

Over time, as instrumental structures come to disfigure every realm of modern life, poetries and philosophies at odds with these structures are forced to criticize and surpass earlier voices in their traditions that seem to have lost a transformative power.

Given the dominant trends of the modern world, however, these adventures repeatedly lead to severe collisions and crises, in response to which they are later revised or further displaced. Baker argues that adventures of exploratory wandering emerge in the romantic period as displaced articulations of older religious discourses. The larger interpretative narrative shaping the book is that a dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity has been at work throughout modern culture.

His guiding concern is to illuminate adventures of "extravagant" or "wandering" language that, from the romantic period on, both poets and philosophers have undertaken in opposition to the dominant social and discursive frames of a pervasively instrumentalized world. Book excerpt: In The Extravagant Robert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers: Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard in a chapter on the sublime Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille in a chapter on visionary quest and Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida in a chapter on apocalyptic negativity. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.īook Synopsis The Extravagant by : Robert Bakerĭownload or read book The Extravagant written by Robert Baker and published by. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life-1770 to 1850-tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. Book excerpt: In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. This book was released on with total page 584 pages. Book Synopsis William Wordsworth by : Stephen Gillĭownload or read book William Wordsworth written by Stephen Gill and published by Oxford University Press.
