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Roman, rhetorical voice, and levels of meaning that were not identifiable, unless Wordsworth’sclassical humanist ethos is recognised as such.In his provocative and sophisticated argument in Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Alan Liuwas concerned to displace Geoffrey Hartman’s ‘landmark work in Wordsworth studies’, and todiscuss and explore the possibilities offered by new historicist, and deconstructionist theory. Liu’scomplex agenda, which comprised ‘a critical stance, a philosophical approach and a practicalanalytic’, meant that his study of Wordsworth was to be far more highly theorised than Hartman’searlier phenomenological approach. His argument about Wordsworth’s ‘denial’ of historydemonstrated a comprehensive appreciation of Wordsworth’s works as he also grappled with theproblems of defining and representing history in the ‘New Historical’ moment in which his study waswritten. As he defined the parameters of his particular approach, Liu made the point that ‘Difference isespecially desirable in the field of Wordsworth studies, which has tended to be extremely familiarwith its objects of study’ (36).In this study I present a different reading of Wordsworth to the one familiar to many in thefield of Wordsworth Studies. In doing so I initially focus on the nature of the ‘radical Difference’between Wordsworth and Coleridge as described by Coleridge in 1802, and suggest a differentappraisal of that difference, to the one provided by Coleridge on Wordsworth’s behalf. I take a far lesssophisticated approach to the question than Liu has done as I explore Wordsworth’s theory rather thancontemporary theory. But the conclusions that Liu drew about ‘the promise of the New Historicism’ inhis essay ‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism’ suggest that he may have been workingtowards a very similar aim to the one I pursue here in my focus on Wordsworth’s use of classicalrhetoric:In its implicit rewriting of [Aristotle’s] Poetics the New Historicism should not ask which isthe more philosophical, poetry or history, but instead how both poetry and philosophy engagehistory. The New Historicism thus requires a method or “language” of contextualisationfounded upon some historically–realized philosophy of discourse – i.e., some notion ofrhetoric, or more broadly, of language as historically situated event. The ultimate rationale ofthe proliferating paradigms of the New Historicism, I submit, exists in an uncannyrelationship of sameness/difference with the de Manian and deconstructive impulse toreinvent a classical rather than Romantic or dialectical concept: the notion of rhetoric…Thepromise of the New Historicism, perhaps, is to develop the philosophy of allegory into a truespeaking in the agora: a rhetorical notion of literature as text-cum-action performed byhistorical subjects upon other subjects. That, which needs to be un-thought in other words, isthe very concept of “text” itself. (756) 43When Wordsworth defined ‘the Poet’ as ‘a man speaking to men’ in the 1802 additions to thePreface to Lyrical Ballads, he had in mind something very similar to Liu’s later description of ‘arhetorical notion of literature as text-cum-action performed by historical subjects upon other subjects.’But Wordsworth did not need to engage in the complex theoretical positions that late twentiethcenturythinkers need to invent for their arguments. His own arguments were based on a classical formof invention originating in Aristotelian principles that were later developed by Cicero. Wordsworth’s43 ELH 56.4 (1989): 721-771.19