Decisions of an Alarmingly Personal Nature,or,What I Think About William Wordsworth

Abstract

This article begins by noting the tendency of certain academic practices to arrest thought, and attempts to circumvent that arrestation in the writer by reflecting on her adolescent response to the writings of William Wordsworth. It explores the possible implications of a youthful feeling that poetry is ‘true’, tying this in with Wordsworth’s own writing about poetry and truth, and with a particular passage from Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere which once prompted that youthful feeling. The personal and particular sources from which affective responses to poetry are often drawn are noted, and prosody is put forward as one of the most important among these sources, firstly for the present writer and then for Wordsworth himself. It finishes by contemplating the loss of that youthful response to poetry, and the implications of that loss for thinking.