[DOWNLOAD] "Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" and Crabbe's the Parish Register: Poetry and Anti-Census (William Wordsworth, George Crabbe) (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" and Crabbe's the Parish Register: Poetry and Anti-Census (William Wordsworth, George Crabbe) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 318 KB
Description
WORDSWORTH'S "WE ARE SEVEN"--AN EARLY, PERHAPS EVEN SELF-teaching poem, and not his final statement about poetry and quantification, if there was one--dramatizes ballad form, its "lowliest" meters and their risk of doggerel, as a stubborn register of conflicts between old and new counts. A very few people inhabit a small scene. By unusually silent implication, it makes poetry, not prose, the first, most dangerously concise medium through which to record conflicts over "population" in the larger scene. Randall Jarrell once made fun of academic village explainers of this poem as bad Magi visiting with bad gifts. Whatever the fun of that laughter, the poem, like some other aggressively awkward works, in fact invites ridicule and protracted commentary in order to survive them both as part of its projected action. Extremely drawn out reading of one "problem" poem is, also, a tradition of sorts, and could be something to revive now because a little out of favor. (1) As an aside, Wordsworth was, in fact, one of Jarrell's two "first" poets, along with Rilke. Modes of census change, classical "lustra" (ritual purifications after census) also change into later, less obvious acts, and poetic mimicry of the real Scene of Counting, using metrics to rethink public enumeration, has a broad if often partly hidden place in poetics. This poem's open, blunt mix of forced dialogue and balladry-about-elementary-numbering comes into focus, a little apart from the critical tradition's emphasis, when read against the eighteenth-century's many witty or unexpected genres (novel, tract, poem, dialogue, debate, and so on) used to frame acts of unofficial census and themes of population. (2) Necessarily clumsy, as a problem lyric, it acts out a deliberately lowest variant of the eighteenth century's English population debates, and also belongs to a larger, more general impulse in world literature that could be called "anti-census." (3) Though generally and accurately taken to be about the nearness-and-farness of death, denials of death, children and adults in dialogue, and moral-instructional timing, its ironically charcoaled structure of encounter also draws an abrasive picture, addressed to its time, of the sort of first forced dialogue that generates numbers for censuses.