Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
The Strangeness of Wordsworth
By M.H. Abrams
William Wordsworth: A Life
by Stephen Gill
Oxford University Press, (Clarendon Press), 525 pp., $30.00
The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson records a conversation in which William Blake, after decrying Wordsworth's naturalism, represented him 'as a Pagan, but still with great praise as the greatest poet of the age.' In this assessment of Wordsworth's stature almost all the other major literary figures of his own and the following generation agreed, including Coleridge, Hazlitt, DeQuincey, Shelley, Keats. Each took exception to qualities in Wordsworth's temperament and writings—his aloofness, his matter-of-factness, his austerity, and the self-concern that Keats called 'the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.' But none doubted his position as the most original and representative poet of the age we now call the Romantic period. A quarter-century after Wordsworth's death Matthew Arnold ranked him (as Coleridge had done seventy-five years earlier) after only Shakespeare and Milton among English poets. Our own age of criticism distrusts literary canons and rankings, but the substance as well as the remarkable quantity of recent critical discussions of Wordsworth attests to the recognition that beyond all but a very few poets he has affected our consciousness and our culture. Either directly or by way of his influence on other writers, he has altered the way we perceive and describe not only the natural world, but our own selves and other men and women, as well as the ways in which we respond to what we perceive.
Review, 5285 words
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