Kurt Fosso’s scientific contributions

Kurt Fosso's Buried Communities analyzes the social relationship between mourning and community in William Wordsworth's writings from 1785 to 1814. In close readings of such major works as The Ruined Cottage, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and The Excursion, Fosso uncovers the idea of mournful community, or what Wordsworth cryptically proclaimed to be a "spiritual community binding together the living and the dead." In addition to offering an explanation for the poet's mysterious, longstanding preoccupation with death and grief, Fosso discovers a poetry insistently social in orientation-and consistently social in character-and uncovers significant coherence between the poet's early and later works. Buried Communities situates Wordsworth as a reformist during a time of social and political crisis, for whom mourning promised to bind together his disaffected countrymen and disjointed world. With its sociological vantage and strong commitment to historical explanation, the book illuminates an important, previously unseen vista for understanding this Romantic poet's representations of death and grief and significantly reframes the cultural dynamics of the Romantic period in Britain.

New Literary History 30.1 (1999) 159-177 In "Public Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain" Karen Swann poses a simple but provocative question: why should Wordsworth have composed his most ambitious and significant early poem, Salisbury Plain (1793-94), in one of the most taxing of metrical patterns, the Spenserian stanza? "Why choose this obdurate stanza," she asks, "and thus revive endless repetition, [and] court the visitations of the dead?" Swann answers that Wordsworth deploys this "unmasterable" form in the hope of returning to himself a poetical "power of repetition" able to "mobilize the public" (PT 819-20). Her argument usefully focuses on Salisbury Plain's gothic elements of transport, compulsion, and return, but in so doing grants considerably less attention to the poem's romance form than one would expect given Salisbury Plain's Spenserian-romance metrics and other conspicuous romance elements (more on these below). To argue that the poet's use of Spenserian stanzas "marks his poem as gothic" because in the eighteenth century any poem so written was "in the spirit of the Gothic revival" ignores the prominence of romance itself in the Revival, not to mention the close generic connection between Spenserian metrics and Revival-romance form (PT 819). In point of fact, while for readers of our day Salisbury Plain's Spenserian and other romance elements might not so obviously distinguish the poem as a romance, for Revival-era readers such formal characteristics would have been familiar. Indeed, while gothic and romance shared much in the decade of the 1790s, there were also clear distinctions to be made between them, as Wordsworth's later adoption of revivalist ballad over "frantic" gothic attests. In a recent work Ian Duncan contends that, while gothic and romance both evoked for Revival readers "a past that was other and strange," gothic signified "a more adversarial [and] . . . militant anti-classicism," a "fragmented" rather than unbroken historical genealogy. Although no less a patchwork of lost origins than was the gothic, romance by contrast posited a "logic" of return and of imaginative transformation and future possibility, a logic not offered by gothic. Revival gothic was indeed the death of such possibility, an opposing pole of dislocation, fetishization, and compulsion. Wordsworth's selection of Spenserian romance to frame a social narrative of two of England's homeless must not, then, be hastily dismissed as mere Revival trendiness or as some journeyman exercise, for a great deal of the poem's mobilizing political power stems from its romance genre and that genre's deployment. Wordsworth himself remained silent about his motives for casting Salisbury Plain as a romance. In looking elsewhere for clues about just what it meant to adopt the genre in the late eighteenth century, the beginnings of an answer may be found in James Thomson's prefatory note to The Castle of Indolence (1748), which declares Spenser's romantic "style" and "measure" to be "appropriated by custom to all allegorical poems written in our language." In so stating, Thomson implies that there might be more tenor to romance and to one's choosing of romance than can be explained by the genre's popularity, antiquity, or sonority. His poem bears out his description of most eighteenth-century English romances as allegorical and suggests Revival-era romance was to be read, in what was considered the spirit of Spenser, as a form whose different registers of meaning were to convey moral or other social themes cast in the guise of alternative times, places, and societies. Like Thomson, Beattie, West, and other writers of the time, Wordsworth deploys the genre as a moral-didactic form intended both to influence readers and to intercede in society. Unlike his predecessors, however, he does so in large part by contriving within the text a subtle generic conflict, later described by F. W. Bateson as an "unco-ordinate collocation" of romance form and "eye-on-the-object" social-realist content. In telling a social-realist narrative of poverty and war, Wordsworth nonetheless unambiguously stamps Salisbury Plain as a romance, employing not just Spenserian romance's traditional stanzaic structure of eight lines of iambic pentameter and an Alexandrine but, like Thomson and Beattie, many of...

William Wordsworth's view of 'the living and the dead' is integral to his sociology and his poetry, and can be traced back to his unpublished 1787 poem, "The Vale of Esthwaite," and to its "mourning of the dead." The poem's troubled mourning (its mourning of mourning) guides the narrative towards a nascent "Wordsworthian vision of community" as an economy of losses and tributes exchanged between mourners and their mourned. Such mourning makes both poetry and social bonds not just possible but necessary, as the products of an interminable burden not to be borne alone.