Wordsworths Trauma and Poetry: 17931803 [Paperback]

Based upon the testimony of Thomas Carlyle, most biographers acknowledge that Wordsworth witnessed the beheading of the journalist Antoine Gorsas in October 1793 during the Reign of Terror. But they go no further. This study reads the Poets reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated by guilt for abandoning his French lover and their child a year earlier. Following a chronological arc from October 1793, when the trauma began, until its conclusion in October 1803, when Wordsworth became a poet-soldier, I examine poetic works from The Borderers (1796), the Discharged Soldier (1798), the Two-Part Prelude (1799), Home at Grasmere (1800), and the Liberty sonnets (1803), to follow the Poet working through anxiety, fear, and remorse to a resolution.

Contents

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Illustrations??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Preface?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Chapter One????????? Wordsworths Trauma: October 1793?????????

Chapter Two???????? French Heroes and a Poet Recluse, 1795??????????????? ?????????

Chapter Three?????? Beaupuy and Godwin in The Borderers, 1796??????? ?????????

Chapter Four??????? The Discharged Soldier of Alfoxden, 1798?????????

Chapter Five???????? Revolutionary Foreboding in the Spots of Time, 1799?????

Chapter Six????????? Finding a Home at Grasmere, 1800??? ??????????????????

Chapter Seven????? Making Amends, Abroad and at Home, 1802????????

Chapter Eight?????? A Poet-Soldier: October 18lw