Talks on Ten Poets: Wordsworth to Moody

Introduction to The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth Editions)

Wordsworth, Presidential Address

to the Lake District and who, from the first flush of revolutionary fervour came to a dignified old age in Rydal, Westmorland as Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate, a Tory supporter, opponent of reform and adherent to the established church. There are several reasons for choosing this subject. I have heard some twenty Presidential Addresses to this Society, from Mr. Robert Cooke's 'Ship-Shape and B...

On Talks

What I have to say may be regarded as provocative or even insulting, but I think it needs to be said. In the history of medicine, a substantial number of lectures, seminars, and papers given at conferences and symposia-let's call them talks-are very difficult to follow, and a few are utterly incomprehensible. Very rarely is this because speakers have failed to master their subject. It is simply...

Banishing the Poets

The main argument of this monograph,* if I understand it rightly (something its rather cloudy writing makes me uncertain of), is that the body of works often (and traditionally) grouped together under the rubric ‘ancient literary criticism’ should be understood not as contributions to aesthetics or criticism of literature as these terms are commonly understood today but rather as political inte...

Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze

In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem The Ruined Cottage (1798) in terms of the importance of the Pedlar who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence as exemplified by the trope of wandering and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the sec...