Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure

Book excerpt: Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure explores the poet's sustained interest in the ethical and aesthetic value of overlooked, underacknowledged, and 'unremembered' pleasures. Such pleasures are marginal and fleeting; they pass by silently and are recognized only retrospectively. Yet they shape the aims, technique, and ultimately the whole affective economy of Wordsworth's writing. Rather than understanding the domain of pleasure to be strictly subjective, personal experience, Wordsworth posits affects and attachments beyond conscious experience or possession. Teasing apart unremembered pleasure from the psychoanalytic concepts of sublimation, repression, and trauma, the book offers new interpretations of both well-known and marginal poems, rethinking familiar oppositions between childhood and maturity, and between sensation and recollection. By tracing affects which are not determinate sensations so much as unacknowledged gifts, it demonstrates how retrospective pleasure undercuts fantasies of purely autonomous experience. It argues for the centrality of surprise: unremembered pleasure promises to disturb, catch out, and remake the person who encounters it. More broadly, it locates in Wordsworth's account of composition the resources to rethink poetic pleasure: not as wish-fulfilment, nor as aesthetic escape, but as an engaged and reparative relation to the world. Book jacket.