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The `Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge by Mark Jones. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Pp. 336. $55.00.
The subtitle of Mark Jones's new book, "A Case Study," is something of misnomer in that it does not merely illuminate a specific problem in literary knowledge, it sheds light on the entire field of literary study. If Wordsworth's lyrics about or over the subject of "Lucy" provide a site of interpretive doubt rather than knowledge, and therefore offer an ideal locus for the study Jones undertakes, these lyrics (as well as their interpretive history) also provide the impetus for a thoughtful re-situation of the interpretive imperative and its consequences. The 'Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge is for this alone a remarkable book; but for Wordsworthians it will also prove a dense and richly rewarding one. It is, in fact, one of those rare books that provokes in the reader the wish to have written it him- or herself.
The question that initiates the problem is: why are we so invested in the `Lucy Poems'? But certainly a more primary question grounds it: how did the 'Lucy' grouping come to be the present one, since it is not Wordsworth's own? These questions together structure the problem: the editorial investment is not entirely separable from the critical investment, both of which respond to but are not the inevitable projection of authorial investment. It is the very mystery that the 'Lucy Poems' represent that allows different claims to materialize around them, to turn the insubstantial into a centering and iconic keystone for the field. The 'Lucy Poems' are important to literary studies not because they are so very good, but because so much can be read into them, a richness that was certainly intended by their author but which is often broadened to even greater critical, philosophical, and literary weight and substance. Mark Jones sets up his case study to comprehend the historical as well as the present reception of the 'Lucy Poems,' their grouping and currently accepted ordering, and their uses for critical interpretation and theory.
Wordsworth's 'Lucy Poems' became cemented during the mid-nineteenth century as consisting of the following poems in the following and familiar order: "Strange fits of passion," "She...