Baron, Michael. Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing. London and New York: Longman, 1995.
Abstract: “The word ‘community’ occurs fairly seldom in Wordsworth’s poetry, and when it does it usually suggests ‘communion’ among all humankind, rather than a socially defined group of individuals. The community presented in the poems, which the reader is invited to join, is one which shares a language, and it is the community which gives validity to the language. In ‘Emma’s Dell’ the narrator trusts that his imagined community will include other kinds of people ‘shepherds’, not individuated but classed by an economic relation to place bridging a gap between aesthetic and economic inhabitation; and that the community will persist. Wordsworth approaches the idea that meaning is essentially a social phenomenon, that only shared associations give language its strength and veracity. For Wordsworth the primary aim of poetry is communication, and any meditation on subject matter and style inevitably involves imagining a reader. Wordsworth draws strength from communion with Dorothy but also from a sense of public recognition.”
Review: William Galperin, Studies in Romanticism 36:3 (Fall, 1997): 492–94.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Dorothy Wordsworth 