Writing in the first book of The Prelude about his search for a suitably ambitious poetic subject, Wordsworth professes a “yearning toward some philosophic Song / Of Truth that cherishes our daily life.” In retrospect, we know that the long autobiographical poem generated by that yearning was only one movement of a larger unfinished symphony; but in his splendid new book, Simon Jarvis takes the phrase as a description of a peculiarly Wordsworthian way of thinking in verse. As a scholar who has written both a study of eighteenth-century Shakespearean textual criticism and a critical introduction to Adorno, Jarvis wants to break down the distinction between philosophy and poetry, arguing that Wordsworth's poetry is not versified philosophy but rather a form of “cognition” in its own right (4). It is well known that Wordsworth briefly fell under the sway of Godwinian thought and got some of his philosophy from Coleridge; and excellent books have explored Wordsworth's engagement with Enlightenment ideas. Rather than disputing these premises, Jarvis wants to read Wordsworth's poetry without the thematization that follows from them. His own writing seems to aspire to the condition of “philosophic song,” in that its supple and speculative approach pointedly resists recognizable critical categories.

If I had to place Jarvis in a critical tradition, I might say that his critique of neat binaries (philosophy vs. poetry, mind vs. body, idealism vs. materialism, idolatry vs. iconoclasm) is deconstructionist, with a strong de Manian inflection; that his philological attention to the ambiguity and deep history of Wordsworthian terms such as “life” and “glory” recalls William Empson's Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951); and that the project of taking Wordsworth seriously as a philosophical thinker owes a debt to Geoffrey Hartman's groundbreaking work. While Jarvis doesn’t disavow this lineage, he mostly withholds proper names from his quotations, citing them in footnotes instead. This is to avoid what he calls “the unphilosophical practice of allowing the name of an authorship to usurp the consideration which should be given to the thoughts contained in it” (7). Jarvis has a good point, though his practice might be equally distracting if the reader ends up playing a kind of guessing game: caught in the act of checking a reference in the endnotes, we might wonder whether we are, like the fallen reader of Stanley Fish's Paradise Lost, recapitulating an old sin.

One advantage of the method is that Jarvis can engage in a polemic against New Historicist readings of Wordsworth without grinding any visible axes: when he says that “Wordsworth is a long way from the varieties of idealism which are sometimes attributed to him” (68), he is disputing Marjorie Levinson's often-discussed claims about the Wordsworthian evasion of historical or material realities; and when he argues that Marx doesn’t assault ideology as mystification but rather “the idea that assaulting mystifying ideals would make you free” (5), he is addressing Jerome McGann's Romantic Ideology (Chicago, 1983), with its assault on putatively Romantic ideas of transcendence. Twenty years after the rise of New Historicist studies in Romanticism, Jarvis knows that his arguments need not be made very strenuously. On a deeper level, his withholding of critical names and labels pays homage to a trait that Jarvis admires in Wordsworth's poetry. Referring to the naked use of the copulative “is” in “Resolution and Independence,” Jarvis sees a verbal power in “the removal of those props of familiarity which stop readers reading and which allow them to substitute for reading a train of associations which have become habitual” (28).

In any case, the dialectic of History versus poetic ideality is only one among many binaries that Jarvis considers. More central to the study is the Cartesian duality of mind and body—which actually represents, in his compelling argument, only half of Descartes’ thought. Jarvis prefers to emphasize the “early” over more familiar “late” Cartesian thought, asserting that the cogito is not really reflective thinking-about or propositional thinking-that, but rather a “sensory awareness” that constitutes the activity of thought itself (161). Against the materialist conception of the body as a “data set” available to the rational mind, Jarvis, via Descartes, argues that the Wordsworthian body is “always already cognitive” (181), that thought might be called “affective substance” (173).

Coming upon this aperçu, any serious reader of Wordsworth might experience a shock of recognition: perhaps the moment in The Prelude in which children, their pulses racing from summer play, come home with “beating minds,” or the claim in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that our thoughts are “representatives of all our past feelings.” Jarvis demonstrates the point in an inspired close reading of a passage in The Prelude in which the poet describes his youthful love for the sun as “a light / Which we behold and feel we are alive” and the correspondent feeling that “my blood appeared to flow / With its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy.” Echoing a perennial distinction in emotion theory, Jarvis says that it seems “impossible to distinguish between the cognitive-evaluative aspects of this feeling and the sheerly somatic aspect of it” (187). “Joy” might be the term retrospectively applied to the feeling, but Wordsworth's attention to blood and breath emphasizes a fundamentally corporeal and extraverbal dimension of experience; and what happens inside the cognitive body tallies with the solar presence outside of it. As Jarvis sees it, the darker implication is “that much of the time we do not feel we are alive at all, that we feel precisely as though we do not have experience, and that it takes something quite intrusively remarkable, such as intolerably powerful light, to make us feel that we are alive” (188).

The feeling of being alive in the presence of light continues to haunt Jarvis in his reading of the “Immortality” ode. It is a reading that draws philosophical inspiration from the Bible, Descartes, Malebranche, and Augustin—a reading I cannot resist calling illuminating. “Light disconcerts and awes in this poem,” Jarvis says, “because it so often refuses to be either figurative or literal” (204). In his philological commentary on the keyword “glory,” he asserts that the priests at Sinai don’t see a sign of God's glory but rather glory itself—that is, light. When Wordsworth says that the “light” from “Heaven” seen by the child “fade[s] into the light of common day,” Jarvis wants to hold out the possibility that the two kinds of light are not mutually exclusive. “Fades into” does not mean the irrevocable loss implied in “fades out.” It is simply that the adult faces “the difficulty of finding a prism to separate daylight from soul-light”; and the phrase “common day” registers not a stark decline but rather a “the meeting point of bliss and enchantment” (204).

Here and elsewhere in his finely nuanced account, Jarvis finds equivocation rather than assertion at the heart of Wordsworth's language. As a literary critic with a strongly philosophical bent, Jarvis is, not surprisingly, drawn to offer his own gloss on the line that so bothered Coleridge: the hailing of the “Child” as “best Philosopher.” The honorific is true “in the sense that this child grounds the truths which we (for example, as philosophers) try to find” (208). Jarvis has found a satisfying critical approach—with “words of Reason deeply weighed,” in Wordsworth's phrase—to approximate those truths.