The professional Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was deeply engaged with legal discourse and institutions throughout his career. Mark Schoenfield's new study explores how that engagement shaped Wordsworth's poetry, his sense of professionalism, and the literary environment of his day.

This study focuses primarily on Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion, but ranges from early letters to the Sonnets on the Punishment of Death (1842). Informed by contemporary legal theory, Schoenfield sets his arguments in the context of a period in English literature when the law held wide-ranging rhetorical power. The most influential reviewers in the romantic period were lawyers, and law and literature shared similar concerns regarding public conceptions of agreement, property, and propriety.

Schoenfield demonstrates that Wordsworth's well-noted interest in history was necessarily an encounter with law. The Professional Wordsworth is an engaging look at the place of poetry as a professional and social force amid national debates on legal rights, public policy, and economic order. Dealing with broad literary, theoretical, and historical cruxes, it sets the groundwork for recognizing the importance of law as a social and interpretive institution for other romantic writers.