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.

Addressing a chronology of texts – the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, the Preface to its second edition, the ballad Michael, and the “Residence in France” sections of the 1805 Prelude – this chapter reconsiders Wordsworth’s great decade as a struggle between two types of honor: a commercial value of hierarchy that operated within the day’s market for “dignified” literary productions, and a social value of egalitarianism that allowed poetry to appeal to the “native and naked dignity” inherent in all humankind, regardless of economic status. Addressing a legacy of criticism on Wordsworth’s canonicity and self-fashioning, this chapter demonstrates how honor refigures Romantic cultural capital, inasmuch as Wordsworthian honor pits society against commerce. Such a tension between honorable egalitarianism and commercial success reframes the poet’s politics. Addressing claims that Wordsworth became more conservative as his career progressed, this chapter shows how he also stages a classic paradox inherent in liberalism: the conflict between market distinction and social equality.

The poet’s conservative revisioning of the Swiss myth is developed in Chapter Six, which looks at Restoration-period representations of Switzerland, unearthing what Paul Hamilton calls the ‘political imaginary’ of the Restoration. After discussing the country’s socio-political situation as well as changes between the Grand Tour and modern tourism, I explore how Whig and Tory travelers alike, including Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Mackintosh, Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Francis Jeffrey tried to revive their liberal hopes in Switzerland after 1814 by revisiting Whiggish topoi, but also by meditating over the ruins of revolution. I then look at Hemans’s and Scott’s late Romantic representations of the Swiss myth as a model of Christian patriotism and domestic attachment, yet one which never completely sheds its residual significance as a democratic trope. Drawing on Switzerland’s medieval past, and notably on the story of William Tell and on the wars of liberation, their texts offer a paradoxical mix of conservative and progressive values, or what I call Restoration republicanism.

Chapter 2 examines the place of the Swiss myth in British Whig ideology, looking at its dual function as residual republican signifier on one hand, and as a form of oppositional discourse on the other. I first survey seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts to see the role that Switzerland played in the English republican tradition, then analyze the dialectic between virtue and commerce in a series of progress poems and historical sketches that compare the Swiss republics with France, Italy, and Britain. While earlier Whig writers such as Addison drew on classical republican language to legitimize a more modern, liberal idea of liberty, writers later in the century began to romanticize the democracies of central Switzerland in order to defend popular sovereignty, preparing the way for the century’s most elaborate but also politically radical interpretation of the Swiss myth, Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches. Written in the context of the ‘second’ French Revolution of 1792, the poem’s representation of the Swiss myth necessarily falls short of France’s modern democracy, pointing to the growing ideological rift between Freiheit and liberté.

Chapter 5 focuses on Britain, arguing that Wordsworth represents his native Lake District as a miniature Switzerland in order to appropriate the Swiss myth’s republican energies and to create the simulacrum of an autonomous community in Grasmere. Various texts in verse and prose that Wordsworth composed between 1800 and 1820 respond to the post-revolutionary problem of political sovereignty and the growing demands in Britain for popular rights by developing the comparison between Switzerland and the Lake District, using picturesque conventions to transpose the Alps onto the Lake District. By palimpsestically inscribing his ‘visionary mountain republic’ over his earlier representations of the Alps, and by casting himself as the true representative of the people, Wordsworth can claim a continuity between his past and present self, while at the same time arguing that demands for political reform are a dangerous misrepresentation of the sovereign will.

Chapter 4 also looks at how the French Revolution, and in particular events in Switzerland and the French invasion, transformed the manner in which the Swiss myth was understood and deployed back in Britain. After examining contemporary reports of the 1798 invasion in periodicals and contemporary histories, I argue for a conjunction between invasion fears, apocalyptic discourse, and insinuations of guilt and treachery in various texts, including sermons and prophecies, as well as Coleridge’s “France: an Ode,” then show how the small Forest cantons, or Waldstätten, which had stubbornly fought against the French, were made into the sole custodians of the Swiss myth. I then discuss Wordsworth’s own delayed response in various poems, including The Prelude and the “Subjugation” sonnet. The primitive democracies’ heroic resistance was meant to regenerate Switzerland’s national spirit and the poet’s own disenchanted belief in republicanism, itself crucial to his creativity. The last section looks at a number of other poems and novels written in response to the invasion. As I claim, these often represent the Swiss as complicit in their fate in order to empty the country’s moral landscape and to displace it back home.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Ranging across Beckett’s work before focusing, in particular, on the stories Malone tells in Malone Dies, I demonstrate the persistence of the emancipatory potential of sentimental fiction in this seemingly most anti-sentimental writer. Sympathy, for Joyce, held the promise of crossing class boundaries. Beckett, in contrast, reads class divisions as internal to the modern subject. Thus, the encounter between beggar and bourgeois that his work repeatedly stages – as in the structure of Molloy – is constitutive of capitalist modernity’s construction of subjectivity where freedom is always mediated by dispossession. Beckett’s subjects suffer alone. Seeing no way out of the infinite catastrophe his works present, Beckett nevertheless retains the possibility of human recognition. Sentimental fictions emerge, here, as one of the many conventions Beckett scrutinizes and inhabits, their persistence giving us an avenue into the history that has made its mark on his work, even as that work strives to efface its traces.

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.

Chapter 4 takes personification as its point of departure in the wake of Wordsworth’s well-known dismissal of it. From this perspective, Coleridge’s early conversation poems – where a tenuous reciprocity with the natural world is with difficulty achieved through the unfolding artifice of the poem – and Clare’s recreations in verse of remembered conversations with self-personifying natural things are inventive extensions of eighteenth-century methods for putting human beings into social converse with the natural world. Both, the chapter argues, are instances of what Jonathan Culler calls “projects of animation”: poems where more subtle practices of personification support a poetry that reaches out to a chattering world of non-human beings and things to make them talk not only to each other but also, at least in poetry, to us. Such tactics seemed altogether more possible, however, early in the century than toward its close – as the poetry of Swinburne’s French correspondents, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes clear.

Chapter 1 reveals the complexity and self-consciousness of Romantic nature writing, bringing together authors who share an interest in nonhuman nature as a dynamic process. It also addresses the porousness of Romantic nature writing as a mode of engagement across different kinds of texts. A key claim is that, while Gilbert White’s localism and close field observations were influential on later nature writing, so was the strand of confessional autobiography pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Romantic nature writing is often represented as a self-aggrandising masculine mode. But women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith were significant, particularly in their portrayals of nonhuman nature as entangled with everyday human life. The chapter also addresses labouring-class writers, bringing John Clare’s natural history prose into dialogue with the work of the artist Thomas Bewick and the novelist and poet James Hogg. All three resisted and lamented the forces of modernisation, but did so through developing innovative modes of representation. Even at its most backward-looking, Romantic nature writing engaged with the contradictions and conflicts of modernity. And, while influenced by natural theology, it also dared to speculate about deep time and the transience of human species.