Musical Wordsworth
Musical Wordsworth

Author: Yimon Lo

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-02-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1837646511

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In his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ must prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. This idea of a structured and complex form of ‘harmony’ was similarly noted earlier in The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music’. Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth’s poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions – Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence. Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.

Wordsworth's Philosophic Song
Wordsworth's Philosophic Song

Author: Simon Jarvis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-12-21

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781139462662

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Wordsworth wrote that he longed to compose 'some philosophic Song/Of Truth that cherishes our daily life'. Yet he never finished The Recluse, his long philosophical poem. Simon Jarvis argues that Wordsworth's aspiration to 'philosophic song' is central to his greatness, and changed the way English poetry was written. Some critics see Wordworth as a systematic thinker, while for others he is a poet first, and a thinker only (if at all) second. Jarvis shows instead how essential both philosophy and the 'song' of poetry were to Wordsworth's achievement. Drawing on advanced work in continental philosophy and social theory to address the ideological attacks which have dominated much recent commentary, Jarvis reads Wordsworth's writing both critically and philosophically, to show how Wordsworth thinks through and in verse. This study rethinks the relation between poetry and society itself by analysing the tensions between thinking philosophically and writing poetry.

The Limelight Book of Opera
The Limelight Book of Opera

Author: Arthur Jacobs

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780879100445

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Biographical sketches of the composers and critical interpretations of their productions accompany these summaries of eighty-seven famous operas

Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic
Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

Author: James H. Donelan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-03-24

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1139471147

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James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher and a composer – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel and Beethoven – developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831.

Wordsworth's Poetry of Repetition
Wordsworth's Poetry of Repetition

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-05-19

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0192870483

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This book explores those moments of repetition, placing them in the early nineteenth century context from which they emerged, and teasing out through extended close attention to the poetry itself the complexities of repetition and recapitulation.

Wordsworth's Ethics
Wordsworth's Ethics

Author: Adam Potkay

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2015-03-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1421417022

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A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.