Rethinking Romantic poetry and history literary marketplace My examples are drawn not from familiar Romantic lyric genres such as the ballad and the sonnet, which have been re-examined recently in work that emphasizes their openness to historical determination and their embracing of “social antagonism” and political agendas, but from a less obvious generic location.19 Lyric poetry is not limited to the individual lyric poem or lyric sequence Some of the period’s most remarkable experiments in lyric writing, and some of its most challenging opportunities for exploring the dynamic of lyric resistance, are to be found within more extended and ambitious narrative and dramatic forms In the examples that follow, lyric’s traditional privileging of affective intensity and reflexive interiority is distinctively at issue, as is its traditional relation to music These familiar effects can function within epic mythopoeic narrative as moments of lyric condensation that resist by arresting the narrative’s inescapable, historically determined telos.20 The most complex transitional moment in Wordsworth’s The Prelude comes at the beginning of Book VII, following the medial crisis of the visit to revolutionary France and the Alps in Book VI and anticipating the tumultuous experience of London and the return to France in the books that follow.21 Here, in the longer 1805 version, are the lines that stage Wordsworth’s renewed epic undertaking as lyric epiphany: But I heard After the hour of sunset yester-even, Sitting within doors betwixt light and dark, A voice that stirred me ’Twas a little band, A quire of redbreasts gathered somewhere near My threshold, minstrels from the distant woods And dells, sent in by Winter to bespeak For the old man a welcome, to announce With preparation artful and benign – Yea, the most gentle music of the year – That their rough lord had left the surly north, And hath begun his journey A delight At this unthought-of greeting unawares Smote me, a sweetness of the coming time, And, listening, I half whispered, “We will be, Ye heartsome choristers, ye and I will be Brethren, and in the hearing of bleak winds Will chaunt together.” And, thereafter, walking By later twilight on the hills I saw A glow-worm, from beneath a dusky shade Or canopy of the yet unwithered fern Clear shining, like a hermit’s taper seen 231 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008