Paul Fry on William Wordsworth ("A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal")

Close Readings

Some of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal."

Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"?

Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here.

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