This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Setting out from a dissatisfaction with the current trend towards New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, it endeavors to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primacy of the personal and qualitative. Taking Marjorie Levinson's reading of "Tintern Abbey" as the book's starting point, McFarland sets...