Abstract
What Wordsworth Touched
This paper explores the occasion of Wordsworth’s retrospective
commentary on his poetry as recorded by Elizabeth Fenwick in notes take at Rydal
Mount in 1843. Focusing on the aging poet turning the pages of the book he holds
in his hand as he reads and recalls writing his poems, the argument considers
touch as a form of mediation that in bringing the subject into relation with the
object also brings him into relation with his own material being. Wordsworth’s
retrospective project reminds us that such materiality is an inevitable if also a
fragile and changing condition of making poets as well as poems.