The critical reception, 1807–1818

Between 1807 and 1818 Wordsworth received some of his most important and influential criticism, in tandem with which the contours of his poetic identity began fully to emerge. To get a sense of Wordsworth’s critical reception, we need to consider not only reviews of his published work (notably by Francis Jeffrey) and the kind of literary criticism that was emerging during the Romantic period (notably by Coleridge), but also personal letters, journals, diaries and other kinds of literary text. In addition, there is Wordsworth’s elaborate response to his own reception in his prefaces and essays. From the critical reception of this near decade we will see Wordsworth emerging as the poet with whom most readers today are familiar, one responsible for a body of poetry that is easy to ridicule as simple, naïve, and even ‘unliterary’, and that is at the same time sublime, inimitable and to be ranked in the canon of English poetry. Such a ranking was far from a given at the time, of course. In 1807, one of the Romantic period’s most influential reviewers, Francis Jeffrey, delivered a devastating review of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes in the Edinburgh Review. Jeffrey had had Wordsworth in his sights since at least 1802, when in a review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer he invented the notion of the ‘Lake School’, a group of poets that were held to behave like a subversive and dissenting ‘sect’. But the 1807 Poems presented Jeffrey with the first opportunity for a direct confrontation, and he went straight for the jugular: ‘If the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted’, he declares (CH 194). Jeffrey’s main problem with Wordsworth (and the other Lake Poets) was that ‘They write as they do, upon principle and system’, and that as far as both language and subject matter were concerned, ‘it evidently costs them much pains to keep down to the standard which they have proposed to themselves’ (189). According to Jeffrey, only when he ‘transgresses’ the ‘system’ that he had outlined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, can Wordsworth write ‘good verses’ (199).