Wordsworth, 1802

This chapter focuses on the series of sonnets that William Wordsworth wrote in 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, when he visited France for the first time in a decade. Critical attention to the political contours of these 1802 poems has tended not to distinguish them from his wartime sonnets of 1803 and 1804, which are often taken as lenses through which to read the peacetime sonnets of 1802. There is surely critical value in thinking about Wordsworth’s sonnets from these years as a series, but in setting them within an undifferentiated chronology we risk overlooking the formal, personal, and political registers that obtain in each poem. Rather than taking Wordsworth’s wartime sonnets as a frame through which to project war back into his peacetime verse, this chapter considers the 1802 sonnets as deeply tied to the era of peace, their ideas and language sharing relays with other Amiens-era discourses, including narratives of travel to France during the peace, and political tracts that consider the significance for Britain of the war’s end and the ways in which concord might be preserved.