“Table of Information | Table of Contents . . . William Wordsworth’s Poems | 1815”

This essay considers the extent to which a table of contents can resemble a table of information. In William Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815, an oddly informative table of contents organizes his short lyrics according to various features: their subject matter, poetic form, the life stage to which they refer or when they were written, and the primary mental faculty that each invokes. What has gone unnoted in discussions of this organization—which has often been understood as a means of creating the abstraction that Wordsworth’s poetry seeks—are the visual features of this paratext. This essay argues that the visual qualities of this table of contents, in their resemblance to tables of information, enable but also complicate the types of abstraction that both Wordsworth’s verse and informative tables pursue. A table of information can institutionalize depersonalization and dominance, but in Wordsworth’s table, the human individual is instead the foundation from which his poetry’s abstraction can be distilled. Drawing on the history of print, the visual display of information, and the concepts of the table, diagram, or grid, this essay identifies in this paratext a fraught negotiation between the dominant order that a table of information imposes and the opportunities for individual reading paths that a table of contents allows.