The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G Woodman

Louis M. Buchanan is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

This is a festschrift of seven essays by Canadian scholars in honor of
Ross G. Woodman, a prolific and highly respected author affiliated with
the University of Western Ontario. The essays were originally read at a
1988 conference to mark Woodman’s retirement; three were subsequently
published, which makes this collection unusual, for a festschrift
generally consists only of previously unpublished material.

Of the articles published for the first time, Ronald Tetreault’s
“Women and Words in Keats” is a fine essay on Keats’s ambivalent
attitude toward women; it includes a very original and thoughtful
reading of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Jared Curtis, in his
interesting, readable, and ultimately persuasive “Matthew Arnold’s
Wordsworth: The Tinker Tinkered,” attempts to determine what
“principles guided [Arnold] as he chose, edited, and arranged
Wordsworth’s poems” in his influential but idiosyncratic edition of
Wordsworth’s poems. The essays by Milton Wilson on Byron and by David
L. Clark on Blake are also well worth reading. In the afterword, Woodman
offers a personal review of his years of reading and teaching; it is
especially interesting to see the great influence that Shelley has had
on him.

This collection includes some fine Canadian contributions to the study
of Romantic literature, and is highly recommended for university
libraries.