Words worth belongs to a generation that re-invented posterity as the true judge of artistic worth, a truth beyond fashion and faction, the eternal justification of a misunderstood life. His exact contemporary Holderlin asked \u27Wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit, meaning, among other things, why be a poet in an age that does not know how to value poetry? Romantic poets invested very heavily in the future, and for that reason, leaving aside others, their reception makes a fascinating study, full of veneration, misprision, irony, bathos, creative imitation and unconscious symbiosis.
Stephen Gill\u27s book IS about both the Victorianization of Words worth and the Wordsworthianization of the Victorians. So \u27reception\u27 is too passive and simple a term. This is not exclusively a narrative of responses from writers and reviewers, professional compares in the business of literary criticism; it is about remakings, some of which are generally familiar. Matthew Arnold\u27s reinvention of Wordsworth - the Words worth whose \u27philosophy\u27 and by implication most of The Prelude is of no lasting value - is still well known through his Essays in Criticism and his selected edition, Poems of Wordsworth (1879), which was still in print very recently. Perhaps J. S. Mill\u27s account of his recovery from emotional breakdown, his discovery of Wordsworth\u27s saving power, is as well known: certainly it is accepted by many critics as a narrative - in fact the narrative - of Wordsworth\u27s absorption into mainstream Victorian liberal individualism: another ambiguous canonization (I\u27m thinking of, for example, Anne Janowitz\u27s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition). But these landmarks in the history of \u27Wordsworth\u27 take on a fresh appearance in Gill\u27s indispensable book, which fills in a great many details and looks at the subject from a number of angles. The cast in this story is huge: not just poets but novelists, reviewers, publishers, publicists, editors, biographers, political and religious opportunists (especially the latter), self-appointed heritage-definers, and simple souvenir-hunters who removed plants from Rydal Mount right under Wordsworth\u27s nose - among them one Isaac Evans, who in 1841 collected rose leaves to send to his sister Mary Ann
