W J B Owen, Understanding 'The Prelude'

A new collection of the author's essays, written over a twenty-year period, on the meaning of The Prelude

Contents

The essays in this book, first published in The Wordsworth Circle but never previously published in book form, meditate deeply on Wordsworth’s own theory of literature, and probe into questions that few critics have bothered to ask, yet which, when asked, seem very central indeed.

Chapters: 1. Understanding The Prelude; 2. The Sublime and the Beautiful; 3. Literary Echoes in The Prelude; 4. Wordsworth’s Aesthetics of Landscape; 5. ‘A Shock of Mild Surprise’; 6. Two Wordsworthian Ambivalences; 7. Wordsworth’s Imaginations; 8. ‘The Charm More Superficial’; 9. The Object the Eye and the Imagination; 10. ‘The Ascent of the Mind’; 11. ‘The Poetry of Nature’; 12. ‘The Most Despotic of our Senses’; 13. ‘Such Structures as the Mind builds’; 14. ‘The Perfect Image of a mighty Mind’; 15. The descent from Snowdon; 16. ‘A Sense of the Infinite’; 17. ‘Prose’.

W J B Owen

W. J. B. Owen is best known for his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1957), his three volume edition of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (with Jane Smyser, 1974), Wordsworth as Critic (1969), Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (1974) and his edition of The Fourteen-Book Prelude for the Cornell Wordsworth (1985)

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