San Antonio College Library

Presented at a symposium sponsored by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in April 1978. Bibliography: p. 177-182. pt. 1. Visions of Wordsworth: Hartman, G. The poetics of prophecy. Wordsworth, J. As with the silence of the thought -- pt. 2. The achievement of M.H. Abrams: Booth, W.C. History as metaphor: Or, Is M.H. Abrams a mirror, or a lamp, or a fountain, or ...? McFarland, T.A. Coleridgean criticism of the work of M.H. Abrams....

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...

In spite of his knowing and writing about his loss of intuitive communion with nature, Wordsworth does not seem to have realized his loss in poetic power. As we shall see, his changing theory of poetry put greater and greater emphasis on study and hard thought, and on various other innocuous stimulants such as travel, and on technical skill. It is clear that, all his life, he felt that he had been given abundant recompense for the lost of his mystic...

Professor Durrant has two aims in his book, First, he shows that Wordsworth was less hostile to the world-view of the scientist than has been supposed: on the contrary, his poetic vision is from one point of view a translation into terms of feeling and perception of a systematic view of the universe. Second, examination of individual poems reveals a poetic language in which that system is translated into images: star, rock, flower, tree, mountain,...