The Egotistical Sublime: A History Of Wordsworth's Imagination
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
At the crossroads of biography and literary criticism stands The Egotistical Sublime, a landmark scholarly work that traces the inner workings of one of English Romanticism's most towering intellects — William Wordsworth. John Jones, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, presents a rigorous and illuminating account of how Wordsworth's imagination evolved across his career, arguing that the poet's celebrated self-absorption — what Keats famously called the egotistical sublime — was not a flaw but the very engine of his creative genius. With precision and elegance, Jones chronicles the shifting landscapes of Wordsworth's mind, from the visionary intensity of his early verse to the more meditative and introspective cadences of his later work. Drawing on close textual analysis and a profound command of Romantic literary tradition, Jones illustrates how Wordsworth's relationship with nature, memory, and selfhood produced a body of poetry unlike any other in the English canon. The prose is measured yet deeply perceptive, offering a model of mid-twentieth-century academic criticism at its finest — disciplined in method, yet alive to the emotional and philosophical depths of its subject. For students of Romanticism, poetry lovers, and anyone captivated by the question of how a poet's inner life shapes great art, this volume remains an indispensable and quietly compelling guide.
Author: John Jones
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
At the crossroads of biography and literary criticism stands The Egotistical Sublime, a landmark scholarly work that traces the inner workings of one of English Romanticism's most towering intellects — William Wordsworth. John Jones, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, presents a rigorous and illuminating account of how Wordsworth's imagination evolved across his career, arguing that the poet's celebrated self-absorption — what Keats famously called the egotistical sublime — was not a flaw but the very engine of his creative genius. With precision and elegance, Jones chronicles the shifting landscapes of Wordsworth's mind, from the visionary intensity of his early verse to the more meditative and introspective cadences of his later work. Drawing on close textual analysis and a profound command of Romantic literary tradition, Jones illustrates how Wordsworth's relationship with nature, memory, and selfhood produced a body of poetry unlike any other in the English canon. The prose is measured yet deeply perceptive, offering a model of mid-twentieth-century academic criticism at its finest — disciplined in method, yet alive to the emotional and philosophical depths of its subject. For students of Romanticism, poetry lovers, and anyone captivated by the question of how a poet's inner life shapes great art, this volume remains an indispensable and quietly compelling guide.