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Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work.

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Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work by Peter Simonsen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. x + 216. $69.95.

This meticulously researched monograph is the latest in a relatively recent trend in Wordsworth scholarship towards the rehabilitation of the much-maligned later Wordsworth and the substantial body of work he composed after what is commonly referred to as his Great Decade. On a solid foundation of rich historical and biographical detail furnished by epistolary documentation and a plethora of critical sources, Peter Simonsen reconstructs a strikingly visual aesthetic in Wordsworth's later work. Through sustained passages of subtle and often illuminating close textual reading, the visual and material nature of the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic and inscriptional poetry is disclosed and identified as a force that "decentres and destabilises" (2) the imaginative iconoclastic poetics of the early Wordsworth, and, by implication, the traditional critical discourse on Romanticism which privileges the visionary and the personal over the visual and the impersonal.

Taking William Galperin's groundbreaking The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1993) as his point of departure, Simonsen dates Wordsworth's first tentative steps towards a pictorialist aesthetics to the poet's prose masterpiece, Guide to the Lakes. First published anonymously in 1810 as a verbal illustration of a series of engravings from Rev. Joseph Wilkinson's pictures of the Lake District, the Guide underwent a number of revisions,...

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