Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays

This highly original study presents re-readings of four major poems from Wordsworth’s great period of creativity, 1798-1805: ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Michael’, the Intimations Ode, ‘Peele Castle’. The author’s concern is to reveal within the profound philosophic and psychic themes of these poems a range of formative contradictions - social, economic and political. Professor Levinson traces these binds to the determining of conflicts of the age. It is not to be categorised as an illustrative contextual study. The book articulates the relations binding textual truths to social, historical and political truths and through a materialist attention to verbal detail, to disclose the mechanisms whereby one set of meanings is used to suppress of displace the other. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems is an important contribution to Romantic scholarship insofar as it situates the poetry as richly and concretely as possible within its historical and ideological moment.