation to Geoffrey Hartman’s 1964 monograph, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 to place in literary history a varied and reactive William Wordsworth predicated on the experiences and perspectives of later life. Correcting misjudgements of Wordsworth’s later poems as an anti-climax or a betrayal of the earlier, the book adds to the sustained critical interest in the writings of later Wordsworth by, among others, Peter J. Manning, James K. Chandler, and Peter Larkin. […]

Not only does Fulford’s study celebrate the achievements of Wordsworth’s later works, it also recognises a style of Romantic lateness that is characterised by a fragmentary sense of decay and diminution, a keen awareness of transience and fragility, as well as an anxiety for posterity. The ideas of lateness and retrospect in what Fulford terms Wordsworth’s ‘dark poetry’ (146) are the textual products of revisiting, rewriting, and renewing earlier works through contemplative, deferential language and generic experimentation. Wordsworth’s late-life elegiac and commemorative writings, as well as his hybridization of conversational poem with late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century landscape verse, constitute acts of homage that reconcile form and history, individual and institution. […]