Woof Robert - William Wordsworth

Volume I 17931820

GENERAL EDITOR: B. C. SOUTHAM, M. A., B. LITT. (OXON)

Formerly Department of English, Westfield College, University of London

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writers work and its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writers death.

For a list of volumes in the series, see the end of the book.

First published 2001

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

Compilation, introduction, notes 2001 Robert Woof

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

William Wordsworth / [compiled by] Robert Woof.

p. cm. (Critical heritage series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Wordsworth, William, 17701850 Criticism and interpretation.

I. Woof, Robert. II. Series.

PR5888 .W44 2001

821.7 dc21 00045941

ISBN 0-203-16902-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26436-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN: 0415034418 (Print Edition)

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On the one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writers historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage series present a record of this early criticism. In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the authors reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes make available much material that would otherwise be difficult of access and present-day readers will be in a position to arrive at an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

Dr Woofs first Wordsworth volume, running from the earliest reviews of 1793 to The River Duddon volume of 1820, treats a vast body of criticism, including journal reviews, satires, parodies and imitations, together with fugitive comments in private letters and journals, some of which material has not been seen in print before.

The strict chronological arrangement of the material, together with Dr Woofs illuminating Introduction and the extensive headnotes, provide us with an invaluable perspective on Wordsworths towering presence amongst his contemporaries and enable us to follow the stages of his poetic growth and change over the years.

BCS

CONVENTION OF CINTRA:
REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 18091833

I would like to thank the many librarians over many years who have given me access to their collections, both of periodicals and of archives. The biggest debts are to the British Library and to the Wordsworth Library, but, as will be evident from the sources cited, private owners were always generous. I would like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Leverhulme Trust in making research possible over the years.

I would like to thank Sally Woodhead for her accurate and thoughtful typing of the text; Peter Regan for encouraging me to think that the book might be a finishable project; Alan Beale for translating and identifying foreign quotations; and my wife, Pamela, who, thirty years ago, thought the project an excellent idea. It is, and always was, her book.

Abbreviations have been kept to a minimum. Whenever possible, full references are given with each of the extracts.

Wordsworths texts are difficult to cite. There has been no complete edition of his poems since the work of Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire in the mid-twentieth century. The admirable Cornells Wordsworth, general editor Stephen Parrish, will be the basis of a future edition.

After the name of the poem, the reader is referred to the de Selincourt/Darbishire text. Because the revisions are particularly radical in Wordsworths early work, such as Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, and Poems 1807, additional references are given to those volumes.

He strides on so far before you he dwindles in the distance.

This was Coleridges explanation for the failure of intelligent men, in this case his patron, Tom Wedgwood, and the Whig and one-time radical, James Mackintosh, to recognise Wordsworths power. It was Coleridge who enunciated the principle (one also shared by Wordsworth) which later defended Wordsworth from the attacks of his earliest critics: every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen. Much of our understanding of Wordsworth springs from Coleridge, but, perhaps to a surprising extent, it depends also on what Wordsworth himself has told us about his art. His prefaces and essays, his letters, his dictated notes, records of his conversation, his sister Dorothys Journals, have all been potent in elucidating the nature of his poetry: of course, intentions are no substitute for great poetry, but if the poet is indeed as great as Wordsworth was, his insights about his own work cannot be ignored.