Wordsworth and the Worth of Words - 9780521129145

In this freshly written though long-pondered book, Hugh Sykes Davies - novelist, poet and distinguished literary critic - addresses Wordsworth's major poetry. Language, and its interaction with genius, is his central concern; but questions about Freud. Coleridge and the Romantic Imagination are raised and answered in the course of his stimulating survey. Scholars working on the eighteenth century will find Sykes Davies illulluminating on guide-books to the Lakes, while his analysis of Wordsworth's idiomatic evocation of thought and feeling will alike interest students of linguistics and the general reader of verse. In his closing pages, Sykes Davies reconsiders the poet's relationship with Mary Hutchinson and his sister Dorothy, focusing on the Dove Cottage menage during Wordsworth's most productive years. A remarkable combination of analytic and empathic intelligence, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words is an essential study of the poet.

Hugh Sykes Davies died in 1984, and this 1987 book was prepared for publication by John Kerrigan, a colleague at St John's College, Cambridge, and Jonathan Wordsworth, Chairman of the Dove Cottage Trust, to which the author gave much support as Trustee.