... of the Past. By JAMES LONGENBACH.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. xviii + 279 pp. $29.00. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. By JAMES LONGENBACH.New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xviii + 329 pp. $21.95. “Ghosts move about me / Patched with histories,” wrote...

.... $29.00. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. By JAMES LONGENBACH.New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xviii + 329 pp. $21.95. “Ghosts move about me / Patched with histories,” wrote Ezra Pound in a crucial passage from Three Cantos I (1917) which James Longenbach illumi...

...Sanford Budick Abstract The poetic work of “The Ruined Cottage” is carried out by acts of the “meditative mind” that Armytage identifies early in the poem (l. 81). The history of interpretation of the poem has been sorely vexed by Armytage’s closing statement, “I turned away / And walked along my...

... in the previous generation. Their two most ambitious experiments of this type are The Ruined Cottage and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , written at the same time while the poets were in constant conversation. These poems have different fates: Wordsworth worries ever after about the abruptness of the original...

... Dorrit, with its primitive but (for the Plo’r- nishes) effective wall painting of the rustic “Happy Cottage”; the vil- lage church of Nell’s last days in The Old Curiosity Shop; the Utopian paper mill and its environs in Our Mutual Friend; and the description of Cloisterham cathedral in the last...

... in the Belfry”: Twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sat the good woman with her spinning-wheel: the children, if not more profitably employed than in gathering heath and sticks, at least laid in a stock of health and strength to sustain the labours...

... of the forest and into contact with human beings. But, forced to flee the first village he comes to, the creature takes refuge in the hovel that is henceforth his home and the site of his education. His movement from the forest to the structure adjacent to the DeLacey cottage, and thus from nature to culture...

... of quixotic altruism? But the text must be the final measure. Quite early in the book occurs the key image of the mother at a cottage door. Stephen is in chapel at Clongowes: There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old...

... this remove Blake from the company of fiercely rushing radicals and place him among the anxious bourgeois bystanders of his time and ours? Goldsmith’s account tends in that direction, and perhaps overdoes it on occasion, as it does for me in suggesting that the poet’s enjoyment of his cottage at Felpham...

... are curious about William’s significant but not quite scandalous relationship with his sister, and tidbits about mighty poets: Coleridge liked to eat rose hips, and it was Dorothy, not William, who painted the walls of Dove Cottage. There are many lovely descriptions of nature, and some years ago...

... homeless by the falling in of the leaseholds on their cottages — the novel is content for it to be explained as the pair explain it to themselves. It is fate or personal misfortune, brought about by John South’s unexpected death, Giles’s careless disregard of important legal documents...

..., “before the roses and the longest day” (June 21st). Midsummer Day (June 24th) is yet to come with its accompaniment of snapdragons, carnations, “Sweet-William with its homely cottage-smell.” The best is yet to be. Yet even with that promise, the cuckoo’s warning notes are heard. They tell...

....” Wordsworth’s early work thus far shows a gradual, natural, and coherent development independent of interruption by extraneous in- fl uence. The Ruined Cottage affords an easy transition to the natural- ism of Wordsworth in 1798 and prepares the way for a second volume of this work, which we await...

....” Wordsworth’s early work thus far shows a gradual, natural, and coherent development independent of interruption by extraneous in- fl uence. The Ruined Cottage affords an easy transition to the natural- ism of Wordsworth in 1798 and prepares the way for a second volume of this work, which we await...

... undermined by political repression at home. In early versions of “Guilt and Sorrow,” The Borderers, and the Baker’s Cart fragment (later rewritten in early versions of “The Ruined Cottage and in early reviews of Lyrical Ballads, Roe finds strong evidence of Wordsworth’s reformist, antiwar convic...

... and informative volume serves as a kind of layman’s handbook of the daily lives of the EIizabethans from the humblest cottager on up through the halls of the great to the queen herself. Although the domestic life of the average Elizabethan is the author’s chief concern, she devotes many...

... share with related accounts of national, imperial, and economic decline a sense of the increasing complexity of the modern world” (71). There is much to admire in The Poetics of Decline , especially its extended reading (in chap. 4) of Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” as a presentation...

...; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke. (11, 71) We know so much about the specious glitter of cities that it is easy not to see that Johnson’s subject...

... of it and the features associated with it were altered to produce a myth of vocation. This was not just a work ethic, for it made work more than necessary: it made work desirable-and necessary for personal happiness.”4 Robert in The Ruined Cottage (1797-98) is first described as an “industrious man / sober...

... it new luster or sullied it, continues into the present time, al- though nowadays, by an extraordinary reversal, it is the Americans (profes- sors of English in provincial colleges, mostly, lamenting that the House of the Seven Gables is not Dove Cottage) who denigrate the national litera- ...