Peter Bell (Wordsworth)

In a tone of straight-faced humour[1] the prologue tells of the poet's travels over the face of the earth and through the heavens in a boat of the imagination, which urges him to choose some exotic or otherworldly theme.

The poem proper begins with a description of him as a hard-hearted sinner, impervious to the softening influence of nature, who makes his living as an itinerant hawker (or potter, in Wordsworth's northern expression) of earthenware.

[10] In contemporary journals the poem was, like his previous publications, generally greeted with derision and contempt, critics being especially provoked by the deliberately flat diction and by the mundanity of its subject, as exemplified in Peter Bell's own prosaic name.

[11][7] Leigh Hunt, writing in The Examiner, condemned Peter Bell as "a didactic little horror…founded on the bewitching principles of fear, bigotry, and diseased impulse".

[12] Other reviewers spoke of its "gross perversion of intellect" and "tincture of imbecility", and pronounced it "superlatively silly", "daudling, impotent drivel" and "of all Mr. Wordsworth's poems…decidedly the worst".

In 1879 Matthew Arnold counted it among the poems which only a true Wordsworthian such as himself could read with pleasure, and in 1891 Oscar Wilde cited it as an example of the deleterious influence of Nature on Wordsworth's poetry.

[21][22] Modern Wordsworth critics generally rank Peter Bell high among its author's works, full credit being given to its daring as a "radical experiment".