![]() Then, I turn to three of The Prelude’s blank verse sonnets: Book I’s opening lines, Book V’s “strains of thankfulness” (174), and Book XIII’s closing benediction. To lay the groundwork for my argument, I first examine how, in his Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), Wordsworth aligns and transposes his epic poetry and sonnets in the deleted “Advertisement,” dual Latin epigraphs, and sonnet “Nuns fret not.” I have chosen the 1807 volumes’ “Advertisement,” epigraphs and “Nuns fret not” sonnet to illustrate how Wordsworth’s collective lyric progress-particularly his Milton- (and Shakespeare-) inflected sonnet formations-dynamically shaped his poetics as an epic poet from 1802-1805. ![]() I propose that Wordsworth’s blank verse sonnets in the thirteen-book Prelude enable him to find the equanimity of mind and the surviving form that Fallon and Weinfield describe. I aim to spotlight how central blank verse sonnet making was for Wordsworth’s thinking and development as an epic poet. 1804-1805) and involves a form not discussed in their articles: Wordsworth’s blank verse sonnets. My response builds on their respective arguments about the beginning of Book I (Fallon) and Book V (Weinfield) of The Prelude (c. Weinfield contends that Milton’s Sonnet XIX mediation of Shakespeare’s sonnet XV moved Wordsworth toward “a third-order meditation reflecting on the nature of contemplation itself” amidst the certainty of material transience (121). Fallon argues that Wordsworth discovered in Milton’s epic narrator a lyric model for presenting the growth of the poet’s mind toward equanimity “in the face of sorrows and adversity” (127). Each article concerns authorial influence-for Fallon based on “equanimity” and for Weinfield involving a potential “threat” (116)-and focuses on beginnings and endings, making and remaking, echoes and allusions, transience and permanence. ![]() ![]() While Fallon reexamines “how Wordsworth makes his poetry out of Milton’s poetry, and particularly his Prelude out of Paradise Lost” (126), Weinfield plots a Shakespeare-to-Milton sonnet lineage manifested in Book V of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Stephen Fallon’s “The Equanimity of Influence: Milton and Wordsworth” and Henry Weinfield’s “‘When Contemplation like the Night-Calm Felt’: Religious Considerations in Poetic Texts by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth” appear together in two bibliographic ways: in volume twenty-six of Connotations and in the journal’s debates section under the title “Between Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth” ( ). ![]()
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