Beginning with an account of a late Victorian collection of Wordsworth’s poems, and the paper and botanical ephemera that were included in a copy of this edition, the introduction assesses Wordsworth’s daisy poems to pave the way for a broader discussion of the poet’s early interest in the poetics and politics of peace and how this interest was modified over the course of his career. Works examined in the Introduction include sonnets composed during the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803) and the ‘Immortality Ode’ from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The Introduction locates Wordsworth’s poetry on peace and war within the broader social, cultural, and political contexts of the period and also outlines the book’s conceptual framework.

In this chapter, attention turns to The White Doe of Rylstone, a poem arising out of familial grief whose engagement with the melancholic afterlife of war was brought into sharp relief following its publication in the year of Waterloo. Whether encountered in the love between the human and the non-human, in the slow effacement of Rylstone Hall, or in the merging of the sacred and the profane, the chapter argues that The White Doe offered a way for post-war readers to imagine peace as a form of aesthetic play that, even as it risks jettisoning actually existing peace to the realm of transcendental inaccessibility, discovers in the comingling of absence and presence, lack and plenitude, finitude and infinitude the preconditions for a life no longer marked by the struggle for self-definition.

Centring on a reading of ‘The Recluse’, this chapter opens with a consideration of the representation of peace in ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800–1806), a poem later known as ‘Part First, Book First’ of ‘The Recluse’. Through close readings of the 1808 ‘Recluse’ fragments that Wordsworth went on to adapt for The Excursion, the chapter investigates how remnants of the poet’s early interest in radical, pacificist thought speak against the poem’s declared allegiance with the values of Britain’s political and religious establishment. Noting how the poem’s composition is bisected by the composition of the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1810) and the letter to the military theorist Sir Charles Pasley (1811), writings that explore the links between armed struggle, national independence, and the primacy of the Imagination, the chapter goes on to consider how The Excursion, through the character of the Solitary, grants expression to the revolutionary hope for perpetual peace, world citizenship, and delight in Fancy’s ‘mutable array’.

The conclusion to this book offers a perspective on Wordsworth’s cultural afterlife, finding in the postscript to Leigh Hunt’s pacificist polemic, Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835; revised 1849), and Thomas De Quincey’s pro-Crimean essay, ‘On War’ (1848; revised 1854), the resources for a reading of the politics and poetics of late Romanticism that responds to the contradiction in Wordsworth’s poetry revealed in these polarised works: the clash between the hope for perpetual peace and the grim satisfaction of eternal war. Whereas De Quincey, citing the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, remains obdurate in his support for the ‘dreadful doctrine’ that war is ‘amongst the evils that are salutary to man’, Hunt joins with those later generations of readers who, experiencing war at first hand, found solace in poems celebrating the life of rivers, mountains, and flowers. Though Wordsworth’s poems do not flinch from violent imaginings, for such readers it yet remains possible that peace will come.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the composition, publishing, and reception histories of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, poems dating from the late 1790s and early 1800s but not published until 1819. In a reading of Peter Bell, the chapter reflects on the representation of violence and on the poem’s attempts to negotiate the terms of a peaceable relationship between the human and the non-human. In the discussion of The Waggoner, the focus turns to the poem’s meditation on creative failure, artistic isolation, and the potential for cooperative living in the aftermath of war. Picking up on the conative entanglement of human and non-human entities addressed in Peter Bell, the chapter concludes with a consideration of how Benjamin’s waggon works like a peaceable commonwealth to realise the potential of its component parts in ways that advance the well-being of the whole.

The poems Wordsworth composed in the years just prior to and immediately after Peterloo bear the imprint of the poet’s concern for the degraded state of Britain and are marked by his fear of social insurrection. Introduced by a reading of Wordsworth’s Autumn poems, ‘September, 1819’ and ‘Upon the Same Occasion’, this chapter proceeds to trace the recurrence of patterns of violent imagining in The River Duddon sonnets, which discover, through their adaptation of the ostensibly pacific but deeply conflicted poetics of the sacred fount tradition, a fitting analogue for the times. The chapter concludes with an account of how the material contradictions underpinning the fluvial tradition are displayed in the arrangement of the three-volume Poems (1820) and four-volume Miscellaneous Poems (1820) and in the sequencing of the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). If the river sequence offers the promise of recuperation, it is a genre that inevitably reveals its origins in bloodshed and ruin. Yet, it is from such ruins, as Ecclesiastical Sketches go on to suggest, that forms of peaceable life may once again be salvaged.

Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820 follows the poet’s course down the Rhine and the Rhône, revisiting scenes that, thirty years earlier, had provided a setting for dreams of radical rebirth. Wordsworth’s battle with the past is intensified by another, more pressing conflict: a spat with Lord Byron, who in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had forged an impression of post-war Europe heavily indebted to Wordsworth. In many respects the Memorials can be read as an effort to defend a reputation that, in Wordsworth’s eyes, had been traduced by Byron, while attempting at the same time to correct the pro-Napoleonic sentiments that, on account of the popularity of Childe Harold, had been allowed to cast a pall on the legitimacy of the post-war settlement. The Memorials make clear that Wordsworth’s efforts to make peace with his own history, a history informed by the conflicted history of Europe, remained unresolved and that by returning to the restorative channels of youth the poet had, in fact, merely reinitiated the repetitive cycle in which peace is coupled with war.

Focussing on a reading of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, and its accompanying shorter poems, this chapter sets Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo compositions within the context of broader, contemporary debates concerning the relations between war, religion, and sacrifice. While elsewhere in the Thanksgiving volume attempts are made to cleanse the ‘stains’ of a ‘perturbèd earth’, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ remains dogged in its attention to the human costs of ‘victory sublime’, an attention that, this chapter argues, should be read within the larger context of Wordsworth’s struggle to submit Imagination to the will of God. With memories too of how, in 1802, peace conflated the distinctions between union and disunion, legitimacy and illegitimacy in Wordsworth’s sexual relations, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ tacitly acknowledges the recent wedding of the poet’s daughter, Caroline Wordsworth-Vallon. Figured as the bearer of conflict and as a principle of restitution, Caroline hovers on the margins of the ode, a symbol of peace founded in war.

On Waterloo Day, 18 June 1875, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy visited Chelsea Hospital to speak with the survivors of a battle that predated his birth by a quarter of a century. As the author’s second wife Florence Emily Hardy records, the veterans’ recollections of the conflict were captured in striking, imagistic fragments, reminiscent of the ‘sensory, perceptual and emotional components’ associated with traumatic memory:1 the sight of ‘bayonets, helmets and swords’ glinting through ‘the haze of smoke’; a sense impression of lying uncovered on ‘the wet eve of battle’, as if the man were ‘speaking on the actual day’.2 While for Hardy, Waterloo represented the climax of a ‘Great Historical Calamity’,3 far removed from the relative peace and security of his own times, for these war-torn veterans the battle was an all-too-present event that refused to lend itself fully to narrative coherence.

One winter evening in Somerset, in the early months of 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth observes ‘the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty … The sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the wood, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent’ (DWJ 147). In between these descriptions of natural phenomena she records, as if in parentheses: ‘Met a razor-grinder with a soldier’s jacket on, a Knapsack upon his back, and a boy to drag his wheel’ (DWJ 147). Unlike the lyrically suggestive accounts of sea, wind and sky, this human encounter is pared to a sequence of bare facts and, while we may deduce that the man is an army veteran now making a living as an itinerant laborer, no attempt is made to derive any further significance from the incident. In the Alfoxden Journal this entry marks the only meeting with a stranger encountered on the roads. By contrast, in the 1800–1803 Grasmere Journal Dorothy records numerous meetings with men, women and children on the public highway and, more often than not, these meetings yield insights into the consequences for the rural poor of the British involvement in the war against revolutionary France, and of the Pitt government’s relentless pursuit of socio-economic ‘improvements’ to support this involvement. Many of these meetings were subsequently developed in poems written by Wordsworth. But, whether written as poetry or in prose, the stories of these outcast and denuded figures, striking in their mundanity, were to cast a searching light on the iniquities of the times.