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Presiding Ideas in Wordsworth’s Poetry (1931). Rader allied himself with Garrod in believing it wasColeridge’s ideas that enabled Wordsworth to produce the dramatically different kind of poetry hecame to write in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads. Rader’s contribution to this debate turned thefocus from the empirical particulars of biographical detail, to discussion of more abstractphilosophical principles. He took the philosophical high ground (as Coleridge had done in Chapter XIIof Biographia), and pointed out that ‘We can scarcely speak of Wordsworth’s ‘philosophy’ unless westretch the meaning of the word’. 15 In supporting Coleridge’s ‘indispensable’ role in shapingWordsworth’s mind, Rader endorsed both Legouis’ and Garrod’s reading of events. But whileLegouis actually gave Wordsworth more credit for having his own ideas, Rader finds him totallylacking in originality, and completely dependent on Coleridge’s intellect at the time of their meetingin 1797:Not only profound affection, but the breakdown of convictions rendered Wordsworth’s mindhighly impressionable. When he fell under the sway of his friend’s intellect, he was justemerging from a stage of extreme intellectual disorganization. This was his ‘soul’s last andlowest ebb’, when his faith in Godwinism had crumbled and he had given up ‘moral questionsin despair.’ The crisis occurred in 1795, but the poet’s bewilderment gave way slowly. It wasprecisely at this most strategic of all times that Coleridge extended aid. At the very periodwhen Wordsworth was yearning for light, a friend appeared with a wealth of philosophicalknowledge and an eager proselytising spirit. (Presiding Ideas 122)Rader’s study shows just how effectively Legouis’ opinions had been incorporated into mainstreamWordsworth criticism, and taken for fact. 16In 1941, Raymond Havens’ detailed study of the 1850 Prelude – The Mind of a Poet, focusedon the more mystical aspects of Wordsworth’s poem and Havens, like Legouis, turned topsychological explanations, rather than philosophical ones, to define Wordsworth’s experiences.Unlike Legouis, he was able to draw, tentatively, on theories of the unconscious to help in his analysis– as Herbert Read had also done in his 1930 study, Wordsworth. Havens made the point that he would‘stress rather than minimize the transcendental in Wordsworth’ (I.2). His transcendental focus was tobe balanced, in turn, by George Meyer’s Wordsworth’s Formative Years (1943). Meyer’s approach,like Beatty’s and Harper’s, gives Wordsworth credit for developing his own intellect and arriving athis own ideas independently of Coleridge, and well before the Alfoxden period. He also stressed thatWordsworth’s so-called ‘mystical’ concepts had their origin in ideas about the relationship betweenman, nature and God discussed in the works of the classical writers that Wordsworth was known tohave read – a relationship that was also discussed in the republican political texts he was reading inthe early 1790s. Meyer also believed that ‘The moral crisis which Wordsworth claimed to haveexperienced at Racedown has no real experience outside the pages of The Prelude’ (177). 1715 Garrod had written: ‘The fact is that Wordsworth is something of a philosophical shirker’ (Wordsworth 172).16 In the Introduction to their edition of Lyrical Ballads A.L. Brett and A.R. Jones follow Rader closely.Wordsworth is described as having experienced ‘something approaching a mental breakdown’ (xxiii).17 In Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years 1770-1799, Mark Reed acknowledged references to sucha crisis, but was unable to pin-point an actual time when it might have occurred.137