Living Calendar: On Common Time and the Regulation of Commencement

Where might we locate, and how might we register, poetry's power to begin? This article explores the relations between the commons and temporality through a relatively overlooked poem from Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Temporal paradigms from opposed poles of the political spectrum of the 1790s—the ultra-radical Thomas Spence and the improver Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff—scaffold an analysis of William and Dorothy Wordsworth's writing of time. Assembling questions around social reproduction, revolutionary time, holidays, and poetic form, the essay offers a reflection on how poetry renews and yields time, configuring new modes of sharing and release according to the measure of what Wordsworth calls a “living calendar.”