ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Wordsworth's writing which complicates and disrupts his consolatory vision of a circulation of grief, and for all its avowals of transcendence, permanence, and metaphysical communion, the poetry is drawn repeatedly to demystify its own consolations, revealing a contingent reality of absence, fragmentation, transience, and broken relations. Recent studies of Wordsworth have all reaffirmed the centrality of matters of grief, suffering, and loss to the workings of memory and consolation in the poetry. Wordsworth may recommend the reining in of emotion for the composition of an epitaph, but his essay remains alert to the 'turns of conflicting passion' that lend 'life and beauty' to 'the form and substance' of other types of monument in the shape of a eulogy or elegy. Wordsworth is always alert to the forces that shape and disrupt the interplay between communal and personal, the representation of which constitutes the vivid experience of grief as it is depicted in his poetry.
