Owen - Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism

The title of this book differs in form from those of its companion volumes because, when I was invited to prepare it, I had already allotted the title Wordsworth as Critic to a detailed exposition of Wordsworths literary criticism published in 1969 (University of Toronto Press; London: Oxford University Press). With some exceptions, my introductory sections in the present volume represent a severely condensed rewriting of that book; for it does not seem possible to expound the same texts in a totally new way without confessing that ones earlier ideas were either markedly erroneous or grossly incomplete. The main exceptions are my observations on the nature and origins of Wordsworths criticism (Introduction, section I), and on the literary tradition of the Preface to The Borderers and the Note to The Thorn (Introduction, sections II and III). Consideration of the nature of these two documents has permitted me to trace to an earlier stage than in 1969 the step-by-step progress by which Wordsworths critical ideas move forward.

My introduction confines itself to formal discussion of the formal literary criticism printed here; I have not discussed, except incidentally, the five important letters which I have included. Their relevance to the formal essays will be obvious: the letter to Fox to Lyrical Ballads and its Preface; the letter to Wilson to Lyrical Ballads and its Preface and, at a remoter distance, to the ideas on originality which appear in the Essay, Supplementary; the letters to Lady Beaumont, to Coleridge, and to Catherine Clarkson to the Preface and Essay, Supplementary of 1815.

My texts, with some concessions to the style of this series, are drawn from Wordsworths own printed editions, where appropriate, and where they depend on manuscripts, from the Oxford editions of Wordsworths Prose Works and of his correspondence. I am indebted to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for permission to use these texts. The source of each text is indicated in the headnote; where no other considerations are relevant, my text is the last of which Wordsworth authorized the printing, or represents what seems to be his final intention in the case of works surviving only in manuscript. My annotations to the texts are confined usually to the identification of quotations and explanations of obvious allusions, with occasional comment on the sense of the text. For fuller discussion of verbal difficulties, detection of concealed allusions, and indications of Wordsworths sources and analogues, the reader is referred to the commentaries in the Oxford Prose Works.

Although she has made no direct contribution to the present book, my frequent references to that edition will be some measure of my general debt to a long and profitable collaboration with Professor Jane Worthington Smyser.

W.J.B.O.