Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market

Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market Scott Hess (bio) Scott Hess Earlham College Scott Hess Scott Hess is Associate Professor of English at Earlham College, in Richmond, Indiana. His book. Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth, was published by Routledge in 2005, and his next book, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: Nature, Class, Aesthetics, and the Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture, will be published by University of Virginia Press in Spring, 2012. Footnotes 1. Douglas Kneale, Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), xviii. See also Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), esp. chap. 4; Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 1 and 10. 2. Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany: State SiR, 50 (Spring 2011) University of New York Press, 2004); Michele Turner Sharp, “The Churchyard Among the Wordsworthian Mountains: Mapping the Common Ground of Death and the Reconfiguration of Romantic Community,” ELH 62, no. 2 (1995): 387–407; Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Lorna Clymer, “Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth,” ELH 62, no. 2 (1995): 347–87. 3. Fosso, 7. 4. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 5. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 172. 6. Classical tombs were traditionally located along the roads leading out of towns, hence the address to the “traveler” to stop and read. For Wordsworth’s discussion of this trope, see The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:54. Subsequent citations of Wordsworth’s prose writing are by volume and page number from this edition. Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hill and Harold Bloom (New York: Humanities Press, 1982), 389–413. 7. Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Johnson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 8. On this development, see Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, “The Epitaph and the Romantic Poets: a Survey,” Huntington Library Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1967): 141. 9. For some versions of how poets responded to this new mass public and wrote the processes of reception and audience formation into their texts, see Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences; Charles Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: the Anxieties of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a broad account of this new situation that poets faced and how they responded with changing forms of self-representations, see also my book, Authoring the Self: Print Culture, Poetry, and Self-Representation from Pope Through Wordsworth (New York: Routledge, 2005). 10. For the two Chiabera translations, see William Wordsworth: the Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) 1:831, 833. 11. Quoted from Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), lines 1, 4. 12. For a general discussion of the poetics of the “Essays Upon Epitaphs,” see W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), chap. 6. 13. Newlyn, 125. 14. On English nationalism and its self-definition through sincerity, in opposition to France and French Enlightenment culture, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), esp. 117–18, 127–28. 15. See Bernhardt-Kabisch, “The Epitaph and the Romantic Poets,” as well as “Wordsworth: the Monumental Poet,” Philological Quarterly 44, no 4 (1965): 505; and Schor, Bearing the Dead, 55–56. 16. On the rise of this domestic tourism, see Ian...

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