Can I read Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse : Poetry, Poverty, and Power on EtoBox?

Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse : Poetry, Poverty, and Power by Gary Lee Harrison is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse : Poetry, Poverty, and Power about?

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.

Author

Gary Lee Harrison

Publisher

Detroit: Wayne State University Press

Published

1994

Language

EN

ISBN

9780814324813

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, Science