Brian R. Bates. Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception

Brian R. Bates. Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 236. $99. Brian Bates's book, part of Picketing and Chatto's "History of the Book" series, contributes to the recent swell of interest in Romantic print culture, book studies, and reading audiences. The book tells, as Bates puts it, "two intertwined stories," of "how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections" and "how Wordsworth's critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the designs of those collections" (1). In so doing, it explores how these forms of paratextual and parodic writing, typically relegated to the margins of literary scholarship, in fact played a key role in shaping literary production, reception, and culture during the Romantic period, as part of a "wide-spread struggle between early nineteenth-century authors, reviewers and publishers to negotiate and create the tastes of contemporary readers" (15). Wordsworth's Poetic Collections is meticulously researched and documented-its endnotes weigh in at over fifty pages, roughly a third as long as the main text. It is also refreshingly clearly written and free of jargon, while at the same time critically astute. The book investigates how William Wordsworth used various forms of supplementary writings from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads through the 1820 River Duddon volume, including "prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other paratexts" (1), to shape his poetic oeuvre, his literary identity, and his relationship with readers. Bates shows how these paratexts engaged in public contestation and dialogue with the writing of various critics, reviewers, and parodists, as "poetry and parody, verse and prose, writers and reviewers, redefine[d] one another" in an ongoing dialectic of framing and refraining (76). One particular delight of the book is its exploration of the symbiotic relationship between Wordsworth and his parodists, whose writings often benefited the poet even as they sought to ridicule him. J. H. Reynolds's "Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad" (1819), for instance, not only imitated Wordsworth's repetitive style but literally appropriated and mashed together his titles, yet ended up swelling sales of Wordsworth's own Peter Bell by thrusting it into public attention. Reynolds, like other parodists, mocks Wordsworth's repetition of words, obsessive cross-referencing of his own poems, explanatory notes, and aggressively egoistic attempt to define his own public. Like many of the "best" or "most popular" parodies of Wordsworth's poetry, Bates argues, it "left readers unable to determine whether it was written in earnest or in jest, or if it was written by Wordsworth or someone else" (15). Yet Wordsworth reshaped this parodic discourse; in another turn of the wheel, as part of the ongoing refashioning of his own poetic identity. An 1820 poem "On the Detraction Which Followed the Publication of a Certain Poem," for instance, denounces such parodies in order to affirm the coherence and value of Wordsworth's own poetic works, labor, and reputation; yet at the same time, "to remain prominent in the public eye, Wordsworth needed the 'harpy brood'" of critics and parodists "that his sonnet denigrates" (136). Bates identifies a main source of contestation with parodists and reviewers in Wordsworth's theme of "connective reading" (12): his use of repeated words and themes across poems, as well as repeated references and allusions to his own works, to induce readers to approach his oeuvre as a single coherent structure. Bates traces various forms of connection in a number of Wordsworth's volumes, such as repetition of the word "stone" in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads; the way the various flower poems in the 1807 Poems speak to one another; and how the word change in the title from "Written" to "Composed" in the 1815 version of "Tintem Abbey," together with some added notes, draw his various poems in the collection into association. …