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The debate about Wordsworth’s empiricism or transcendentalism was given a furtherphilosophical turn in Newton P. Stallknecht’s Strange Seas of Thought, Studies in WilliamWordsworth’s Philosophy of Mind and Nature (1945). 18 Stallknecht announced his study to be a workof philosophical rather than literary criticism, and explored both sides of the mind / nature equation.But he also acknowledged the significance of Wordsworth’s mystical turn of mind. He was one of thefew people to consider the influence of the Stoics, though he preferred to follow Coleridge’s route, viathe Neo-Platonists, to account for such ideas. In 1953 Abbie Findlay Potts published Wordsworth’sPrelude; A Study of its Literary Form, which provided an analysis of the literary sources that could beseen to have influenced the ideas represented by Wordsworth. Potts’ study is invaluable, and remainsnecessary reading for anyone concerned with the scope of Wordsworth’s intentions in The Prelude,and her research reveals something of the breadth of his background knowledge of literature. Potts hadearlier been a student of Lane Cooper, one of the few North American scholars to recognise the truthof Wordsworth’s classical voice when the mainstream critics were listening, instead, to Coleridge’sventriloquism. Her study largely ignored the debate about imagination’s status as an empirical ortranscendental concept, something that was becoming a preoccupation of Romantic critics.In OnWordsworth’s Prelude (1963), Herbert Lindenberger similarly avoided reading the poem according tothat polarisation as he focussed instead on Wordsworth’s use of classical rhetoric and the ethos-pathosformula. Believing that ‘the poem wavers quite explicitly between two areas of reference…the poemas personal history and as prophetic utterance’, Lindenberger saw Wordsworth finding ‘a mode oflanguage and organisation to encompass both areas at once’. Rather than attempting to pursue aparticular thesis that might produce any definitive interpretation of the poem’s claims about‘imagination’, Lindenberger’s approach, like that of Geoffrey Hartman, was more phenomenological.Acknowledging that, the ‘thought structures and literary sources’ of The Prelude ‘had been done onceand for all by Havens and Potts’, he offered, instead, ‘thirteen ways of reading The Prelude’. But inthe same year that Potts’ study was published by Cornell, Oxford University Press published MeyerAbrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Four years earlier C.M. Bowra’s influential essay ‘The Romantic Imagination’, published by Harvard University Press,had quietly ushered in the era of High Romanticism. 19Abrams acknowledged that Bowra’s thesis about the significance of the ‘creative imagination’being ‘closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things’ was oneon which, he too, had based his own study. 20 In developing his thesis that Wordsworth be consideredthe visionary, founding member (along with Coleridge), of a new expressive form of poetry, Abramsdrew heavily on Coleridge’s representation of Wordsworth and, as has been argued here, many of the‘Romantic’ values attributed to Wordsworth can be seen, on closer reading, to have originated in18 Stallknecht had written an earlier essay on ‘Wordsworth and Philosophy: Suggestions Concerning the Sourceof the Poet’s Doctrines and the Nature of his Mystical Experience ‘in PMLA 44.4 (1929): 1116-1143.19 Bowra’s concern that the Romantic poets had ‘a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things’closely echoes Legouis’ and Garrod’s assertions about Wordsworth’s ‘visionary’ or ‘mystical’ capacities.20 Mirror and the Lamp, p. 313.138