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IntroductionI. Representing WordsworthWordsworth had no intention of liberating poetry from its tradition. Quite the contrary, hisprogram seems to have been one of liberating poetic tradition from the museum where it hadbeen encased in all its pastness, of breathing new life into what had been assumed to bedead…[This] principle can be discerned in every form Wordsworth adapts to his use.’ 1I shall concentrate here on Wordsworth…because his works – like his position in theRomantic Movement – are normative and, in every sense, exemplary. 2This thesis argues that a major misrepresentation of the poet William Wordsworth’s identityor ‘ethos’ occurred in the development of ‘the critical tradition’ in ‘traditional’ literary studies, andthat this was due, primarily, to the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s representation of his poeticgenius. Although contemporary professors of literature in the specialised disciplines of Romanticstudies and the study of Wordsworth recognise aspects of this misrepresentation, I maintain that muchof their criticism of Wordsworth still remains under the shadow of Coleridge’s influence. I argue herethat, despite the recent re-evaluations of the critical tradition in the turns to ‘theory’ and ‘history’ –and the consequent devaluation of Coleridge’s particular authority – the study of Wordsworth remainscommitted to defining a Romantic representation of his ethos that is entirely ‘out of character’. In thisstudy I propose that the ‘exemplary’ Romantic Wordsworth, as described by Jerome McGann – andearlier by Meyer Abrams – is a figment of Coleridge’s imagination. It is an identity Coleridgepassionately believed Wordsworth should have been, and which he represented to the public inBiographia Literaria. The development of English Literary Criticism in the Universities owed muchto Coleridgean concepts, and its founding members were pre-disposed to accepting Coleridge’sRomantic representation of Wordsworth. This is not a study of Wordsworth criticism or Romanticism,however. It is primarily a study of Wordsworth, focussing on his poetic and moral imagination andconcerned with providing a better appreciation of his ethos. My thesis paints a radically differentrepresentation of Wordsworth to the one that has been, in the words of McGann, ‘incorporated intoour academic program’. 3In referring to the ‘critical tradition’ here, I have in mind the concept entertained by MeyerAbrams in his influential study The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the CriticalTradition. Abrams played a significant role in endorsing and institutionalising Coleridge’srepresentation of Wordsworth in his own work, effectively establishing it as ‘canonical’ in his1 Stuart Curran, ‘Wordsworth and the Forms of Poetry.’ in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays onthe Romantic Tradition. Ed. Kenneth R Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff p. 126.2 Jerome McGann. The Romantic Ideology p 82. In The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, Clifford Siskin alsojustified his ‘extensive use of Wordsworthian texts’ because he found them ‘in Jerome McGann’s wordsnormative and in every sense exemplary’ (196).3 The Romantic Ideology, p 91. McGann famously argued that ‘the scholarship and criticism of romanticism andits works are dominated by a Romantic ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own selfrepresentations’(1).In Chapter 8, he specifically asserted that the core values of this ‘Romantic ideology’were essentially ‘Wordsworthian’.1