* Discussion of romanticism

England, and its intellectual life seems to benefit from a return to the realization that it is pretty good to be English. It does not suffer the shocks of France, Russia, or Ireland, although these shocks are benefits to their respective assets in their own way.

# Chapter 11 The Experiment

It’s this the first notion of lyric poetry? Pamphlet wars need to make a comeback.

Interesting to trace the paroxysms of the French Revolution’s influence on English poetry, coming as it did through a kind of back door.

# Chapter 12 Lucy in the Harz with Dorothy

I believe this is directly referenced, or much of it is discussed, in the Proteus chapter of *Ulysses*.

# Chapter 13 By W. Wordsworth

Mary Robinson’s is quite the story.

Our time seems to echo the idea that the French Revolution created a reality where only supernatural and demonic pulp were the only greater horror that could be imagined. Our time has the added twist of producing simulacrums of normalcy because only the simulacrum seems a sufficient reserve of normalcy when the day by day is exceeding strange. Culture, through its agent, the human mind, reflexively and reliably produces counterparts in response to experience.

This seems to me a much more profound framing than the idea that we cannot write but what is dead in us.

Artistry of this kind helps in the comprehension of the Nietszchean idea that it is anyone, in whatever circumstance, that could be having a valid human experience. It is imperative that we build upon the perceptiveness expressed in this poem. The emphasis on ‘men that wear fine clothes’ as reserves of true experience leads to a horrible misalignment of priorities.

# Chapter 14 Home at Grasmere

More here on the theme of English eternal return.

# Chapter 15 The Child is the Father of the Man

# Chapter 16 From New School to Lake School

Walking Stewart, I remind myself, would not take carriages due to a feeling for horses. He felt a universal police state would take command and that we would have to bury books six feet deep until the dawn of the Stewertian man.

# Part Two 1807-1850 Wordsworth’s Healing Powers

# Chapter 17 Surprised by Grief Writing plays offers an interesting impetus for writing lines that are memorable. The more memorable the lines are, the smoother rehearsal goes. That the memorability of the lines also improves the quality of the play is a virtuous cycle, although it is a high hurdle to get over in the first place.

# Chapter 18 This Will Never Do

# Chapter 19 Among the Cockneys

Politics is the domain of people who thinks words should have power but were never able to compose words of real power. All is diatribe and rhetoric.

# Chapter 20 The Lost Leader

I suppose my note about politics, in light of the author’s hypothetical regarding Wordsworth’s early demise, is revealed as less than entirely accurate. Wordsworth, a man who unquestionably commanded words with power in themself, still, in later life, felt compelled to make political commitments. I wonder if this was long developing, or if some loss of his poetic powers allowed this other force to take hold the ground where his poetic flower blossomed.

> Whence that low voice? — A whisper from the heart, That told of days long past when here I roved With friends and kindred tenderly beloved; Some who had early mandates to depart, Yet are allowed to steal my path athwart By Duddon’s side; once more do we unite, Once more beneath the earth’s tranquil light And smother’d joys into new being start. This is wonderfully found by the author. It carries a special pathos to find these lines laden with feeling despite the criticism of late Wordsworth, which must have stirred a crisis in the poet, however fully or partially perceived.

Shakespeare writes what feels like incantations. They suggest this dominion over thought which can, with sufficient skill, take command of sense itself, perhaps by removing the agency of thought.

A morbid irony comes to mind over Lamb’s death from an infected scrape and the fact that lanonlin, a wax secreted by wool bearing animals, like lambs, acts as an antiseptic for their many scrapes.

# Chapter 21 A Medicine for My State of Mind

# Retrospect

# Chapter 22 A Sort of National Property