William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement

This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Setting out from a dissatisfaction with the current trend towards New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, it endeavors to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primacy of the personal and qualitative. Taking Marjorie Levinson's reading of "Tintern Abbey" as the book's starting point, McFarland sets forth a different way of approaching the poem, and then identifies "intensity" as the secret of Wordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality are illustrated by careful examinations of "Ruth", of the "spots of time", and of "Home at Grasmere". There follow chapters on Wordsworth's desiccation, which is seen as precisely the absence of intensity; and on the aspiration of The Recluse. McFarland then discusses the special way in which Wordsworth assumed the prophetic stance, which was essential to his poetic vision; and the book concludes with a reading of The Borderers, not as a successful play but as a disposal chamber for the dark matter of Wordsworth's cosmos.