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  • The Map at the Limits of His Paper: A Cartographic Reading of The Prelude, Book 6: “Cambridge and the Alps”
  • Julia Sandstrom Carlson (bio)
Julia Sandstrom Carlson
University of Cincinnati
Julia Sandstrom Carlson

Julia S. Carlson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. Her essays and a review have appeared in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and Romantic Circles. She is completing a book that examines the materialization of Wordsworth’s writing in relation to Romantic representational modes (the guidebook, the large- scale topographical map, the short blank-verse poem) and systems of emphasis (punctuation, prosody, elocution).

Footnotes

1. Unless otherwise stated, quotations of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude are from The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1991), vol. 1. Here I quote Book 6.346–48.

2. For estimates of distance, see Donald Ed. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Walking Tour of 1790 (Tulsa, OK: U of Tulsa P, 1983) 116–19.

3. Geoffrey Hartman dates the composition of Book 6, lines 547–72, to 1799. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1964) 45. See also Max Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass 11,” English Studies 43 (1962): 368 and 377.

4. Wordsworth’s list of overnight stopping places, the rhymed couplets of “Descriptive Sketches” (composed 1791–92), and journals kept by Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson Wordsworth of an 1820 tour over the same Alpine terrain also provide information about the trip. For a bibliographical list of the six principal sources, see Max Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass 1,” English Studies 40 (1959): 226. See also Hayden 3–6.

5. For a reading of the focal position of the Simplon episode in the critical discourse on The Prelude, see David Ferris, “History, Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass,” SiR 30 (1991): 391–438. For treatments of the episode since Hartman (Wordsworth’s Poetry), See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973) 448–53; Harold Bloom, Visionary Company: A Reading of British Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971); Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 195–204; Andrezj Warmmski, “Missed Crossings: Wordsworth’s Apocalypses,” Comparative Literature (Dec., 1984): 983–1006; Mary jacobus, “The Writing on the Wall: Autobiography and Self-Inscription in The Prelude,’' Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 3–32; and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989) 3–31.

6. Raymond Havens, “The Prelude”: A Commentary, vol 2 of The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1941) 420–23.

7. Hayden 4–6 passim. Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass 1” 224–32 (227).

8. Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998) 16.

9. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) 1: 124. On the influence of nature on Wordsworth’s ideal language, see W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969) 7–15; and on “‘the best of those who live… In Nature’s Presence’” as inspiration for the verse of The Prelude, see Owen 60–66. At the opening of the poem, Wordsworth credits the “voice,” “ceaseless music,” and “steady cadence” of the River Derwent for composing his infant “thoughts” and, implicitly, for shaping his future song (1.276, 280, 282).

10. William to Dorothy Wordsworth, 6 and 16 September 1790, The Letters of William amd Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver, 2 vols. (Oxford; Clarendon, 1967) 1: 32. Subsequent references to this letter are cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

11. Liu remarks but dismisses one reference to limited “room” as an instance of the inexpressibility topos, linking it with other “clichés of circumvention” (9).

12. Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, 6 October 1790, Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth 1: 39.

13. Coxe’s...

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