Wordsworth’s Poetry and the Question of Liberty: The “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty” of 1807

This paper explores the ways in which William Wordsworth recuperates liberty by appropriating the sonnet form in the post-revolutionary world, focusing mainly on "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty" printed in Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807. It was in August 1802 that Wordsworth took advantage of the Treaty of Amiens to visit Calais and met with Annette Vallon and Caroline in a decade. In the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, Wordsworth criticizes Napoleon's military expansion, while correcting his own "juvenile errors" (10.637) that refer to his past fascination with the French revolutionaries in The Prelude of 1805. Moreover, he urges his contemporary readers to reevaluate the seventeenth-century Commonwealth of England by contrasting Napoleon's imperial campaign with the Puritan Revolution that John Milton supported. Torn between individual and national crises, Wordsworth pursues his own way of recreating British freedom by writing the sonnet sequence that reminds readers of Milton as an exemplary figure of poetry, politics and morality. In doing so, Wordsworth endeavors to reclaim not only the republican liberty but the English revolutionary past as opposed to the degenerate and selfish people at home and abroad. Consequently, Wordsworth's sonnet sequence elucidates complicated and yet creative claim for British freedom that entails individuals and community alike, thus successfully inheriting the poetic tradition that William Shakespeare and Milton established.