Lucy Newlyn
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199242597
- eISBN:
- 9780191697142
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242597.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This chapter demonstrates the major change which takes place in Wordsworth's thinking while he made his alterations to the text of The Leechgatherer. It suggests that this change marks not only a ...
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This chapter demonstrates the major change which takes place in Wordsworth's thinking while he made his alterations to the text of The Leechgatherer. It suggests that this change marks not only a turning point in the relationship with Coleridge, but a new stage in the development of his art. The willingness to use old material alongside new, without seeming to notice the difference, goes hand in hand with the poet's confidence in his present, revisionary self — the self who makes radical alterations, occasionally (as here in The Leechgatherer) to good effect, but frequently on a random basis, and with destructive results.Less
This chapter demonstrates the major change which takes place in Wordsworth's thinking while he made his alterations to the text of The Leechgatherer. It suggests that this change marks not only a turning point in the relationship with Coleridge, but a new stage in the development of his art. The willingness to use old material alongside new, without seeming to notice the difference, goes hand in hand with the poet's confidence in his present, revisionary self — the self who makes radical alterations, occasionally (as here in The Leechgatherer) to good effect, but frequently on a random basis, and with destructive results.
