Reviewed by
Dennis M. Welch
Virginia Tech

Because scholars since Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947) have generally considered Blake an adversary of nature, he has largely been avoided in the recent emergence of eco-criticism among Romanticists.[1] Kevin Hutchings's book changes this situation and deserves much respect for doing so.

Imagining Nature seeks to delineate a "distinctively Blakean view of the relationship between humanity and nature," a view challenging "the traditional Western notion that humans should exercise a hierarchical and narrowly anthropocentric 'dominion'" over the non-human world (3). Hutchings's strategy involves a double focus, in which he finds Blake distinguishing between nature itself and Enlightenment discourses about it, opposing and critiquing mostly the latter instead of the former. Deeply aware of discursive ideological renderings of nature, Blake shows that Enlightenment philosophy, science, and religion colonize it with anthropocentric systems of thought.

Following the "Introduction" in Imagining Nature, Chapter 1 includes sections not only on the scholarship about nature in Blake's work but also on his environments while growing up and his views concerning industrialism, his relationship with the creation theology of antinomian and Miltonic traditions, his myth of Albion in terms of panvitalism and hylozoism, and his own anthropocentrism as it relates to environmental ethics and animal rights. Of these sections the last two are the most original and interesting. According to Hutchings, panvitalism and especially hylozoism provided Blake with perspectives that emphasize the interconnectedness of all creatures as integral parts of a unified divine organism, which he called Albion or the Human Form Divine. But whereas the hylozoism of a James Hutton was solely analogical, the poet's is literal. All natural phenomena are parts of Albion's physiology, whose cosmic organicism enables Blake to imagine that they are both interrelated and interdependent. Because it may preclude "the possibility of valuing non-human entities on their 'own' terms" (67), this cosmic anthropomorphism seems problematic. And yet it challenges deistic mechanism and hierarchy and poses fresh possibility for an environmental ethics because, "if all nature is considered human, the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' must necessarily be generalized to include literally 'every thing that lives's" (69). Whether or not this view leads to a practical ethics, as Hutchings suggests in terms of "merely letting creatures 'be'" (74), is uncertain, however. For what if those creatures multiply (as deer have in some regions), so that people can't travel the highways safely or maintain the plants in their yards?  Just letting the deer "be" gives those plants less opportunity to live.

Chapter 2 presents a subtle and fascinating analysis of The Book of Thel , arguing that Thel's initial abandonment of the vales of Har is a rebellion against its implicit anthropocentric violence, that she is at odds specifically with its emphasis on use-value (or instrumentalism), and that she is informed by the Cloud about a selflessness (3: 26-27) that raises the possibility of egalitarian holism, in which she might participate except for her own sense of hierarchy and the danger such holism "can be manipulated to serve the self-interested ends" of power and regulation (89). Hutchings contextualizes this holism and its political implications in terms of the concept of "nature's economy," which "epitomizes a highly ethical mode of mutual coexistence" that the alienated Thel "would do well to emulate" but also effaces the otherness of Har's natural creatures "by naturalizing various modes of social hierarchy" (90) that Thel herself needs to reject. Underlying this effacement is the fact that "nature's economy," which Blake understood probably through his familiarity with botany and, in particular, with Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), was a sexual economy. The illustrations of Thel, especially its title-page, show Blake's awareness of this fact. But Hutchings, instead of using it (as most Blakeans have) in order to argue that Thel fails to embrace her own sexuality, shows that this gendered economy involves a masculinist discourse projected by Thel herself in hierarchical ways between the male and female creatures she encounters.

Central to nature's gendered economy in the eighteenth century was its discourse on harmony, which tended to valorize a secure and orderly status-quo of unequal relationships. Hutchings conjectures that the word "Har," which is followed in two instances by a grammatically unnecessary period (3:18, 4:10), is an abbreviation for "Harmony" and that Thel's abandonment of Har constitutes an intuitive dissent against its peaceful but patriarchal pastoralism. While the conjecture about "Har." as an abbreviation may be relevant, it's important to remember that the Erdman edition, which Hutchings uses for all quotations from Blake's texts, is a consensus version of them (Viscomi 181). This means that the unnecessary periods after "Har" probably do not appear in each copy of Thel and therefore "Har." is probably not an abbreviation. More importantly, as Joseph Viscomi observes, in Blake's texts there are "marks meant to be commas but that look like periods because of the way they had printed" (181). In both instances of conjectured abbreviation, commas would make more sense as the appropriate punctuation.

Chapter 3 of Imagining Nature shows how Blake "correlates the Satanic 'Selfhood' with Newtonian physical science, basing his critique of Satanic self-interest in part on social and quasi-legal implications of Newtonian atomism" (28). Although it was Donald Ault, who first elucidated the Satanic "Selfhood" in terms of Newtonian science, Hutchings's analysis of its social and legal import in Milton is fresh and illuminating. The analysis involves environmental concerns by showing—as in the design on plate 15, the imagery associated with Theotormon's Mills (27: 49-54), and the descent of Milton from heaven—how Blake critiques both the "deterministic model of cyclical recurrence" (125) and the self-reflecting legalism that are inscribed in Newtonianism and inclined to enclose nature in a dull round of atomistic and self-interested creatures.

Because Blake considers Newtonian circular time highly problematic, he formulates "imaginative alternative[s]" to it,  associated with such diverse forms as vortexes, larks, wild thyme, and visionary artists—each embodying "a profound commingling of discrete entities that prefigures the interrelationality crucial to ecological models" (136). In contrast to these imaginative alternatives, Blake also recognizes the eventual outcomes of mechanistic circularity and atomistic self-interest—i.e. , disrespect and even destruction of the natural world (M 38: 15-19). But perhaps even more relevant for Hutchings's argument than Newtonian science to self-interest and adverse effects on nature was the long history of self-interest per se in England. This history ranged from at least Hobbes and Locke to Mandeville, Hume, and Smith. Explored by such scholars as A. O. Hirschman and Stephen Holmes, self-interest, which became a euphemism for avarice, underscored the political economy of accumulation, consumption, waste, and abuse that has compromised nature at least as much as Newtonianism has.

Focusing mostly in Chapter 4 on Jerusalem, Hutchings continues to investigate the role that anti-relational self-interest plays in Blake's understanding of humanity's connections with nature. Albion's fall from emanative relationship ("Fibres of love"), which once united him with Eternity's inhabitants, leads him to solipsism and to anthropomorphic projections that divide, disregard, and damage nature. Given Albion's many projections on nature (Vala), Hutchings focuses on her role, which he sees (unlike most Blakeans) not as inherently harmful but instead as ideologically constructed by patriarchal science and religion. He makes this point partly by demonstrating Vala's associations with Newtonianism and deistic reason and by examining both her upbringing in the context of religious warfare (J 22: 4-7) and her adulthood amid male-centered relations such as the battle between Albion and Luvah for "dominion" over her body (43: 61-62).

Just as Vala is ideologically constructed, so also is the "Polypus," which is an especially problematic manifestation of materiality as a proliferating and consuming power capable of homogenizing humanity and nature. But just as this figure in Blake's work derives from his era's materialistic science, specifically on vegetative polyps, which Hutchings mentions and which Blake may have observed in William Hunter's Anatomical Theatre (Kreiter 114, Hilton 88), so also does the figure have definite associations with sensibility as a kind of physical, social, and economic "connective tissue" that bound men and women together in self-indulgent and mutually consuming relationships. These relationships played directly into the economics not only of marriage but also of household demand and commercial products in a vast consumer revolution, "a mighty Polypus" (15: 4), whose effects on natural resources and the environment were as extensive also as those of eighteenth-century science. Thus, the following would have been relevant in Hutchings's argument about Blake's concern with nature and its "female commodification" (183): namely, that he critiques the "Polypus of soft affections" (M 24: 38), that the "Fibres of Life" which Rahab and Tirzah "Weave" into human bodies "till the Great Polypus covered the Earth" (J 67: 4, 34) are probably nerve-related tissues, which (as Dr. George Cheyne had said to Samuel Richardson) women possess in greater (and hence more sensitive) abundance than men do, and that Rahab herself with "Lovely  Delusive Beauty" (FZ 8.109.11) enters Albion's heart (J 66: 28-29) "in many tears" (or great sentiment) and, with her "locks of shadowing modesty" and "features, soft flourishing," functions as a figure of deceptive and corrupt sensibility, "consuming lives of Men [as well as other entities] / In fires of beauty" (J 70: 22, 23, 27-28).

In a "Coda" to Imagining Nature Hutchings asks if "the humanization of nature that occurs in Jerusalem's apocalypse" can be trusted as an "appropriate resolution" to the problem that "human conceptions of nature are largely the cause of nature's devaluation" (207). He answers this question, arguing that "poetic anthropomorphism prevents a purely utilitarian approach to the natural world" (207) by avoiding hierarchy and imposition, as in the case of Jerusalem's apocalyptic moment when nature's animals "Humanize / In the Forgiveness of Sins" (98: 44-45). This reconciliation between the human and animal is interpreted by Hutchings as mutual, "actualizing the cosmic covenant God establishes in Genesis between himself, humanity, and literally 'every living creature'" (217). In this apocalypse, however, the natural or material—in particular, the body's "excrementitious / Husk & Covering"—will be cut away, "Driving outward the Body of Death" (98: 18-19, 20). The new body succeeding the old and resembling the Pauline "spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15:44) will be like nothing humanity and nature have ever known, for all creatures will partake in it as parts of Albion's (risen) body. And if they do not, then Albion will return to a hierarchical order, with his embodiment existing at a higher plane metaphysically and ontologically than any other. The point is that nature and embodiment in the Blakean apocalypse differ fundamentally from nature and embodiment in this world.

Except for neglect of this difference and the discursive histories of self-interest and sensibility in England, no significant gaps appear in Hutchings's book. On the contrary, it includes numerous fascinating discussions of both minute and significant particulars in Blake's work. Posing and working through competing interpretations in mutually instructive ways, Hutchings's book is well balanced and illuminating. Permanently altering the old misconception that Blake is an adversary of nature, the book makes judicious use of modern ecological thought and is a significant contribution to both "green" Romantic studies and Blake scholarship.

strong>Notes
[1] Lussier and McKusick are exceptions. [back]

Works Cited

Ault, Donald D. Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
Hilton, Nelson. Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
Hirschman, A. O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
Holmes, Stephen. "The Secret History of Self-Interest."  Beyond Self-Interest. Ed. Jane J. Mansbridge. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 267-86.
Kreiter, Carmen S. "Evolution and William Blake." Studies in Romanticism 4 (1965): 110-18.
Lussier, Mark. "Blake's Deep Ecology." Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 393-408.
McKusick, James. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.
Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Reviewed by
Kathleen Lundeen
Western Washington University

Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas has been likened to the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The words epiphany, apotheosis, and climax have all been used to describe the grand finale of Blake's unfinished epic, in which all of life appears to rush together to restore the transcendent unity that was shattered in Night the First. In a recent study of The Four Zoas, Peter Otto argues otherwise. "It is my contention," he writes, "that rather than urging sublime transcendence, The Four Zoas hopes to thwart it." He explains, "The poem aims to delay the movement of the sublime from blockage to transport and elevation, long enough for the reader to see the warring visual and verbal elements of the fallen world as the fragmented and dismembered body of humanity" (8). "Blake's poem," he goes on to argue, "directs us to a human rather than transcendent reality. Contrary to the thrust of the sublime, therefore, the 'transcendence' canvassed in this poem is horizontal and temporal rather than vertical and eternal" (33-4). In the 300 pages of commentary that follow, Otto defends his thesis through an exhaustive explication of the poem, including its graphic design.

In the introduction Otto offers a concise history of the poem's construction, including the alterations and censoring that mark its development and seem to restrict access to it. He also provides an overview of twentieth-century interpretations of the poem, thus clearing the way for his own reading. In Otto's study, The Four Zoas emerges as a multi-layered allegory whose psychology, philosophy, and theology counter those traditions that idealize a separation of the spirit from the body. To present the poem as a critique of transcendence, Otto situates it within the tradition of the sublime. Enlisting the services of Locke, Young, and Swedenborg clarifies Blake's response to the sublime and shows convincingly how each member of that motley group is essential to Blake as he forges his response to it. The premises Otto assumes about the illustrated poem are as follows:

Blake's Critique of Transcendence argues, first, that The Four Zoas is structured as a coherent, albeit complex and multi-voiced narrative, which details the history and outlines the relations that constitute the body of the fallen Albion. Second, far from being opaque, the illuminations (drawings and proof engravings) are arranged in a multifaceted "visual" narrative, that stretches across the entire length of the poem. Third, text and illumination sustain an intimate, mutually clarifying relation to each other (10).

Otto's presentation of the poem as a coherent statement is nothing short of remarkable, in light of the elusive nature of Blake's prophetic method and the sheer density of detail in the poem. Some readers, however, may encounter the same challenge in navigating his deciphering of The Four Zoas that they confront in reading the prophecy itself. Otto's patient explanations of the complicated relationships among Blake's cast of characters, along with his elaborate decoding of Blake's iconography (airborne genitalia and all), give readers the sense they are traveling through the poem in real time; but real time in literature and art is not as reader-friendly as imaginary time. Though one might expect a moment-by-moment unwrinkling of the manuscript to yield a smooth and lucid narrative, unrelenting scrutiny of minute particulars poses a difficulty for readers: being introduced to so many verbal and visual parts demystifies the individual components of the prophecy, but it doesn't always facilitate comprehension of the whole. Such an approach makes it difficult at times to see Blake's epic forest through the signifying trees.

Though Otto discovers a logic in Blake's prophetic method, he also reflects on the unconventional nature of The Four Zoas. In the early pages of his book he writes, "the narrator is himself an effect of the story he wants to relate." He also notes, "Far from providing a frame within which history can be ordered, The Four Zoas sometimes seems little more than a container within which narratives and voices multiply" and then muses, "It is as if the poem is haunted by voices, traces of other poems, and allusions to other projects and times, all of which it can embrace but not assimilate to a single point of view" (2-3). Though in the next paragraph Otto argues that the poem does in fact have an accessible structure, his shrewd observations of the prophecy's postmodern features linger as one proceeds through his argument.

Otto himself helps sustain the lingering. In the course of his encyclopedic cataloguing of the visual motifs and verbal images, from time to time he steps back to remind the reader of the built-in problems of critiquing such a poem. At the end of the third chapter, for example, he writes:

The fallen world is a moment in the life of Albion that is spatialized and temporalized as a world of seven thousand years. It is in this space that Los and Enitharmon are born. Their world is based on contradiction, for in the spaces of Eno, within the lifeless body held by the Saviour, nothingness is given a time and a space (77).

Here, it would be worth showing the problems Blake encounters, as poet and graphic artist, in depicting that contradictory world and representing nothingness in time and space. Similarly, there are occasions when Otto's attempt to resolve the conflicts in the narrative mutes the dynamic of the poem. For example, Otto notes that "the narrative detailing the birth of Los from the divisions of Tharmas is continually undermined and qualified by other narratives," which leaves the reader "encompassed by a babel of voices" (101). Instead of accepting "a cacophony of voices" (to borrow his own apt chapter title) and the discomfort in inhabiting such a rhetorical realm, however, he reassures the reader that "this instance of a cumulative threat to the poem's narrative structure provides us with helpful insights into the structure of the poem as a whole" (101). Perhaps the cumulative threat to the poem's narrative structure is the principal structure of the narrative? Otto's argument that Blake's unfinished prophecy is a critique of transcendence would be more convincing if he showed the ways in which The Four Zoas stymies conventional criticism and its complicity with transcendental structures rather than justifying its every mark as part of a unified scheme. Indeed, Blake's prophetic method does not produce seamless narratives or stable rhetorical structures, and his words and images do not always join in fruitful collaboration.

The problems that face any reader—when to read texts literally and when to read them figuratively; when to read texts ironically and when to read them in a straightforward manner—are exacerbated in Blake's prophecies, thanks to the ways his texts, both verbal and visual, resist becoming contexts in the poem. Otto's interpretive choices lead him to read the The Four Zoas as a poetic proposition that "spirit and flesh [are] contraries rather than opposites" (344). Whether readers accept his interpretive choices and his conviction that leaving no Urizenic stone unturned reveals a coherent theme and structure, there is value in rambling with Otto through the pages of Blake's manuscript. By immersing us in the formality of The Four Zoas Otto enables us to see that Blake, at least on the inscribed page, was a player in the intellectual debates of his day—one who understood the contenders in philosophy, art, and theology well enough to orchestrate his own revolution.

Reviewed by
Alison Hickey
Wellesley College

"'1800' is not one of the most famous dates in English literary history, but it should be" (1), declares the Introduction to this outstanding collection of essays. The idea that the literary-historical importance of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads equals or even surpasses that of its "more celebrated rival of 1798" is not itself new, but it has never before been so convincingly borne out by sustained, multifaceted, and rigorous critical inquiry.

The essayists, among the most highly respected Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars now writing in the UK and the US, define 1800's "newness" in various ways, and their approaches range from "revisiting the title" (Zachary Leader) to delving into "Wordsworth's Loves of the Plants" (Nicola Trott). Yet the volume as a whole, for all its diversity, possesses a coherence not often found in collections of essays by multiple authors. The tension between unity and multeity, comparable to tensions in Lyrical Ballads itself (or "the" Lyrical Ballads "themselves"), gives the critical volume a rare integrity.

Several themes recur: singleness, doubleness, multiplicity, and their shifting relations to each other (including the perennial, still pertinent, question of the Ballads' "unity"); ambivalence about solitude and community; uncertainty, conflict, "dissension and disquiet" (4) as elemental constituents of Wordsworth's verse; the "hidden" Wordsworth of danger, desire, and buried depths; accidents, contradictions, bafflement, self-checkings, and about-faces; continuities and inevitabilities; lyric, narrative, and history; and the symbiotic relationship between "art" and "nature." The contextually informed close readings at the heart of almost all the pieces reinforce the sense of a shared endeavor. Whereas the recent collection 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, edited by Richard Cronin, was "not a bicentenary reading of Lyrical Ballads, but an exploration of their context,"[1] its 1800 counterpart (featuring several of the same contributors) brilliantly combines both modes. The "1800" of the title refers variously to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, to the year, and to a longer biographical or cultural "moment."

As the Wordsworthian burden of the above inventory suggests, The New "Lyrical Ballads," with its overmastering emphasis on Wordsworth, brings home with particular force the salient difference between the anonymous 1798 edition and 1800, subtitled "Poems by W. Wordsworth." None of the present authors has felt the need to revisit the oft-told tale of Coleridge's marginalization, a story whose human drama has contributed to the marginalization of the second edition by drawing attention away from its other interesting aspects. Most of the essays treat 1800 as, essentially, the first Collected Poems of Wordsworth. Coleridge remains an important presence, but less often for his poems than for his thinking, so integral to Wordsworth's Wordsworthianism through and beyond 1800. More surprising is the paucity of references to Dorothy Wordsworth, despite her distinct influence on 1800. Were there no compelling "new" perspectives from which to consider her role in the making of the Ballads?

The first four essays in the volume consider the 1798 and 1800 editions together. John Beer discerns in 1798 a "unity" that dissipates before 1800. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1798 poems, Beer argues, solicit "a kind of double reading" that acknowledges the tension between "a previous state of disillusionment and hopelessness" and "some kind of positive stance" (10, 11-12) toward which the volume gradually builds. This shared "doubleness" unites the poets as long as the "positive" pole remains an incipient sense. When, however, they begin to define the "positive forces" (12) in distinct ways—with Wordsworth's "human heart" branching off from Coleridge's "One Life"—the special magnetism is lost. Since Beer's point is that the unity of 1798 depends on vaguely formulated ideas that leave out the particulars, the vague formulations in his own writing may be necessary to his argument. But they leave the reader unable to engage the essay's critical judgments except on a general level.

Revisiting the title of Lyrical Ballads, Zachary Leader finds that "[t]he 'known habits of association' of the words 'lyrical' and 'ballad' make their conjunction problematic" (38). Leader invokes Prometheus Unbound, proposing that the tension between the lyrical and the theatrical in Shelley's "Lyrical Drama" can help us to understand the analogous problematic conjunction of genres in Lyrical Ballads. The sublime or lyrical moments in the drama "[take] the subject out of time" (28) and turn the action inward. Despite Leader's awareness that "for some critics" (he cites Marjorie Levinson and Alan Liu) such ideas of lyric are associated with a "denial of history" (36, quoting Liu), he nevertheless emphasizes "static and inward" (30) lyric moments without acknowledging the vital relationship in Shelley between such moments and historical action, a relationship that depends on Shelleyan ideas of imagination as an agent or instrument of historical forces. Such ideas about history and imagination need to be interrogated, but to disregard them is, in its own way, to leave out history. Leader is on firmer ground when, returning to Lyrical Ballads, he acknowledges that "lyric intrusions" (37) into narrative do not necessarily repress "the social or the communal, or history": that, in fact, "halting or disrupting the story can be a way of facing social reality" (36).

This explicit substitution of a positive association between lyric and history for the notion of lyric as escapism is the nearest that any of these essays comes to mounting a polemical response to the (no longer new) "New Historicism." In the undefensively post-new-historical New "Lyrical Ballads," detailed attention to poetic texts coexists with, and is usually inextricable from, consideration of their cultural contexts.

Tim Fulford's "Primitive Poets and Dying Indians" examines one such context, the  literature by and about North American Indians that fed the public hunger for the "exotic" and the "primitive" in the eighteenth century. Fulford shows that factual narratives (some of which included Indian songs) and poems such as Joseph Warton's "Dying Indian" influenced Wordsworth's "Ruth" and "The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman" and Coleridge's "Foster-Mother's Tale"; Wordsworth and Coleridge, in turn, influenced not only other poets but, Fulford suggests, "the ideology of British colonialism," by perpetuating and promulgating a paternalist vision (69). That Fulford does not attempt to show how, precisely, this ideological influence worked allows the focus to remain on the poems themselves, both the Lyrical Ballads (seen in a new light) and the less familiar poems and travel narratives that make up a hitherto rarely examined aspect of the Ballads' cultural milieu. Fulford touches upon the ways in which discourses of colonialism, race, and gender operate in these texts, but his survey never slows down enough to provide a full reading of the complex interactions of these multiple discourses in any particular text. His essay performs a useful function in presenting this interesting "new" material, which merits further revisiting.

A different version of the primitive—that of folklore and the folktale—is the subject of Marilyn Gaull's "Wordsworth and the Six Arts of Childhood." Gaull's classifying impulse (reminiscent of Renaissance treatises such as George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie) is somewhat perplexingly belied by her readiness to break down "artificial" boundaries. The only distinction she treats at length is that between the fifth art of "children's literature" (moral and didactic tales, histories, and adaptations) and the more exciting, perilous sixth art of the "lawless tales" (Prelude [1805], 5.548, qtd. p. 88) that profoundly influenced Wordsworth's childhood: Arabian Nights, fairy tales, adventure stories, folktales and folk songs. Invoking an array of well-known studies of the role these often cruel and violent forms of literature play in children's psychological development, Gaull examines the element of fear. Against the grain of scholars who view childhood fears as part of an education in sublimity, she emphasizes the equal importance of fear as a "socializing force" (83), reminding us that Wordsworth became known to the Victorians not through his evocations of sublime childhood experiences but through his artificial, formulaic, sentimental writings on children. In making this corrective Gaull risks downplaying the connection that persists between the "lawless tales" and forces of power, danger, and desire that are not "socializing." Her excerpt from the "lawless tales" passage omits the lines explaining that the writers of these tales are "friends" not because they wield "socializing force" but because they make us "feel / With what, and how great might they are in league, / Who make our wish our power, our thought a deed, / An empire, a possession" (Prelude [1805], 5.551-53).[2] Gaull's apparent ambivalence reflects Wordsworth's own as he attempts to attach social feelings to solitary experiences of power.

The next section of the book comprises essays that address the contents of 1800 more directly. Kenneth Johnston's admiring observation about Wordsworth in the Preface aptly describes his own depth of inquiry: "He often starts much further 'down', at the foundations of his subjects, than he needs to, or than most readers would expect" (114). In keeping with the theme of revisionary revisiting that the critical collection shares with its subject, Johnston's essay builds on his own great books. Like other contributors to this volume, he recognizes Wordsworth as a "dialectically contrary poet" (99) and attends to the poet's "ability to admit doubts and qualifications" (109). He reads Wordsworth at the "deepest autobiographical level," where the verse, the Preface, and the life come together in uncanny ways. Thus the minor local-color poem "The Idle Shepherd-Boys" anticipates the two crucial visionary self-recognition scenes [Simplon Pass and Snowdon] of The Prelude" (108), and Michael sounds like "The Mad Mother" or like the father in "The Last of the Flock"—"or like Wordsworth himself at the end of 'Lines written above Tintern Abbey', pleading with Dorothy to keep his life in her mind forever: 'save me', is the message" (120). In other hands, such connections might seem superficial or forced, but Johnston makes us feel that he has found hitherto undiscovered secret passages.

Michael O'Neill's "Lyrical Ballads and 'Pre-Established Codes of Decision'" (the quoted phrase, from the 1798 Advertisement, refers to contemporary assumptions about poetic value) locates the interest and value of the Ballads in their resistance to such codes, their overturning of expectations, and their ways of "involving the reader in what he or she cannot wholly comprehend" (124). The satisfying readings that result examine the play between the many and the single, the communal and the solitary, the general and the specific, the public and the private.  In his memorable discussion of "Michael," O'Neill singles out the devastating line "And never lifted up a single stone." "'Truly expressive' the line may be," he writes, taking up Matthew Arnold's appreciative judgment, "yet what it is truly expressive of is the screened-off unreachability of specific experience" (133), an unreachability found in many other Wordsworth poems. O'Neill's analysis of this and kindred "singular" lines in Wordsworth stands alone in its power to move, yet it also gains power from and lends power to the many other readings in the book that acknowledge a similar dynamic. Johnston's essay, immediately preceding O'Neill's, ends by touching on the same line. Such resonances, which the editors wisely allow to speak for themselves, bring the pieces closer together.

Trott's fascinating piece analyzes Wordsworth's "complicating resistance" to the totalizing, optimistic, Coleridgean view of nature expressed in  the plan of The Recluse (144). Trott identifies two natures straining against each other in the "hybrid form" (155) of the Lyrical Ballads: an innocent nature "immersed in Coleridgean theology" and "another, racier, love of plants" (146), a sexualized, sometimes violent, nature influenced by Erasmus Darwin. Delving into the fertile cultural soil of 1790s botany (which as she notes was involved in "the ongoing ideological crossfire" of that decade [148]), Trott shows how the Ballads sprang from this ground. The co-presence of two natures, she explains, is not generally recognized because Wordsworth soon "marginalizes or moralizes one of them almost out of existence" (156)—though clandestine traces of the sexual content remain. The fecundity of Trott's subject is matched by the vitality of her writing, its sentences sprouting with metaphors, its rhythms expressing potent intellectual charge and release.

Bringing to a close the middle group of essays and interweaving strands from several of them (Johnston, O'Neill, Trott), Perry examines the idea of "accident" in Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth in the Biographia, according to which Wordsworth fails to live up to the Aristotelian principle "that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident" (qtd. 170). Perry traces a "secret Coleridgean history of inevitability as a criterion of poetic excellence, and accidence as a mark of poetic failure" back to its roots in Coleridge's "theological-cum-political thought of the 1790s" (172), specifically his enthusiasm for the doctrine of historical inevitability. This enthusiasm, communicated by the "always-contagious" Coleridge to his friend (173), forms an important background for Wordsworth's lyrical experiments in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth (171).

The story (like those told by Johnston and Trott) is intertwined with that of The Recluse: as Wordsworth continued to fail to write the epic that Coleridge had proposed for him, "[t]he millennial confidence that Coleridge had hoped to enjoy vicariously through his friend's epic was fraying into a new kind of lyric art which explored instead the counter-forces of accidence, contingency, and circumstance" (177). Interesting and insightful as always, Perry traces the uninterrupted path from Coleridge's idea of historical inevitability to his subsequent, more "purely aesthetic" criterion of "the necessity of poetry" (191), the standard by which Wordsworth is repeatedly judged and found wanting in the Biographia. But Coleridge himself is, not surprisingly, inconsistent on the matter: although he continues to criticize Wordsworth for failing to attain the ideal, he sometimes celebrates the characteristically Wordsworthian "hybrid art" of ideal and real, poetic and unpoetic, necessary and accidental (193).

"There is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment," writes Hazlitt in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (qtd. 200). Lucy Newlyn fascinatingly explores the complex linguistic significance of chanting in Hazlitt's essay, contextualizing it within the politically-charged eighteenth-century dispute about the relative merits of chanting and "plain speaking." Chanting, Newlyn explains, "could claim kinship with the ballad tradition, and with a distinctly progressive notion of primitivism. But it could also attach itself to the more oracular authority of the Anglican church": this doubleness "accounts for the later divergence of Wordsworth's 'natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings'" from (that strain again) "Coleridge's Aristotelian belief that 'poetry is essentially ideal'" (202). For Hazlitt this divergence was secondary to the fact that both poets were chanters. Deeply suspicious of the mystifying power of such chanting—and, by extension, of the enchantments of poetry itself—Hazlitt suggests that the chanting and the mutual enchanting of Wordsworth and Coleridge are to blame for "each poet's relinquishment of an authentic radical voice" (200) and for their adoption, as conservative members of the Anglican Church, of increasingly exclusive language. Hazlitt, meanwhile, remained true to "the cause of 'colloquial freedom' in the unambiguously public forum of the periodical press and his medium was always prose" (220). Newlyn's absorbing essay makes two familiar issues new by examining their complex relationship in intriguing detail.

The closing essay by Nicholas Roe surveys Wordsworth's reception in popular editions, commentaries, and memoirs in the years since 1798/1800. Roe sees this varied, lively, and at times bizarre "low" tradition both as an index of the ballads' popularity and, even more important, as a key to their continued vitality. He laments the dwindling of this tradition  in the "high" Romantic criticism of Frank Kermode, Geoffrey Hartman, M.H. Abrams, and Harold Bloom, which bring about the ascendancy of Wordsworth as "poet-prophet of the Coleridgean tradition" (235). (Again Coleridge is held responsible for more than half-creating Wordsworth as we know him.) Roe expresses hope that the recent overturning of the Romantic canon, in calling attention to popular writing of the 1800 moment, will revive the debate over where to locate the life of Lyrical Ballads. He suggests not that the "low" can or should replace the "high" but that, if scholars wish to renew the Ballads for a third century of readers, they need to remember that "the most lively arena" of Wordsworth reception over the past two centuries has been the popular one. Roe sees continued life for the Ballads in renewed debate over the question of the "popular" versus the "artificial" Wordsworth.

Renewing this debate is not the same as restoring Lyrical Ballads to the popular "arena." To the extent that scholars can ever hope to revive the Ballads as (if not a "popular" text) a text capable of appealing to a general readership, we must help to create the taste by which this wider audience can appreciate them. In the undergraduate classroom, where encounters between "high" and "low" readers (in Roe's sense) most often take place, the upending of the canon and the inclusion of popular discourses contemporaneous with the Ballads (and, for that matter, current popular discourses) may help to create new interest. Too often, however, the language that is meant to give expression to the newly rediscovered "popular" aspect works more to exclude than to invite an audience beyond the high-academic one. To cultivate a new readership for Ballads (and even to renew it for an academic audience), scholars must embrace an accessible language. What could be a more fitting way to honor the Ballads as they enter their third century? The real language of reader speaking to reader, as this book so beautifully demonstrates, need not sacrifice newness, nuance, complexity, sophistication, depth, interest, or insight. Far from reducing the poems' difficulty, it can offer more direct access to their enduring opacity, a source of their power and their ability to generate new interpretations.

The hybrid approach of The New "Lyrical Ballads" will make it a boon to scholars and students alike. It revisits old questions and makes them new again. It provides stimulating new perspectives, contexts, and arguments. It extends, deepens, and refines critical understanding of the poems. At the same time, in its authors' eloquent articulation of bafflement in the face of  power or blankness, it reminds us that any attempt to transmit the poems can at best only approach, but never fully explain, the hiding places of their power.[3]

Notes
[1]. Tim Fulford, "Richard Cronin, ed. 1798: The Year of the 'Lyrical Ballads ,'" Romanticism On the Net 15 (August 1999), 18 January 2005.  <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1999/v/n15/005864ar.html>
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[2]. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 180. [back]
[3]. See Peter J. Manning, "On Failing to Teach Wordsworth," Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth's Poetry, ed. Spencer Hall with Jonathan Ramsey (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986), pp. 39-53.
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