Wordsworth's Fun

&quote;The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage,&quote; William Hazlitt recalled, &quote;He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.&quote; Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know-and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy.Wordsworth s Fun explores the writer s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.