Wordsworth in Youth and Age

Abstract

The encounter between youth and age is familiar to any reader of Wordsworth, who populated his early poetry with figures of advanced age. Readers of Lyrical Ballads will recall Walter Ewbanks, Michael, and Simon Lee. The dramatic energy of the poems often arises from the gap between such imagined figures of age and a callow narrator, as in Resolution and Independence. The configuration attests to Wordsworth's urgent search in his 20s and 30s to discover how one gets from an unsettled here to an unknown there, but it is a strategy that became less available as the poet aged and became a public figure. To shed light on this significant trajectory, I bring to bear a variety of perspectives, including close reading, biography, textual and book history, the relations of word and image, and reception, on a juxtaposition of The Two April Mornings and The Fountain (both 1800) and one of Wordsworth's least-known poems, To an Octogenarian (1846).

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