comment-Publication History of A Winter's Ramble in Grasmere Vale - The Implications of Dorothy Wordsworth's Own Intellectual Evaluation-3 Publication History of A Winter's Ramble in Grasmere Vale - The Implications of Dorothy Wordsworth's Own Intellectual Evaluation

The publication history of such a submerged poem can be difficult, but this E2 proves you up to the task: you dig around for clues about its composition date, consider the DW’s reluctance to go into print, make some interesting points about publishing in WW’s shadow, and move towards consideration of a new audience of contemporary feminist readers.

Your instincts here are typically solid; the execution, however, sometimes falters. The report is saddled with a fitfully applied present tense. At its best, this lends you a you-are-there immediacy, like someone recounting a game play-by-play. But in the end the present tense seems a bad choice for a publication history; it invites awkwardness and confusion, especially when you naturally slip into the past tense from time to time. Likewise, some idiosyncratic phrasing here can get in the way. Letters “exact” dates, a poem’s content “unveils,” a publication history “projects” feelings… sometimes a simpler, more straightforward verb would do a better job for you.

The detective work regarding WRG’s actual composition date undoubtedly took effort, and it is interesting, a symptom of DW’s lack of confidence and the consequently murky state of her texts. And yet in the end I wonder whether it’s worth so much space in the report, especially given that you don’t end up pinning the date down to anything more exact than sometime before 1805. Is there something else at stake here, some reason why it’s important to pin down that the poem was written when it was?

If the puzzle of the composition date had been compacted, there might have been more room for you to expand on your quite interesting consideration of DW’s being enmeshed in WW’s preexisting audience. Here some more specific focus on WRG might be helpful: was there something about the poem that stopped it from intermingling with William’s work, something maybe that was discernable from his poems & therefore kept it unpublished? I also wonder who spearheaded that Monthly Packet publication (anonymous as it was), and why William Knight was led to finally compile DW’s works. Was this yet more entanglement in William’s own poetic fortunes?

The turn to feminist audiences closer to our day is again interesting but rushed (the E2, in fact, seems a bit skinny, weighing in at just over 5 pages soaking wet). This seems a great climax to your report – finally, DW gets an audience of her own! – but, in spite of your welcome attempt to illustrate why WRG might be speaking to an audience that The Thorn can’t reach, I just don’t see why that “’O Misery!’” line “takes advantage of a female sin.” I’m sure you’re on to something here, something to do with “giv[ing” presence to women” vs William’s objectification, but the difference just isn’t clearly defined.

One other note: your (alas unannotated) bibliography lists works that might have really helped fill in some facts and figures here – but Darling, Woof, Heinzelman, and Wolfson are strangely absent. So, too, are the required two electronic sources – a shame, because while the Web is hit-and-miss when it comes to quality research information, a good amount of work has been done on sites specifically focusing on women romantics.