Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Acknowledgments

105 105 Acknowledgments I absolutely must thank Robert D. Richardson for seeing the potential in my project for the Muse Books series. Writing this book has been the most enjoyable project of my career, and I am deeply grateful to Professor Richardson for giving me this opportunity. Special thanks go also to Elisabeth Chretien, my editor at the University of Iowa Press, for her initial interest and for abundant encouragement , advice, and assistance throughout the process. For their love and support, I am grateful to my family, Wendy Warren and Sarah Margaret Robinson; and I am grateful to my band, Mark Graybill and Bob Falgie, mostly for the rocking.With many thanks, I want to acknowledge the support of this project provided by Dean Matthew Poslusny and Provost Stephen C. Wilhite at Widener University. I also owe a debt of personal gratitude to Grant Strine. Special thanks are due to Janine Utell for her brilliant insights and suggestions, to Jason Goldsmith for his amazing artwork , and to Susan Logsdon for her careful eye in the reading of proofs. Because my thinking about Wordsworth has been influenced by a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship , I can only acknowledge my debts to those works that pertain most directly to this book by recommending them for further reading: David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory ; Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1998); Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-­ Facement,”MLN94(1979),919–30;PaulH.Fry,Wordsworth and the Poetryof What We Are (Yale University Press, 2008); Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1989); Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation , 1787–1842 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Yale University Press, 1964); Kenneth R. Johnston,Wordsworth and The Re- 106 Acknowledgments cluse (Yale University Press, 1984); Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford University Press, 1988); Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Cornell University Press, 1986); and Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Blackwell, 2002). To readers seeking an accessible overview of the lives of and the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, I recommend Adam Sisman’s The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (Viking, 2006). The epigraph from “The Other,” from The Whole Motion,© 1992 by James Dickey, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. The epigraph from “Turning Back,” from The Boatloads,© 2008 by Dan Albergotti, reprinted by permission of BOA Editions. ...