In her article, Lucy Newlyn does close readings of several texts by Cowper, Lamb, Lloyd, and Wordsworth. She first identifies three responses to the city to be found in Cowper's The Task, written in 1783, and then examines some ways in which the same responses recur in works by Wordsworth, Lamb and Lloyd.

Cowper's first response to the city, according to Newlyn, is to see it in terms of opposition to the country. The country is presented as a positive influence, a "sort of Paradise"; while the city is seen by Cowper as a symbol of "a world, or way of being that is opposed to the human spirit" (170).

The second and third types of responses Cowper has to the city are, as Newlyn terms it, examples of ways in which Cowper's oppositions of city and country sometimes "break down" (171). She points to the sections of The Task where Cowper writes "with a genuine affection for the vice and squalor of city life," (170). Newlyn points out that Cowper's tone also sometimes contradicts his statements in The Task," in that he writes of the city with great imaginative power, even when he condemns it; while his descriptions of the country, although full of praise, are often flat in tone.

In the section of her article that deals specifically with Book VII of The Prelude, Newlyn challenges Raymond Williams' assertion that Wordsworth was the first to view the city as "a new way of seeing man in what is experienced as a new kind of society." She argues instead that Lloyd's 1798 poem London was the first to reflect that view, and proposes that London may have been a source for Book VII of The Prelude. Newlyn goes on to say that the city Wordsworth describes in Book VII has "stopped being a metaphor, and is being used, instead, to record a personal estrangement reminiscent of Lloyd's in London (180).

According to Newlyn, as Wordsworth becomes more personally engaged with London in Book VII, we begin to see more ambivalence in his response to both the positive and negative aspects of the city. Newlyn also believes that at certain points in Book VII Wordsworth seems ". . . to be seeing the city as a formative experience -- just as crucial in moulding his imagination as the country" (181) and that the chaos of London life, in disturbing him, sparks his imaginative powers.

However, according to Newlyn, in the last part of Book VII Wordsworth "retreats from the implications of his most imaginative writing" (181). Newlyn believes that in lines 696-705 of Book VII Wordsworth's condemnation of the city is a move backward to an earlier position, and that the "extraneous" last passage is a "denial of the imaginative center of Book VII" (182).

Document created March 7, 1997