William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement

This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Motivated by a dissatisfaction with the current trend toward New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, McFarland 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 proceeds to an identification of "intensity" as the secret of Wordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality are illustrated by careful examinations of several other poems and Wordsworth's desiccation is seen as precisely the absence of intensity. McFarland then discusses the special way in which Wordsworth assumed the prophetic stance, which was essential to his poetic vision, and concludes with a discussion of The Borderers, which is shown to be a disposal chamber for the dark matter of the Wordsworthian cosmos.