Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.

Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure explores the poet's sustained interest in the ethical and aesthetic value of overlooked, underacknowledged, and 'unremembered' pleasures. Such pleasures are marginal and fleeting; they pass by silently and are recognized only retrospectively. Yet they shape the aims, technique, and ultimately the whole affective economy of Wordsworth's writing. Rather than understanding the domain of pleasure to be strictly subjective, personal experience, Wordsworth posits affects and attachments beyond conscious experience or possession. Teasing apart unremembered pleasure from the psychoanalytic concepts of sublimation, repression, and trauma, the book offers new interpretations of both well-known and marginal poems, rethinking familiar oppositions between childhood and maturity, and between sensation and recollection. By tracing affects which are not determinate sensations so much as unacknowledged gifts, it demonstrates how retrospective pleasure undercuts fantasies of purely autonomous experience. It argues for the centrality of surprise: unremembered pleasure promises to disturb, catch out, and remake the person who encounters it. More broadly, it locates in Wordsworth's account of composition the resources to rethink poetic pleasure: not as wish-fulfilment, nor as aesthetic escape, but as an engaged and reparative relation to the world. Book jacket.