Abstract
A more accurate title for this essay might be "Wordsworth and the metalanguage of forms," but it begins by invoking Shaftesbury's phrase "the language of forms" to underline Stuart Curran's point in Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) that forms themselves have a signifying power, because that's the deeper and more complex issue that lies behind this immediate topic, the metalanguage of form, the language used to talk about form. The article focuses on the preface to Wordsworth's collected Poems of 1815 as an example of this shifting genre-consciousness, and the problems associated with it.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 86-90 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | The Wordsworth Circle |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Publication status | Published - 2003 |