John L. Mahoney. Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical Reputation.

Rzepka, Charles J.

Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. Pp. xix+166. $55.00.

More than fifteen years ago, in the Wordsworth chapter he wrote for the fourth and last edition of the Modern Language Association's The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism (New York: MLA, 1985), Karl Kroeber observed with alarm the "accelerating increase in the quantity of writing" about the poet since the previous edition of the Review in 1972. Anticipating the Association's eventual decision not to commission a fifth edition, Kroeber registered his fear that Wordsworthians were about to "lose track of our most useful lines of inquiry" and experience a "suicide-through-plenitude" (256).

While reports of the death of Wordsworth studies by surfeit may have been greatly exaggerated, there is little doubt that the "useful lines of inquiry" in the field have multiplied several times over since the publication of Kroeber's remarks. For many of us, the gains have clearly outweighed the losses: greater archival access, the resources of the internet, more detailed information about historical contexts and events, and a wider range of critical approaches and subfields count among those gains. The losses, however, are real, and perhaps the most fundamental has been the loss of historical perspective on these furiously multiplying "lines of inquiry." All the more reason, then, to welcome the appearance of a focused critical history like John Mahoney's concise but comprehensive overview of the poet's reputation.

Wordsworth and the Critics is manifestly the product of a lifetime's devotion to its subject. Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English at Boston College, Mahoney is well-known among students and colleagues for his outstanding pedagogy, and among romanticists in general for his extensive scholarship on the poet and his influence, including a previous book, Wordsworth: A Poetic Life (New York: Fordham UP, 1997). Mahoney's expansive range is displayed to advantage in this book, which traces the response to Wordsworth's poetry, private as well as public, from the first appearance of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in 1793 to the work of David Bromwich, Kenneth Johnston, and Robert Ryan in 1998.

Mahoney identifies five major stages in the evolution of the poet's reputation over the last two centuries: Early Responses (contemporaneous), Victorian, Early Twentieth-Century (relative principally to the New Criticism), Theoretical (relative mainly to the impact of poststructuralism and New Historicism), and Late Twentieth-Century (a sudden proliferation of approaches and subfields). Many of the developments within each of these stages, such as the early notion of Wordsworth as an "egotistical" poet, or Victorian idealizations of the poet as sage and physician, or New Historicism's version of the poet-advocate of a "Romantic Ideology," will prove familiar to Wordsworthians. It is helpful, however, to see more precisely how these images of the poet emerged and developed within each stage, to be introduced anew to the written sources contributing to them, and to be reminded of the critical traditions with which each succeeding generation of critics engaged. One of the great virtues of this volume, moreover, is the author's modest, even-handed, and temperate approach, a model of scholarly disinterestedness and probity that serves his purpose well.

Wordsworth and the Critics is an important contribution to Wordsworthian criticism, especially coming as it does at a moment in our professional history when our sense of identity as romanticists (and under that rubric, as sub-specialists in one or another writer, approach, literary theory, or area history), is undergoing a profound reassessment in the face of Kroeber's ever-augmenting "plenitude." While Mahoney's comprehensive familiarity with Wordsworthian criticism, early and late, includes one or two merely nodding acquaintances (the material on deconstruction and poststructuralism is thin), his book provides a historical baseline for both mature scholars and beginning researchers in the field. More than an annotated bibliography of Wordsworth criticism, it is a historical portrait of the artist in the full-length mirror of that criticism.

CHARLES J. RZEPKA, Professor of English at Boston University, is the author of Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995) and The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986), as well as numerous articles on romanticism and popular culture. He is currently at work on a cultural history of detective fiction.