William Wordsworth: Background information when reading Bloodroot

William Wordsworth

This article relates to Bloodroot

Characters in Bloodroot rely on William Wordsworth's poetry as a source of comfort and inspiration, but echoes of his literary philosophy and poetic interests can also be found in the pages of Amy Greene's novel.

Just as Bloodroot relies on memory to tell its stories, much of Wordsworth's poetry focuses on capturing moments of memory and recollection. He developed a philosophy of "two consciousnesses": himself in the present and himself in the past, and a lot of his poetry sought to identify the discrepancy between these two. Whereas Marcel Proust, in his exhausting account, In Search of Lost Time, pursues the depth of memory through the taste of his madeleine cookie, Wordsworth's poetry explores the disjuncture between what is now and what was then.

Memory aside, Wordsworth is most famous for his depiction of daffodils in "I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud." Throughout the poem, the speaker revels in the beauty of a field of daffodils, only to have the scene shattered when it becomes clear that the daffodils only exist in his memory. The daffodils that Wordsworth describes are carefully personified, described as "golden" and "dancing" which grants the flowers authority. The power of Wordsworth's daffodils and natural world is similar to the role that the bloodroot plant plays in Amy Greene's inaugural novel.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Bloodroot. It originally ran in February 2010 and has been updated for the January 2011 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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