Unremembered Pleasure

Abstract Chapter 1 begins from Wordsworth’s frustrations with his own memory while walking in the Swiss Alps, before considering the ways in which Wordsworth’s early loco-descriptive verse works through problems of perception, retention, and representation. Reading Wordsworth against a long tradition which positions him as the poet of memory, it traces a persistent interest in lost and unnoticed images and affects, which are neither consciously experienced nor traumatically repressed. It goes on to study and develop Wordsworth’s use of the term ‘unremembered pleasure’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, presenting the possibility of unnoticed and retrospectively acknowledged satisfaction as an alternative to the broadly empirical and descriptive way readers have often expected or hoped for the poem to work. Turning to anthropological theory, the chapter develops an account of unregistered experience, and above all lost pleasure, as a form of gift