“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage.... He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote-like.... There was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face.” William Hazlitt's words present a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know. This book argues that the poet's quixotic creativity owes much to this mixture of the solemn and the laughable, one that is vitally related to his hopes for his writing and to his sense of t ... More

“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage.... He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote-like.... There was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face.” William Hazlitt's words present a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know. This book argues that the poet's quixotic creativity owes much to this mixture of the solemn and the laughable, one that is vitally related to his hopes for his writing and to his sense of the risks and embarrassments that such hopes entail. Wordsworth’s Fun explores the poet’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reading and reworking of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. The book travels many untrodden ways, examining the relationship between Wordsworth’s metrical practice and his interest in laughing gas, his fascination with pantomime, his investment in the figure of the fool, and his response to discussions about the value of play. The book sheds fresh light on debates about the causes, aims, and effects of humor, and also on the contribution of Wordsworth’s peculiar humor to the shaping of the modern poetic experiment.