The poems Wordsworth composed in the years just prior to and immediately after Peterloo bear the imprint of the poet’s concern for the degraded state of Britain and are marked by his fear of social insurrection. Introduced by a reading of Wordsworth’s Autumn poems, ‘September, 1819’ and ‘Upon the Same Occasion’, this chapter proceeds to trace the recurrence of patterns of violent imagining in The River Duddon sonnets, which discover, through their adaptation of the ostensibly pacific but deeply conflicted poetics of the sacred fount tradition, a fitting analogue for the times. The chapter concludes with an account of how the material contradictions underpinning the fluvial tradition are displayed in the arrangement of the three-volume Poems (1820) and four-volume Miscellaneous Poems (1820) and in the sequencing of the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). If the river sequence offers the promise of recuperation, it is a genre that inevitably reveals its origins in bloodshed and ruin. Yet, it is from such ruins, as Ecclesiastical Sketches go on to suggest, that forms of peaceable life may once again be salvaged.

This chapter examineswhat happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead—when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason; however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

Although the dominant meaning of virtue today concerns human ethical capacity, the word had a much broader scope in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and in early-modern herbal and agricultural literature. This chapter tackles this ecological sense of “vertue” (as it was often spelled in the period), unpacking the resilient force it named in natural matter and the skill and virtue of stewardship it solicited from the humans entangled in its management in household, garden, or apothecary. As this chapter shows through readings of examples from Shakespeare, early modern practical texts, and modern environmental thinking, stewardship and resilience promise to capture the skills and virtues of household management in its broadest sense, to include care for the oikos shared by human and nonhuman creatures and systems – especially, in contemporary settings, in times of catastrophe. As keywords of contemporary environmental ethics, however, they have also been criticized for individualizing environmental virtue, undermining necessary structural change in favor of personal care and tenacity. This chapter suggests we might clarify this debate through a return to early modern vertues, by engaging the powers of nonhuman virtues and the legacy of these mixed and distributed agencies in the present.

Beckett’s works are built around the paradoxical notion of the still life. Suspended between motion and standstill, destruction and creation, a still life conveys the state of a being that is simultaneously lifeless and alive. Still lifes are located at the intersection of life and death, of presence and absence, of the material and the immaterial dimension of a work of art. Beckett, above all in his later prose and drama, uses the still life as a reflection on the creation of a work of art while simultaneously performing this creative process as it were in vivo. This chapter discusses the relation between visual, textual, musical and dramatic still lifes. It analyses the tableaux vivants and nature mortes in works such as A Piece of Monologue, Stirrings Still and What Where in relation to Hamlet, and investigates the notion of ghostly doppelgangers by way of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise that informed Beckett’s late plays. Journeys of dispossession and shrinking, moments frozen in time that approach the condition of a still life will be analysed in Timon of Athens, The End, King Lear, Texts for Nothing, Sonnets 55, 18 and 81, and finally in Breath.

Milton's sonnets, which present Milton's self as a fictionalized persona, reveal the ways in which Milton's masculinity and his subjectivity interact in a highly masculinized poetic form. In his political and personal sonnets, Milton makes himself a vulnerable but also authoritative figure who makes his own authority through poetic form. Claiming public status while eschewing public alliances, creating enemies while claiming popularity, and naming friends while walking in solitary glory, Milton's sonnet-speakers confirm the ambivalent, tactical, and self-authorizing manhood which is Milton's default.

Chapter Three, “The Sonnets and the Messiah” shows how Victorian enthusiasts did with Shakespeare’s lyric expressions exactly as they had done with his plays. Charles Ellis’s astonishing collection, Shakespeare and the Bible: Fifty Sonnets, with their Scriptural Harmonies (1896) deliberately juxtaposes Shakespearean sonnets with passages from scripture so as to demonstrate their mutual accord.This chapter untangles the peculiar theological expectations implicit in Victorian reading to show how their conception of Shakespeare’s divinity served to ensure and to perpetuate unlikely interpretations of the sonnets.

This chapter argues that while Shakespeare has no single or overarching theory or view of love, specific patterns or tendencies are evident in both the plays and the poems. It focuses on three characteristics of such a disposition: the singularity of the beloved (‘you are you’) that admits of no substitute; the essentially projective rather than reactive vision of love (‘love sees not with the eyes but with the mind’); and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that love is not an emotion as such, but rather a disposition or form of behaviour that involves different, sometimes contradictory, emotions. This puts Shakespeare at odds with contemporary, Galenic theories of love as one of the most volatile of the passions. The Sonnets, for example, are virtually devoid of references to contemporary psychology, and the chapter focusses on these poems to explore the rich varieties of emotion they express in their complex and fraught negotiations of love and desire. Classifying and arranging the sonnets in accordance with the emotions expressed in them furthermore does not accord with the usual narrative attributed to them.

This chapter examines the latticework of links between Shakespeare and Spenser, telling a tale of two writers. One goes to London to become poet and playwright, the other to Dublin with dreams of a dramatic career, where he finds his theatre of worldlings is a theatre of war. If Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare, especially early Shakespeare, is seldom discussed, Shakespeare’s influence on Spenser remains an even more neglected topic. Spenser is crucial here, since that poet’s Irish residence necessitates a broadening of horizons, and he is viewed as part of a recognizable circle. Shakespeare, a lifelong co-author and collaborator influenced by several of Spenser’s Irish contemporaries, is too often viewed in isolation. From the Spenser–Harvey correspondence and the early histories onwards, this study tracks the collaborative underpinnings of both writers’ work, charting their influences from a shared reliance on Holinshed to a common concern with innovation in form and genre.