Notes Introduction 1. Stuart Curran opened his seminal essay, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indiana- polis: Indiana UP, 1988): ‘Let us suppose they all died young: not just Keats at twenty-five, Shelley at twenty-nine, and Byron at thirty-six, but Coleridge in 1802, Wordsworth in 1807, and Southey on the day in 1813 he became poet laureate’ (185). Marilyn Butler likewise entertained the idea of killing Wordsworth prematurely, as early as 1793, in ‘Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism’, in Romantic Revolu- tions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth Johnston et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990), pp. 133–157. In the process of telling the story of how he was cured from depression by reading Wordsworth in 1828, John Stuart Mill parenthesises the later Wordsworth with extraordinary authority: ‘the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was added in the latter part of the author’s life), proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture’. Auto- biography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), p. 88. In 1879, Matthew Arnold, more famously and influ- entially, originated the notion of Wordsworth’s Great Decade when he said that ‘within one single decade , between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first rate work was produced’. Poems of Wordsworth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888, 1st ed. 1879), p. xii. In the early 1980s, the most influential Romanticist of the last two decades, Jerome McGann, in the most casual manner remarked that in 1807 Wordsworth ‘fell asleep’. Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1983), p. 116; elsewhere McGann concluded that the later work consists of ‘verse we are spared from having to remember’. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investig- ations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985), p. 313. Similarly, for Harold Bloom, ‘Wordsworth’s dreadful poetic dotage went on drearily from 1807 to 1850’ signifying ‘the longest dying of a major poetic genius in history’. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 249–250. 2. H. W. Garrod once described the Anti-Climax as ‘the most dismal of which the history of literature holds record’. Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1927, 1st ed. 1923), p. 138. See also Willard Sperry, Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935). 3. For such unified constructions of Wordsworth’s oeuvre, see Abbie Findlay Potts, The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition (New Haven: Yale UP, 1922); and Bernard Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1966). René Wellek gives the most important construc- tion of a unified Romanticism in ‘The Concept of Romanticism in Literary 185 186 Notes History’ and ‘Romanticism Re-examined’, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1963), pp. 128–221. 4. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1981); McGann, Romantic Ideology; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993); Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2003). 5. Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1987, rev. ed. 1971, 1st ed. 1964), p. 331. Hartman addresses the later poetry in two essays in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, foreword by Donald G. Marshall (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1987): ‘Blessing the Torrent’ and ‘Words, Wish, Worth’, pp. 75–119. See Jared Curtis, ed., Last Poems, 1821–1850 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999); and Geoffrey Jackson, ed., Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845 (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004). 6. See Peter Manning, ‘Wordsworth at St. Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth’s Later Poetry’, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), pp. 273–299; ‘Cleansing the Images: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of Historicism’, Texas Studies in Liter- ature and Language 33:2 (Summer 1991), pp. 271–326; ‘The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s “Musings Near Aquapendente” ’, in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), pp. 191–211; and ‘The Persian Wordsworth’, ERR 17:2 (April 2006), pp. 189–196. 7. John Wyatt, Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–42: ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 8. Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s ‘Excur- sion’ (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), p. 8; Sally Bushell, Re-reading The Excur- sion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 9. William Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989), p. 56. 10. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, eds, The Oxford Anthology of English Liter- ature, 2 vols (New York and London: Oxford UP, 1973), 2, p. 125. 11. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 13. When Wu addresses a later poem such as ‘Composed when a probability existed of our being obliged to quit Rydal Mount as a Residence’ (1826), he emphasises its continuity with the earlier work (see 195–196). 12. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), p. 65. 13. According to Potts in Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a ‘ “continuous stream of iden- tity” ’ (as Christopher Wordsworth said in the 1851 Memoirs) ‘flow[s] from the poet’s earliest to his latest poems’; for Potts, who adapts the term from Coleridge, Wordsworth’s oeuvre was ‘homogeneous’ (3). Alluding to critics who dismiss the later Wordsworth, Groom asked in The Unity Wordsworth’s Poetry: ‘if Wordsworth’s poetry is really of such merit, are his readers to consent, for all time, to the dismissal of the greater part of what he wrote Notes 187 during more than half his life? The tendency to isolate a limited number of poems from the rest shows few signs of weakening, yet it is certain that a strong element of consistency runs through the poet’s work from first to last. It deserves, indeed, to be viewed as a whole’ (xi). 14. This study gives almost no attention to the topic of Wordsworth’s politics and his later public role as national figure, a subject dealt with by Michael Friedman in The Making of a Tory Humanist (New York: Columbia UP, 1979), but whose force as interpretive key for understanding the later poetry in terms other than of failure and decline has seemed scant. The generally accepted explanation of the so-called ‘decline’ links a gradual change in Wordsworth’s political commitment from an early republican radicalism towards a more liberal conservatism to a qualitative decline in his poetic output. From Emile Légouis’ first modern critical biography, The Early Life of William Wordsworth (1896), which was republished with a new fore- word by Nicholas Roe in 1988, to Marjorie Levinson’s significantly titled Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986); Alan Liu’s Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989); and Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), modern scholarship has been obsessed with the youthful Wordsworth, who in a deeply fascin- ating ten-year span both embraced, rejected and transformed the meaning of revolutionary France. This critical tradition’s interest in what came after is expressed in one of Johnston’s closing remarks, ‘Anyone who teaches Wordsworth for very long will occasionally toy with the idea of what his image in literary history would be had he died young—at age thirty-six, for example, when he read The Prelude to Coleridge. In essence, he did die: the story of his youth ends there’ (835). 15. Angus Easson, The Lapidary Wordsworth: Epitaphs and Inscriptions (Winchester: King Alfred’s College, 1981), p. 4. See also Hoyt Hopewell, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947); and John Sparrow, Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969). 16. The two seminal works in this field are Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry’, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, pp. 31–47; and Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, ‘Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet’, Philological Quarterly 44 (1965), pp. 503–518. 17. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995), p. 5. 18. With significant early studies by R. W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis (1947); Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1958); Gispert Krantz, Das Bildgedicht in Europa (1981); and Wendy Steiner, The Colours of Rhetoric (1982), a number of monographs on ekphrasis have been published since the early 1990s that testify to a general academic interest in media, multi- and intermedia. Prominent examples of the recent wave of studies in ekphrasis are Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992); James Heffernan, The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1993); W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture 188 Notes Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1994); Grant F.