The Intelligible Ode - Davidson, Graham

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Résumé :
Abbreviations Acknowledgements Preface Part I: Patterns 1 A Philosophical Framework: Understanding the Intelligible 2 Expostulation and Reply: The Tables Turned 3 Tintern Abbey: His First and Happiest Ode 4 Geometry, Poetry and the Sublime of Man Part II: Principles 5 Intimations 6 Recollections Part III: A Crisis: The Poems of 1802 7 Several Kinds of Poem 8 Heaven and Earth Part IV: Reading the Ode 9 Origins 10 Verse, Grammar and Imagery 11 Competing Forces 12 Stanzas I-IV: The Statement of Loss 13 Stanzas V-VIII: The Analysis of Loss 14 Stanzas IX-X: Recovery 15 Stanza XI: Resolution Part V: Looking Forward into History 16 Poems Published and Unpublished 17 What if? A Counterfactual Reading Bibliography Index...

Biographie:
if one considers Eliot's Four Quartets as odes, facing several of the same problems as did Wordsworth, there is some irony in Eliot's dismissal of the Immortality Ode as 'verbiage'....

Sommaire:
From its first publication, what is now known as the Immortality Ode has been praised for the magnificence of its verse and disparaged for its paucity of meaning - the 'immortality' of the subtitle unsubstantiated, and the 'recollections' insubstantial. Yet Wordsworth's idea of immortality has clear precedents in the seventeenth century, and recollections of childhood are Traherne's starting point for the recovery of a lost vision comparable to Wordsworth's. Via the power of the imagination, or reason, they believed they could experience a renewed vision that both termed variously Paradise, or infinity, or immortality. Graham Davidson traces the origins of Wordsworth's poetic impetus to his resistance to the Cartesian division between mind and nature, first adumbrated by the Cambridge Platonists. If reunited, Paradise was regained, but this personal trajectory was tempered by a deep sympathy for the woes of mortal life. Davidson explores the consequent dialogue through some of Wordsworth's best-known poems, at the heart of which is the Ode. In the last section, he demonstrates how Wordsworth's publishing history led the Victorians and modernists to misinterpret his work...