Abstract

"Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers"

This essay explores problems of reference raised by Wordsworth’s short lyric, “She dwelt among th’untrodden ways.” The critical angle comes from a) analytic models rarely consulted by readers of Wordsworth (e.g., Gottlob Frege’s “On Sense and Reference,” John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic), and b) inter-texts new to the scholarship on the Lucy poems (e.g., Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Gertrude Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar”). The goal of the inquiry is to illuminate the workings of both zero and one (understood as singularity rather than exemplarity) in Wordsworth’s poems.