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(2012) Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
How do readers greet a poem? Is there a literary equivalent? Rather than overwhelming it with critique, how does a poem bring us to a threshold of expectancy or what one critic has called a "neighborhood of the questionable"?1 Greeting might be a trope for the poetic word, a word that as such remains precarious and questioning.2 Where a greeting leads to a conversation, however, readers do not leave things as they were: we invite the poem to share its question with us so that questioning is not so much the ultimate word but a shared word—and as such the poem can move on with us.
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Full citation:
Larkin, P. (2012). "Frost at midnight": some Coleridgean intertwinings, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 167-182.
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