Content area
Full Text
Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s. By David Bromwich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xi + 186 pages.
It follows that a morality shaped by the knowledge of a tradition must give peculiar force to my thought of myself as a survival of some past. It will give the same force to my thought of the future as a survival of the moment that I now represent by my thinking and acting.
This passage could be taken for a gloss on William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," one of the poems examined in the book by David Bromwich here under review, but it is from Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (1992), also by Bromwich. Considered alongside Bromwich's study of Wordsworth, passages like this testify to a continuing concern with what Bromwich views as an Anglo-American tradition of liberal humanism, of which he is an unapologetic defender. Politics by Other Means is, according to its preface, "a defense of tradition as a social and personal fact-but personal first and last and most" (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992, xiv). Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s tacitly reveals the literary provenance of this stance.
As his subtitle indicates, Bromwich limits his investigation to the first decade of Wordsworth's career. Within this time-frame, moreover, the approach is, in Bromwich's words, "drastically selective" (ix): readings of "The Old Cumberland Beggar," The Borderers, "M2`intern Abbey," "The Idiot Boy," "The Thorn," "Nutting," Peter Bell, "A slumber did my spirit seal,"99 "The Brothers," The Ruined Cottage, Michael, and the two-part Prelude (expanded in the next decade to the thirteen-book Prelude of 1806). In this way, Bromwich proposes to read Wordsworth's career forward from its inception rather than backwards from its apparent culmination in the complete Prelude-in effect, "to interpret part of a career in poetry as if its end were unknown to the poet and to us" (ix). Where we might expect a close historical reading of a decade of literary labor, however-the kind of focused totalizing investigation James Chandler presents in England in 1819 (1998), for instance-we get instead a psychological reading based on a number of suggestive texts. The closest analogy I can think of is William Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age (1825), in...