In This Article

Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

When what a poet hopes to communicate is an unaccustomed pleasure through his experimental poems, he cannot rely on straightforward strategies of communication. He must instead deliberately disappoint his readers’ expectations and hope that instead of condemning him out of hand they will try to figure out what he is doing. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads declares this strategy, and his poems in the two volumes of that collection enact it through discursive rhetorical devices like epitrope, hyperbole, circumlocution, shifting narrative points of view, and enigmatic ‘morals’. To counter long-standing reading habits reinforced by Coleridge’s long-authoritative declaration of the experiments’ failure, a critic may make fruitful recourse to the rhetorical theories of Wayne Booth and Mikhail Bakhtin. This essay illustrates this rhetorical approach through brief inquiries into ‘Simon Lee’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, ‘We Are Seven’, ‘Hart-Leap Well’, and ‘Michael’.

Keywords: experimental poems, rhetorical devices, Wayne Booth, Mikhail Bakhtin, Simon Lee, Anecdote for Fathers, We Are Seven, Hart-Leap Well, and Michael

Don Bialostosky

Don Bialostosky first contributed to the growth of the poet’s mind with a 1979 article in PMLA criticizing Coleridge’s reading of the Preface. He published Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (1984) and Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism (1992), bringing Bakhtin-School insights to Wordsworth’s narrative and lyric poetry and reviewing the main lines of Wordsworthian criticism from that perspective. Teaching poetry from that perspective, writing about rhetoric and Bakhtin, and chairing English departments have occupied him since. He is pleased to have been asked to reprise and advance his thinking about the ballad experiments here.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.