Metrical Pleasures

Abstract Chapter 3 reads Wordsworth’s poetic theory as a far-reaching account of compositional pleasure. It considers the crucial relation between of poetry’s claims to truth and its claims to produce and communicate pleasure, and uses the question of poetic pleasure to explore the tense relation in Wordsworth’s prose between real language and events and the artificial and mechanical operation of verse. It goes on to position Wordsworth’s theory of poetry in opposition to the persistent critical problem of sublimation. In place of the assumption that artistic pleasures must be substitute satisfaction or sheer fantasy, it explores the claim that poetry might disclose existing but unacknowledged pleasure in the world. The challenges and pleasures of metrical verse, it argues, are for Wordsworth constitutive of its retrospective, reparative forms of attention. The chapter concludes by returning to Wordsworth’s poetry and considering how metrical pleasure might function as a form of mourning.