Wordsworth in American Literary Culture. Eds. Joel Pace and Matthew Scott. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1-4039-0133-3. Price: US$79.95.

There is a cliché in Romantic studies, which contends that no scholar can avoid becoming partisan when it comes to Wordsworth and his fellow poets. Sometimes the choice is between Wordsworth and Coleridge—was Wordsworth the long-suffering friend and collaborator, or was he an egomaniac who drove his friend to a crisis of poetic confidence from which Coleridge would recover? Other times, at stake is the complex public relationship between Wordsworth and that other great poet of the Romantic era, Byron. Occasionally, it is even a choice between Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, especially when her unpublished poems and journals are at stake. If the cliché has any truth, I will make an enemy of half of the field when I confess that I do not often find myself of the Wordsworth party. Thus, I was surprised and delighted to discover the excellent essays in Joel Pace and Matthew Scott’s volume Wordsworth in American Literary Culture. I begin by rehearsing this tired cliché about the divisiveness or decisiveness (depending on one’s perspective) of Wordsworth for reasons that are, I hope, grounded in more than self-indulgence. In reading the essays gathered together in Pace and Scott’s volume, I found myself wondering about my reception of Wordsworth and about the ways in which that reception might have been informed by a prior cultural experience of American literary culture. At stake in these questions of Romantic scholarly partisanship are, after all, questions of Wordsworth’s poetic legacy and cultural influence; these same questions are at the heart of Wordsworth in American Literary Culture. The book is comprised of eleven diverse chapters, plus an introduction, in which the authors chart the American cultural engagement with Wordsworth and his verse from the early national period until the latter part of the last century, with the majority of the essays focusing on Wordsworth’s reception in the United States during the nineteenth century. I think it is fair to say that, if partisanship is our professional destiny, Pace and Scott would have to be counted among the Wordsworth enthusiasts. This is certainly fitting, given the project at hand. The opening lines of the introduction announce: “Harold Bloom has written that only two writers have truly altered the course of western poetry” (1), and one of them, unsurprisingly, is Wordsworth. The statement is, as the editors note, a controversial one, but in many ways the framing of this collection, loosely at least, around Bloom invites debate. No fewer than five of the essays, in addition to the introduction, use his work to inform readings of Wordsworth’s reception in America, and in some ways Bloom and his scholarship are as much at the heart of this project as Wordsworth. However, Bloom became a controversial figure in contemporary American academic culture after the publication of his work on the western canon in the 1990s, and, because Wordsworth has at least as important a role in the politics of the canon as he does in the history of literary influence, my only suggestion is that it might be useful for readers to understand more precisely from the outset the reasons for Bloom’s centrality to this project. It is probably also worth noting that, although the essays in the volume work at the productive intersection that we think of as Anglo-American culture, Wordsworth in American Literary Culture is perhaps weighted more toward British literary studies than American literary studies. The majority of the contributors are, in one way or another, Wordsworth specialists, and, as a student of British Romanticism, I was pleased to find contributions by so many distinguished and familiar names in …