Andrew Bennett is an author on the warpath. He's angry at troops of critics who have depicted Wordsworth as “a poet who doesn’t write poetry” (3, author's italics). Matthew Arnold, for example, promulgated the myth that “nature herself seems … to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer penetrating power” (3). Bennett won’t buy it and wants to blow the whistle or shout, “Enough already!” He sets out to expose the falsity of our belief that Wordsworth composed most of his poetry in his head, as he walked, and only later wrote it down or dictated it to an amanuensis. Bennett does not deny that the poet did indeed compose some works in this fashion, but he argues that Wordsworth also often wrote outdoors with pencil and paper and wrote indoors far more frequently than his critics have alleged.

This subject concerns Bennett for several reasons. He believes, first, that inscription—the physical act of writing, not only creating verse—was essential in Wordsworth's process of constructing his self-identity in and through language; second, that as his career unfolded, an interest in more encompassing philosophical, spiritual, and moral themes coupled with an uneasiness about formal restrictions on both poetry and poetic language subsumed the poet's interest in “the strange ways of words” and “an active sense of grammatological possibility” (7); and third, that although Wordsworth wrote about cure, for him the act of writing itself was not curative but instead troubling and the cause of illness. Bennett grounds his analysis in the examination of evidence from Wordsworth's manuscripts, published texts, notes, letters, Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, observations by the poet's contemporaries, critical studies, and some literary theory.

Bennett claims that poetry for Wordsworth was “not so much a representation of events or objects in the world as a representation of the poet's mind in the act of creation: poetry is a certain experience of the poet, a certain, way, or certain effect of “feeling.” … The act of composition involves feelings being pressed out “spontaneously,” without mediation, from a certain interiority—from the very essence or soul—of the subject who experiences them. And it is this very act of composition that is, itself, poetry” (108, author's italics). Poesis for Wordsworth, then, was a psychological process, as it famously was for Keats. In rightly seeing much of Wordsworth's greatest poetry as describing movements of the poet's mind, Bennett is analyzing psychological processes; however, he accepts only a few concepts from Freudian psychoanalytic theory and makes do with no psychological moorings from other schools. He carefully rehearses the familiar history of the tension in Wordsworth's writing between poetry and philosophy without acknowledging the tertium non datur in the space between them, which is psychology, and he appears reluctant to recognize the role the unconscious plays in most human thoughts and actions, perhaps because Freudian theory regards the unconscious primarily as a repository of repressed memories. But for Wordsworth it is vaster, and from it come intimations of immortality and visionary gleams. Bennett's references to “blank thinking” (130), “ineluctable thought” (132), and “unthinking” (133) all pertain to moments when Wordsworth's rational consciousness is lost, his ego usurped by his unconscious, but Bennett avoids using the term. Thought itself, he rightly acknowledges, can indeed baffle and unhinge the mind, as Geoffrey Hartman so persuasively argues in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962; repr. in Romanticism and Consciousness [New York, 1970]). This occurs when we are caught in a complex, whose source is unconscious. Bennett describes the poet's fascination with engulfment by such irrational complexes, with childhood states of preconsciousness, and, in numerous shorter poems, with abnormal psychology—but without utilizing a vocabulary that could help him analyze psychic processes and not inevitably mire him in psychojargon.

In asserting that Wordsworth's writing failed to produce the curative and therapeutic effects frequently claimed and that it was instead—and continued to be—“the source of physical and psychic trauma” for him (152), Bennett implicitly raises significant questions about the poet's psyche. If the success of the “talking cure” is contingent upon the presence of the listening analyst or the “listening” reader—made possible for the poet through inscription rather the recollection of memories alone—is Wordsworth's well-documented revulsion against the act of writing and equally well documented consequential illness a resistance to being heard and known, to being exposed and judged? And, if so, what did he fear? His conclusion to the preface to Lyrical Ballads invites readers to evaluate the merits of his verse by the poetic principles that he sets forth in the preface. But did the anxiety about being labeled a bad poet trouble him as much as that of being diagnosed a mad poet by those readers and later by readers of The Prelude? And did the deferred, posthumous publication of The Prelude actually prevent the healing its composition might have effected for him had it seen print earlier?

Bennett does not explore all these possibilities, but his aggressive campaign to correct assumptions about Wordsworth's habits of composition compels us to confront them. Doing so, we glimpse new understandings of the possible workings of Wordsworth's brave but brooding soul.