Klavan, Andrew. "Romanticon." CITY JOURNAL 19.3 (2009).

It seems to me that the last several decades in America have been a weird echo of the decades in Europe around the coming of the nineteenth century—and that no figure can serve as a better guide to both wisdom and error than William Wordsworth, one of the greatest of the British Romantic poets and, in many ways, the very model of a modern neoconservative, defending the West’s liberal tradition against radicalism. My argument in brief is this. The French Revolution was the historical tragedy that recurred as farce in America’s 1960s. Cranky-cons like myself tend, when thinking of the Revolution, to skip right ahead to the bloody parts, like a 12-year-old watching Friday the 13th on DVD. But the French overthrow of what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute” provided young Europeans with the same sort of goose of utopian hope that the Age of Aquarius gave the young here. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” Wordsworth famously recalled in later years. “But to be young was very heaven!” What aging boomer boring his grandchildren with tales of Woodstock wouldn’t say much the same? The young and blissful Wordsworth had a good view of the action. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_3_wordsworth.html.

Drabble, Margaret. "Poor Dorothy Wordsworth." TIMES April 23, 2008.

Wilson, Frances. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. London: Faber, 2008. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote much and published little, but despite her reticence much has been written about her. Frances Wilson gives us a new and at times startling reading of this enigmatic woman, and does not shy away from discussing what the editor of her letters, Alan G. Hill, described as the “peculiarly insensitive and maladroit” post-Freudian interpretations that have clustered round Dorothy’s relationship with her brother William. Wilson is neither insensitive nor maladroit. She is bold, witty, scholarly and speculative. She is not always respectful, but she is always interesting. She takes on incest, migraines, voyeurism and, at one point, what she describes as a note of “post-coital intensity” in Dorothy’s prose. This gripping narrative presents a character more subtle than the devoted, self-effacing amanuensis of tradition, or the later feminist stereotype. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth does not claim that Dorothy was a better writer than her brother, or that he repressed her talent by demanding sympathy and giblet pies. What really went on in Dove Cottage remains mysterious, and, as Wilson says, there are parts of the story which we will never know. . . . The rest is here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3801825.ece.

Jacobson, Dan. "Wordsworth's Hidden Arguments." TLS Otober 31, 2007.

Early in his career he also became known as a strikingly “egotistical” and self-absorbed poet – the first of these adjectives being applied to him most famously, though not exclusively, by the young John Keats. (In a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats distinguished between his own character as a poet – “unpoetical” he called it – and the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”.) Wordsworth himself came close to acknowledging that something of this sort could be fairly said of him. Referring to the long, unfinished poem that became known after his death as The Prelude, he wrote that it was “unparalleled in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself” – a remark suggesting that in his case self-knowledge and self-satisfaction managed quite easily to cohabit with one another. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2779499.ece.