Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth's Poetry in Fields of Print (Material Texts)

In the late eighteenth century British print culture took a diagrammatic and accentual turn. In graphs of emphasis and tonal inflection in signs for indicating poetic stress and in tabulations of punctuation elocutionists grammarians and prosodists deployed new typographic marks and measures to represent English speech on the page. At the same time cartographers and travel writers published reconfigurations of landscape on large-scale topographical maps in geometric surveys and in guidebooks that increasingly featured charts and diagrams. Within these diverse fields of print blank verse was employed as illustration and index directing attention to newly discovered features of British speech and space and helping to materialize the vocal and visual contours of the nation. In Romantic Marks and Measures Julia S. Carlson examines Wordsworths poetry of speech and nature as a poetry of print written and read in the midst of topographic and typographic experimentation and change. Investigating the notebook drafts of The Discharged Soldier the printers copy of Lyrical Ballads Lake District guidebooks John Thelwalls scansion of The Excursion and revisions and editions of The Prelude she explores Wordsworths major blank verse poems as sites of intervention―visual and graphic as well as formal and thematic―in cultural contests to represent Britain on the page as a shared landscape and language community.