User:Ottava Rima/Wordsworth

Slakey 1972

Slakey, Roger L. "At Zero: A Reading of Wordsworth's 'She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways'." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 12, No. 4, (Autumn, 1972), pp. 629-638

629 - Poem shows information about speaker's experience and not Lucy and the natural world - "The evolving form of the poem, its changes from sentence to phrase, from proposition to appositive, from metaphor to simile, from concrete expression to abstraction, represents that proceeding as the speaker moves from an assertion of fact about her, to an insightful, personal perception of her, and then to a feeling of desolation when he reflects that she is dead."

- "one of Wordsworth's finest poems, indeed one of the finest short poems in our language, and among the most powerful" - few critics like it, only look at it as a Lucy poem or as philosophical - Most critics ignore the speaker in the poem

630 - The drama in the poem is the speaker's, not Lucy's (shes dead) - He reflects on himself - "its power" comes from the final line - "The difference to me!" - The poem follows Coleridges's "definition of poetic form as a proceeding" or "a coming into realization" - leans towards the end - Her name being held to the third stanza "create and develop such a tension through the poem that unless we perceive one leading into the other and climaxing in that final utterance of the desolated speaker we have not read the poem at all."

Ferry 1959

Ferry, David. The Limits of Morality: an Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems. Middleton, 1959

73 - What makes the poem work is "the complex feeling that the girl is at once victim and goddess"

Kroeber 1964

Kroeber, Karl. The Artifice of Reality: Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and Leopardi. Madison, Wisconsin, 1964.

107 - What makes the poem special is "the dramatic relationship of two modes of being" within Lucy (the actual being and the narrator's ideal representation of her).

Taaffe 1966

Taaffe, James G. "Poet and Lover in Wordsworth's 'Lucy' Poems". The Modern Language Review, Vol. 61, No. 2, (Apr., 1966), pp. 175-179

175- Lucy poems arranged "in two separate categories - "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" is with "Strange fits of passion have I known" and "I travelled among unknown men" in "Poems Founded on the Affections" - "One sees immediately that in this order two signifcant 'dream' sequences frame the elegy; their differences point out the developing nature of the lover's experience as well as the cyclic form the sequence assumes." - The poem is "a record of death" - emphasis on loss - Lucy's death reminds speaker of own mortality - her death warns speaker that his imagination "could deceive him as to her human state"

176- "The three initial lyrics, separate as they are, form a unit of their own." - his dream became a reality without Lucy - "what the lover feared in his mind, then, becomes reality in the nostalgic epitaph for Lucy, 'She dwelt among the untrodden ways'." - emphasis on Lucy being solitary and beautiful - she had an intimate relationship with nature

Hartman 1934

Hartman, Herbert. "Wordsworth's 'Lucy' Poems: Notes and Marginalia." PMLA, Vol. 49, No. 1, (Mar., 1934), pp. 134-142

134 - The five poems weren't originally five ("I travelled among unknown men" added later - "She dwelt" written in Common measure "the cross-rhymed ballad stanza with alternate tetrameter and trimeter lines"

138 - "Hartley lampooned the Laureate's 'She dwelt among the untrodden ways' as no male counterpart of Nature's Lady could have dared to do." The Parody was first printed in Notes and Queries July 24, 1869