Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (Oxford English Monographs) - Hardcover

Newlyn, Lucy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019812855X ISBN 13: 9780198128557

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1986

Synopsis

In her study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a startlingly new version of the poetic interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the critical years from 1797 to 1807. Rejecting the traditional accounts, even those given by the poets themselves, which have minimized the differences between the two, Newlyn demonstrates that it is only on the most superficial level that each poet seemed to be the other's ideal audience. Below that surface, she insists, there were radical dissimilarities between the two which led to a kind of "creative" misunderstanding by which each artist clearly defined himself in relation to the other. Because it is in the poet's "private language" of allusion that these differences are most clearly seen, the book concludes that this "private language" spoken by artists amongst themselves may in fact be the most aggressive of literary forms.

About this title

About the Author

Lucy Newlyn is Fellow and Tutor in English at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Review

"Distinguished by her subtle readings of Wordworth's and Coleridge's allusions to one another's writings and by her account of the 'saving fictions' that the poets construct in order to come to terms with fundamental differences between them."--Studies in Romanticism

"Newlyn has cast light on an aspect of early Wordsworth and Coleridge that will deepen our understanding of them as men and poets."--ineteenth-Century Literature

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019812855X
• ISBN 13: 9780198128557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220