University of Chicago Press Wordsworth′s Fun

"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage.... He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote-like." These words from William Hazlitt present a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know--and as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, a Wordsworth who owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworth's Fun takes us on a journey through the poet's debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reading and reworking of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Bevis travels many untrodden ways, examining the relationship between Wordsworth's metrical practice and his interest in laughing gas, his fascination with pantomime, his investment in the figure of the fool, and his response to discussions about the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth'sFun not only sheds fresh light on debates about the causes, aims, and effects of humor, but also on the contribution of Wordsworth's peculiar humor to the shaping of the modern poetic experiment. Review "An admirable addition to studies of William Wordsworth and Romanticism ... A deep reading of Wordsworth that ties his aesthetic practice to the poets of the past (Shakespeare, Pope), to Wordsworth's contemporaries, and to poets of our own moment who work in his lyric vein (John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens)."--Mark Fulk "Eighteenth-Century Studies" "Bevis says he is not trying to save Wordsworth from himself, but he brilliantly rescues the poet from two very large groups of would-be possessors: his solemn admirers and his solemn detractors. Life for the Wordsworth evoked in this book is too serious to be taken only seriously--he believes, as Bevis says, 'that only one sort of feeling about a subject isn't enough.' Bevis's double claim is richly sustained: that Wordsworth is more fun than we may have thought, and that fun itself is more Wordsworthian than we have imagined."--Michael Wood, Princeton University " Wordsworth's Fun sets out to show that the poet's uses of humour are, in fact, altogether deeper and stranger than popular caricature allows . . . this is the sort of study you want to tear passages out of and tuck inside the Complete Poems to inform all future readings . . . This Wordsworth is both 'egotistically sublime and ridiculous', mercurial as Bevis's own essayistic quickness. His close readings are sharpened by a formalist's instinct for singularity, holding up rare rhymes and rhythms to the analytic light, while his literary history is enlivened by a gregarious range of reference from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries . . . It is the effect of this excellent and generous study, so full of original insights, to be suggestive of further fun."--Jeremy Noel-Tod "Romantic Circles" " Wordsworth's Fun: surely that's an oxymoron, or a joke? But Bevis is serious. Showing how much Wordsworth and fun have to teach us about each other, Bevis de-familiarizes his monumental subject and returns the poet to his essential human strangeness. In the process, this book makes a literary contribution to the small shelf of philosophical and psychoanalytic works that think hard about the nature of laughter and play." --Langdon Hammer, Yale University "From its provocative title through its subtle and dazzling readings, Wordsworth's Fun reopens a case one might have thought not only closed but nonexistent. Bevis brilliantly pursues the queer conundrum the poet's contemporaries better recognized (even if they often censured it): how Wordsworth sounded out the ludic in the ludicrous, the fun in the funereal, the wit in the withheld, the daftness in daffodils, the glee in what's agley. Elegant, absorbing, and often (yes) fun, Bevis's book is a bravura inquiry that looks hard at the rebarbative often obscured pleasures of this poet.