Unremembered Politics: A Discursive Analysis of Lyrical Ballads and American Revolutionary Politics

This thesis seeks to define Wordsworth’s political stance in his 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Up to this point, his work’s politics have been defined negatively, that is, he has been described by what he is not. Instead, I suggest that reading his poems through the lens of an American Revolutionary discourse offers us definitive view of his political position. To these ends, my first chapter establishes this discourse, outlining the three elements of the discourse on which I focus. Most important of these is the elevation of common humanity present in Wordsworth and the discourse outlined. Also present are an anti-urban sentiment and walking, which both point toward a democratic impulse. The following two chapters focus of Lyrical Ballads itself, first poems that are not typically read as political, and finally I offer a reading of “Tintern Abbey,” a poem around which so much controversy has centered. In these two chapters, I use the discourse outlined in the chapter one to show the ways in which the poems point back towards American revolutionary politics. The formulations rely, in part, on Foucault’s discourse theories, which allows us to draw connections between texts that may seem unrelated initially. Such analysis, as I stated above, allows us to positively define Wordsworth’s politics through the texts of the American Revolution.