The Excursion

…was published in 1814 as The Excursion and consisted of nine long philosophical monologues spoken by pastoral characters. The first monologue (Book I) contained a version of one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, “The Ruined Cottage,” composed in superb blank verse in 1797. This bleak narrative records the slow, pitiful decline…

…form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897),…

…English poet William Wordsworth in The Excursion (1814), who lives in complete isolation because he can neither hear nor speak. Wordsworth provided the reader a perspective on this figure by referring to the face of the Sun—moving above him—as representing a grace that redeems life. For de Man, however, the…