Wordsworth's Biblical Ghosts [Hardcover]

The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches - intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics - Westbrook first analyzes Wordsworth's theory and practice as these reflect the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation. Subsequent chapters consider Wordsworth's adaptation of biblical narrative forms - etymological tales, parables, and mystical allegories. Closing chapters examine some extraordinary linguistic innovations in Wordsworth's revisions of biblical apocalypse, techniques that permit the poet to express the ineffable and to reveal nothing.Introduction: Poet in a Destitute Time The Word as Borderer: Incarnational Poetics: the Theory The Word as Borderer: Of Clothing and Body: the Practice How Awesome is This Place: Poems on the Naming of Places Wordsworth's Prodigal Son: 'Michael' as Parable and as Metaparable Wordsworth's Song of Songs: 'Nutting' as Mystical Allegory Wordsworthian Apocalyptics: Definitions and Biblical Intertexts Wordsworthian Apocalyptics in Which Nothing is Revealed

'...a rich and rewarding study of Wordworth's art, carefully situated within established scholarship...' - Laura Dabundo, The Wordsworth Circle

DEANE WESTBROOK is Professor of English at Portland State University where she teaches courses in British romanticism, poetry, criticism, mythology, biblical literature, baseball and myth, nineteenth-century studies, and classical Greek civilization. Her published works include articles on Genesis, northern European mythology, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and a book, Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth.