The Abandoned and the Forsaken: William Wordsworth, Geoffrey Hartman, Childhood Misfortune, and the Counterseparations of Poetry

Abstract: William Wordsworth arrives at his assertion about the developmental good fortune of the blessed Babe (II:269–310) in the 1799 Prelude only after having explored in other poems the fates of infants and children who are not at all blessed, some of whom have no parents or have been abandoned. While Geoffrey Hartman provides my key formulations for thinking through how an embodied intelligence in a Romantic or post-Romantic context might sustain itself in the face of separation and loss, Donald Winnicott’s writings illuminate what is at stake in creative living for every child of misfortune, past and present.