Animals

Wordsworth's sensibility inheritance: the Evening Sonnets and the “Miscellaneous Sonnets”

“…However, more recent critics have sought to investigate the potential for self-reflexive and inward looking poetry -the Romantic lyric and the associated sonnet of sensibility -to look outward, and embrace social concerns. 16 Sarah Zimmerman's re-reading of Romantic lyricism attempts this by overturning canonical interpretations of the mode, which had been codified by critics such as Abrams and Frye. These influential studies, Zimmerman argues, "too successfully" made their case for a mode of lyric where the poet "turns his back on his audience," meaning "we have come to associate the form exclusively with one particular political trajectory" (74, x).…”