BETWEEN ROUGHLY 1797, WHEN HE BEGAN WORK ON THE RUINED COTTAGE manuscript, and 1814, when he published The Excursion, William Wordsworth returned again and again to the poetic form of the epitaph. Critics in recent decades have tended to read these epitaphic poems either deconstructively, as a general trope for the textuality of writing and its inevitable gap of absence and loss; or as creating an imagined form of community, through shared sympathy with the deceased. This essay will build on those insights but suggest a more historically specific reading of Wordsworth's epitaphic mode: his use of the epitaph in order to develop, theorize, and justify a new poetics and a new authorial role in relation to an expanding print culture. Deconstructive readings generally emphasize the gap between the sheer materiality of the inscribed epitaph, figuring the textuality of writing, and the absence of the author, associated with the absent dead. In the epitaph, according to such readings, the living play of experience and identity is arrested onto the fixed lineaments of the material page, creating a haunted gap between signifier and signified, text and the human presence to which it refers. Frances Ferguson, Paul de Man, J. Douglas Kneale, and Mary Jacobus all connect the epitaphic mode in this way with the project of autobiography generally: what Kneale calls "Wordsworth's master trope, the epitaph, in which the (absent) autobiographical self attempts to give itself textual form" but can never fully incarnate itself within the text. (1)
