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whatever logic’ he deemed ‘possible’. His attitude reflects that of Coleridge, and Owen sincerelybelieved that Coleridge’s definitions in Biographia Literaria Chapter 13 could, and indeed should, beused to define ‘Wordsworth’s Imagination’. He also considered that his informed readers would knowthem well enough for him not to need to cite them in any detail. Coleridge’s authority on the matter istaken for granted.But Wordsworth actively resisted thinking in terms that limited his understanding todefinitions controlled by purely logical arguments; and the failure of critics to appreciate thisfundamental aspect of Wordsworth’s thinking has led to a critical tradition that feels justified inaccusing Wordsworth of a ‘rather confused anti-intellectualism’, while praising Coleridge for his‘impressive analysis of the poetic imagination’. 19 I am concerned to defend Wordsworth’s intellectualprowess, and suggest that those critics who pride themselves on their logical abilities, and judgeWordsworth for lacking them, have failed to understand Wordsworth’s imagination and the fact thathe expressed his ideas according to a rhetorical dialectic, rather than a strictly logical one. Coleridgewas opposed to such a form of rhetorical argumentation because it lacked the rigorous logical thinkinghe had decided to pursue in his own enquiries, following the example of Kant. Literary critics trainedin a tradition strongly indebted to Coleridgean ideals also find Wordsworth’s manner of reasoning‘illogical’. But it was a form of argument set down by Aristotle, whose example, as a philosopher,Wordsworth followed.The idea that Wordsworth was writing about imagination as a ‘creative’ or ‘Romantic’ powerof the poetic mind, as understood by Coleridge, continues to have some currency. Kenneth Johnstonhad assumed this when he wrote Wordsworth and The Recluse, and his reading of Wordsworth thereis structured accordingly. In his prefatory remarks he asserted that ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge, likemost post-Kantian Idealists of the time, celebrated the creative imagination’ (xv). This was acommonplace of Wordsworth criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s, but it is one I am determined toargue against here. I assert that Wordsworth was not a post-Kantian idealist when he wrote his‘Address to Coleridge’, which refutes Kantian theory. Nor was he one when he wrote The Excursion –the only definite part of ‘The Recluse’ ever finished. Similarly, in the Introduction to the OxfordCasebook, William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ (2006), Stephen Gill takes it for granted that ThePrelude is ‘a work that both explained and, through the originality and quality of its verse,exemplified all that [Wordsworth] had pronounced on over the years about the creative imagination’(5). 20 This may well describe what later readers concluded from their knowledge of what Coleridgewrote about Wordsworth, but I again suggest that it was not what Wordsworth had in mind.19 These distinctions are made in the concluding paragraph of R.L. Brett’s and A.R. Jones’ Introduction totheir 1 st edition of Lyrical Ballads:But whereas Coleridge went on to give an impressive analysis of the poetic imagination and its relationto the reasoning power of man’s mind, Wordsworth’s views remain the expression of a rather confusedanti-intellectualism. Coleridge set himself no less a task than to explain poetry as part of man’s wholeintellectual and spiritual endeavour. Wordsworth is intent only on expressing the convictions whichgrew from his own personal experience. (l)20 Émile Legouis originally suggested this Coleridgean understanding of the imagination in his Early Life ofWilliam Wordsworth (1896). But it was C.M Bowra’s essay ‘The Romantic Imagination’ published in 1949that defined this concept for modern criticism. Meyer Abrams notes and concurs with Bowra’s thesis in TheMirror and the Lamp (313).105