The second section looks at the special attention Wordsworth pays to the visual and material nature of print media in light of a new form of technology, namely the lithograph. Central to this section is the role that the awareness of media plays in the type of poetry Wordsworth envisions. The first explores the extent to which Wordsworth emphasizes the materiality of language in the age of print. This paper is divided into three sections. The prevalence of such self-reflexive elements in the Lyrical Ballads ultimately suggests that this focus on medium and materiality is central to the project of Romanticism as conceived by Wordsworth. This new focus on the materiality of language urges Wordsworth to pay special attention to the visual and material nature of print media, as evidenced by the “Preface” and his personal letters. 1 It is this corporeality, this materiality of the printed and written word, that drives Wordsworth to pay special attention to the material tools of writing through the addition of new titles like “Lines written with a Slate-Pencil upon a Stone” and “Lines written on a Tablet in a School” to the second edition. In the Endnotes to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth mentions the existence of words “not as symbols…but as things,” emphasizing the material existence of the poet’s language through his use of italics (“Endnotes” 200). In this paper, I argue that, beginning with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth puts forth a conception of language as being materially affected by its medium.
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