Paesaggi della coscienza. La formazione poetica in William Wordsworth

The aim and scope of this book has been to introduce Italian scholarly readers to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude and to a few connected items of research which have concerned English and American Wordsworth scholars in the past twenty years, thus updating, both on the intellectual and bibliographical level, our local discussion on such subjects, which, apart from excellent translations, introductions, and single essays, has been scanty to say the least. As I also consider the way in which a few traits of English Romanticism harken back to the literary world of romance, my discussion has turned on a comparative approach. My study has specifically focused on the following issues: -The Prelude, its complicated publishing history and its central poetic and structural feature, and most striking innovation, which Wordsworth called spots of time. -how the relationship between romance and allegory, according to recent and less recent theoretical stances, enters Wordsworth’s shorter pieces, whether they were inserted in the longer poem or not. -Tasso’s and Collins’s influence on Wordsworth’s earliest writings and juvenilia, a quite new strain in Wordworth’s scholarship, which has strongly been appreciated by a top English scholar. -tracing passages of The Prelude back to recently discovered juvenilia and the most recent biographies, thus highlighting the relevance of loss and mourning as the fundamental strain in Wordworth’s poetry. -giving their due to Wordsworth’s early but highly revised poems, which he published late in his life and which are mostly ignored by Italian scholarship. -Connecting Wordsworth and Schiller’s notions of the naïve and sentimental Much remains to be done to our appreciation of Wordsworth’s greatness. I am trying to work towards it by a new translation of an early version of Wordsworth’s Prelude.