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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 114 0 200 x 127 mm 110 pages |
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Peter Bell 1819 By far the longest and most ambitious of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, Peter Bell is a comedy somewhat in the manner of Sterne. Wordsworth wrote it with his other ballads at Alfoxden in spring 1798, but withheld publication until 1819, when it sold out in a week. It was parodied brilliantly by Shelley (Peter Bell the Third) and received with delighted mockery by Byron. Like ‘The Idiot Boy’, Wordsworth’s comic masterpiece, Peter Bell has a powerful eccentricity that has always left some readers uneasy. Wordsworth himself, however, writing at the height of his powers, expended great pains upon it and expected it to achieve a permanent place in English literature. £25 $48 There’s something in a flying horse, |
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