Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845

As its title implies, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845 picks up where Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 ends. At the close of his landmark study, Hartman proclaimed that Wordsworth ceased, for the most part, to produce work of any note in the wake of The Excursion, thereby restricting future critical attention to the poetry of the so-called ‘Golden Decade’. With a handful of exceptions, including most notably the essays by the later Hartman on ‘To the Torrent to the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824’ and ‘A little onward lend thy guiding hand’, collected in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), this is a view that continues to hold sway. In the introduction to his book Tim Fulford acknowledges the...