G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child. Cranbury, New Jersey; London: Associated University Presses, 1995. ISBN: 0838636004 (hardback) Price: £30

G. Kim Blank's psychoanalytical approach reinstates Wordsworth's personal life as the centre and source of his poetry. In answer to the lure of the deconstructive abyss, Blank offers Wordsworth's own theory of poetry: 'that it is expressive' (p. 18). What it expresses is not a 'socially-constructed sense of self' (p. 34) that communicates above all else the cultural forces that shaped it, but a far more deeply internalized subjectivity, a realm in which experience in the social world has been transformed into feelings. It is these feelings that are at the heart of the poetry, up to, and including, the Immortality Ode. Where Wordsworth, and many critics, universalize, Blank repersonalizes, in a project of two related phases. Blank acts as therapist-critic, though his is not 'traditional psychoanalytic criticism, which, in its emphasis on the oedipal structure, is beginning to appear both autocratic and bankrupt' (p. 29). On the one hand he locates in the poetry a nexus of emotions - loss, fear, anger, guilt - and reads the poems in their light. On the other, he constructs a psycho-biography to account for the presence of those emotions, the chief causes being the death of Wordsworth's parents and emotional abuse from his grandparents. But Blank does far more than this. For the events of the traumatic childhood and troubled youth that caused and then exacerbated those feelings form only the first chapter in the story. The second concerns the composing poet who begins not as a healthy man, fathered by the child he once was, but as an 'adult child', unable to integrate feeling with thought. He begins this way, but he heals his inner child, and his healing method is writing poetry. Whilst the poems, then, perform the role of the patient, or are the patient's symptoms, which are analysed by the therapist-critic, the poet too is a therapist, if unknowingly so, performing 'writing therapy' (p. 147) upon himself. This takes the form of re-enactment, as feelings are released, events recreated, first within the fictional stories of the Lyrical Ballads , and then, more directly, in the early autobiographical passages of the Prelude. Blank gives a perceptive reading of a letter to Coleridge in which Wordsworth complains of physical suffering that is clearly psychosomatic (p. 146). By writing poetry, Wordsworth brings out his symptoms in order to resolve their cause. It follows that revision, as Dorothy Wordsworth's journal attests, caused her brother particular pain. Before considering this biographical thread in itself, I shall turn to some of the individual readings, for many of these are striking, and have the power to convince even out of context. Frequently, Blank sees Wordsworth's characters as projections or parts of himself. For example, Wordsworth's subjectivity is at the root not only of the pedlar and the narrator of Margaret's story (available now in several versions, but published as the first part of The Excursion ), but of Margaret too, a person first abandoned and then herself neglectful, of herself, and of her child. This I find a fruitful idea, because it helps to explain a peculiarity in Wordsworth to which there has long been objection. Thomas De Quincey suggested that At the very least, 'he might have offered a little rational advice, which costs no more than civility'. He goes on to consider, with high wit, the various procedures that might have been undertaken: a letter to the War-Office to track down Margaret's husband's regiment, appeal to the neighbourhood priest, and so forth. Certainly, one can often find oneself asking why, in poetry that presents itself as social criticism, no practical solution is …