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Description
This analysis follows Wordsworth's development as a poet through the years just after his return from France in 1792, until publication of the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Historically, the time period was one when France was undergoing a popular revolution with unexpected results -- unexpected at least by young British radicals like Wordsworth who had supported the early revolutionaries' democratic ideals -- and also a time when England, weakened by expensive wars, and in the first stages of abandoning an agrarian-based society for one of urbanization and industrialization, experienced a number of dispossessed poor vagrants and other social challenges. This analysis begins with Wordsworth's Salisbury Plains poems, written just after he had left his French mistress, Annette Vallon, and their newly born daughter, Caroline, on the other side of the channel and returned to England. His poetry in those years reflected an internal state as chaotic and violent as the external political and social situation. As Wordsworth worked his way through his consuming personal crisis, he wrote a play, The Borderers, in 1796, which is particularly revealing regarding the changes that were taking place in his outlook, and which is the pivotal piece of this analysis. Mostly neglected by previous critics, who have focused more on Wordsworth's landmark works of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and Lyrical Ballads, The Borderers is the poet's only venture into the genre of drama. If the play is examined with its unique choice of genre in mind, it reveals a key transition in Wordsworth's aesthetic philosophy. The Salisbury Plain poems (1793-5) resound a last cry from the bitterly disappointed idealist who had once seen himself as a pure moral voice in support of the French Revolution. Lyrical Ballads (1798) presents an altered voice of the poet who, in his own eyes, has perhaps fallen from grace yet not beyond rescue; who balances loss with hope; who seeks redemption in contact with nature and compassion for others. In between lies The Borderers, in which the careful reader might discover Wordsworth's focus shifting in emphasis from narcissistic self-justification to disinterested compassion for others. The corresponding dramatic action shifts from obsession with the tormented ethical arguments surrounding Wordsworth's stand-in debater, Mortimer, to interest in and empathy for society's marginalized poor, exemplified by the characters Robert and Margaret. The unsatisfactory ending of The Borderers, which has never been produced as a successful drama, finds resolution in Wordsworth's subsequent poetry in Lyrical Ballads. In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth fully expressed his interest in, and compassion for, the dispossessed poor of late 18th century England. In the process of healing from personal disappointment in his radical political ideals, as well as remorse for his behavior toward Annette and Caroline, Wordsworth developed an aesthetic that emphasized the beneficial influence of nature on a receptive disposition, both as a means of transcendental spiritual solace for the individual and, by extension, for society at large. In parallel with this major development in his personal philosophy, Wordsworth's attitudes toward traditionalism, rationalism, and the role of women also underwent a change. The poetic philosophy that Wordsworth developed during the years under analysis in this thesis is summarized in its complete form in the final poem of Lyrical Ballads, "Tintern Abbey."
