Wordsworth/Awe/Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography

Working Thesis: William Wordsworth’s earlier and most studied poetry is, of course, firmly representative of the Romantic era in its treatment of awe and the sublime. However, Wordsworth’s later writings contain a somewhat more pragmatic reference to the practical world. It is in the later poetry that we find the bridge between ungrounded Romantic awe and cold practicality in Wordsworth’s treatment of pragmatic situations through the lens of awe. (Typical disclaimer: work in progress, has changed, will change, rough draft, needs substantiation, etc.)

Annotated Bibliography

Batho, Edith C. The Later Wordsworth. London: Cambridge UP, 1933. Print.

This is where I originally got the idea that Wordsworth’s work underwent a change from his sublime, awesome early years to his more politically grounded later work. About a third of the book has detailed physical descriptions of Wordsworth from way too many of his distant acquaintances, but most of it makes a claim that the later work is wrongly undervalued. I’ll use this one heavily.

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

This might be misplaced in a collection of sources about awe, but I really have referenced this book a few times to help me think through the theories I’m using in my paper, and better understand the theories in my classmates’ papers. It’s better than the other literary theory reference books I’ve used, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to share, even though it’s basic (obviously). It’s also a prime spot to mine sources.

Cochrane, Tom. “The Emotional Experience of the Sublime.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42.2 (2012): 125–48. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.

Cochrane takes a psychological stab at breaking down the sublime. The sublime revolves, he argues, around the inextricable relationship between our emotional reactions and the qualities of the sublime objects, which qualities include physical extremes and our sudden experience with said extremes. He does mention Wordsworth expression of the natural sublime, but this could be a valuable source for those more interested in terror and the sublime, like Erin and Shelly.

Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.

This is your typical Norton intro, where I got most of my foundational material for situating awe in the Romantic period, and especially in Wordsworth’s most famous poems.

Havens, Raymond Dexter. The Mind of a Poet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941. Print.

This book is pretty exhaustive, but I found that the third chapter called “The Ministry of Fear” has a very relevant discussion of fear and the sublime. The book as a whole takes Wordsworth as a prototype for the poetic mind, and the third chapter breaks down Wordsworth’s statement that he grew up “fostered alike by beauty and fear.”  Havens goes on to describe the fear at hand as “a milder emotion, akin to awe and a sense of the sublime, arresting, often frightening, and yet stimulating, as danger commonly is, and somehow exalting” (39). It’s a nice pair with the Cochrane article above.

James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. 1907. Project Gutenberg. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

Here’s where my pragmatism ideas come in, although I’ll touch on them more lightly than I had originally planned. In any case, I like James and the ideas he presents in this book—that nothing is of use unless it has practical traceable consequences. The way that he settles the metaphysical debate about the squirrel in Lecture 2 is maybe my favorite part. I think I’ll tie it in to how Wordsworth’s later work was more grounded in the practical world around him (tying in with Batho).

Milnes, Tim. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

This one doesn’t deal with Wordsworth specifically, but so far it’s helped me contextualize how pragmatism has already been treated in the Romantic period. I need to read more of it. I think it’s interesting that Milnes found more cogent ties to pragmatism in Coleridge than he did in Wordsworth.

Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

This one’s a little off the wall, but I dug some useful sections out of the index. It deals mainly with modern poetry. Also need to read this one more.

Wheeler, Kathleen M. Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Print.

This book helped a lot with my post on pragmatism vs. practical criticism. It has some enlightening treatments of pragmatism as it contrasts with Romanticism, but at the end of the day the original stuff from both Wordsworth and James is much more comprehensible than Wheeler’s dense philosophical diatribes.

Wordsworth, Jonathan, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.

I think I’ll deal with The Prelude as a means of comparing some of Wordsworth’s ideas over time. So how he approached the work in 1799 clearly differs from how he dealt with it in later years, and I’m going to see how well it lines up with Batho’s ideas.

Where I’m going: I’m going to read more of the first source on Wordsworth’s later work, and I’m going to start writing to see if the idealist bridge in the last part of my working thesis is even a possibility. I could also take pragmatism totally out of this paper very easily, and only deal with the awe in Wordsworth, and only deal with the grounding weight of practicality in my dance. Writing will help me figure it out.