Based upon the testimony of Thomas Carlyle, most biographers acknowledge that Wordsworth witnessed the beheading of the journalist Antoine Gorsas in October 1793 during the Reign of Terror. But they go no further. This study reads the Poet’s reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated by guilt for abandoning his French lover and their child a year earlier. Following a chronological arc from October 1793, when the trauma began, until its conclusion in October 1803, when Wordsworth became a poet-soldier, I examine poetic works from The Borderers (1796), the “Discharged Soldier’ (1798), the Two-Part Prelude (1799), Home at Grasmere (1800), and the Liberty sonnets (1803), to follow the Poet working through anxiety, fear, and remorse to a resolution.
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Chapter One Wordsworth’s Trauma: October 1793
Chapter Two French Heroes and a Poet Recluse, 1795
Chapter Three Beaupuy and Godwin in The Borderers, 1796
Chapter Four “The Discharged Soldier” of Alfoxden, 1798
Chapter Five Revolutionary Foreboding in the Spots of Time, 1799
Chapter Six Finding a Home at Grasmere, 1800
Chapter Seven Making Amends, Abroad and at Home, 1802
Chapter Eight A Poet-Soldier: “October 1803”
Bibliography
Biography
Richard E. Matlak is professor emeritus from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod, MA, where he engages in community service, social and athletic activities, scholarship, travel, and family events. He has published five books: Approaches to Teaching Coleridge's Poetry and Prose, Contributing Editor (1991); British Literature: 1780-1830, Co-editor with Anne K. Mellor (1996); The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800 (1997); Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth – John Wordsworth – Sir George Beaumont, 1800-1808 (2003); and William Wordsworth: Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), Editor (2016). He also established with Lisa Villa the CrossWorks website "The Berth of the Abergavenny, East Indiaman" http://crossworks.holycross.edu/spcol/
