poethood

Women reading Wordsworth's Preface understand that they are excluded from his defined readership even before they discover its literal exclusionary terms in the definition of poethood as "a man speaking to men" (603).

Wordsworth’s Balladry: Real Men Wanted 1999

What seems to him a duplicitous unmanning of poethood by those who exploit the unnatural aspects of troubadourism — its false attachments between poet and beloved, its mockery of meaning-making — threatens the sincerity of his own project.

Wordsworth’s Balladry: Real Men Wanted 1999

This is the poethood that takes such language and such men in order to be a man speaking to men.

Wordsworth’s Balladry: Real Men Wanted 1999

This return to origins — figured by the recapturing of the 1798 statement, and redirected to real language of real men that is nevertheless transcendent — is the object of manly poethood.

Wordsworth’s Balladry: Real Men Wanted 1999

I think he was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of it.

The Crest-Wave of Evolution A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 Kenneth Morris 1908

For although Wordsworth was crowned laureate, a kind of poet-King Arthur, for the lifelong quest first announced in the Preface, readers have followed Coleridge’s lead in evading the terms of romance there, by assuring themselves that the Preface is mere nonsense after all — a sad reflection, as Cervantes also noted, on the claims of chivalry, poethood and the story of self for the new age.

Wordsworth’s Balladry: Real Men Wanted 1999