"Lines of Light": Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley.'

Sandy, Mark

doi:10.3366/rom.2016.0287

"Lines of Light": Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley.'

Sandy, Mark

Authors

Professor Mark Sandy m.r.sandy@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

Recognising the importance of Wordsworth's sense of nascent light (elegised in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’), the essay traces how influential this idea was on later Romantic poetic treatments of light. Wordsworth's qualitative distinction between the ‘fountain light of all our day’ and the ‘light of common day’ reveals his alertness to the revelatory and blinding effects of light and establishes the terms of Byron's and Shelley's imaginative engagement with the transformative aspects of light in their depiction of Italian cityscapes and coastal scenes. This transformative quality of light, for Byron and Shelley, is inextricable from those utopian aspirations to recapture future edenic states, which are configured in terms that consign such future idylls to the irrecoverable past. Finally, Shelley's The Triumph of Life is read as avowing an apocalyptic, rather than transformative, light whose ‘severe excess’ is still reimagined in terms familiar to the reader of Wordsworth's ‘Ode’.

Citation

Sandy, M. (2016). "Lines of Light": Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley.'. Romanticism, 22(3), 260-268. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0287

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Sep 1, 2016
Publication Date	Oct 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Oct 5, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Oct 5, 2016
Journal	Romanticism
Print ISSN	1354-991X
Electronic ISSN	1750-0192
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	22
Issue	3
Pages	260-268
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0287