http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/844031

Wordsworth's bardic vocation, 1787-1842

Wordworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. Exploring his lifelong fascination with the Druids and the Bards of Cumbria, Part 1 associates Wordsworth's druid reveries in The Prelude, The Vale of Esthwaite (1797) and An Evening Walk, with his mature historical vision in the Guide to the Lakes, and Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Parts 2 and 3 examine the poet's politically engaged 'defence of the people' in Salisbury Plain, The Ruined Cottage and Lyrical Ballads; his exploration of mortality in the elegies for Lucy and the Elysian poems of encounter; and his reconfiguring of minstrelsy and manliness in poems from Hart-Leap Well to The White Doe of Rylstone. Finally, Part 4 explores the dialogic quality of The Excursion, the ideology of the political sonnets, The Convention of Cintra and the Waterloo odes, and the historical moment of Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). While situating the poet in a wider range of contexts than usual (from antiquarianism, classicism, concepts of nature, and Jacobin sentiment in the 1790s, to the struggle with Napoleon, ideas of gender, and class war in the era of Friedrich Engels), Gravil argues that his exceptionally varied oeuvre is unified by a 'bardic vocation'. Like Whitman or the the Bards of Rheged, Wordsworth is 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and of endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile 'the living and the dead', and to nurture 'the kind'.

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