Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: William Wordsworth, deemed the ‘Poet of Nature’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is well known for his affinity with trees. This essay directs attention to Shelley’s arboreal poetics of place through Wordsworthian allusions in Alastor and related compositions. Shelley’s trees branch throughout his various forms of composition, from the drawings of trees in his manuscript notebooks, to rhetorical figures within his poems and descriptions of trees observed in letters. Contrary to Shelley’s apparent rejection of Wordsworth in the Preface to Alastor, the ‘woodland state’ of a related poem, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, underscores the persisting importance of Wordsworth’s place in Shelley’s arboreal poetics.
Source: Plant Perspectives
Author: Amanda Blake Davis
Institution: University of Derby
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4414610975
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: