Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (review)

This volume of essays on the subject of Wordsworth's influence on American literature is a welcome addition to the growing field of transatlantic Romantic Studies. As Meredith McGill has noted, the so-called 'traffic in poems' between Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century fostered a symbiosis of literary cultures. Poetry by British writers such as Wordsworth, Byron and Hemans circulated widely, especially on the eastern seaboard from Maine to Virginia, with Philadelphia, New York and Boston producing the majority of editions. American periodicals were even more important to the transmission of British Romantic poetry, as they rapidly and frequently reprinted poems, especially lyrics. Influence flowed in the other direction as well, of course, but the volume under review is concentrated on the migration and adaptation of Wordsworth–his poetry, his biography, his ethics, his perspectives–by a variety of American authors working throughout the nineteenth century. As such, the volume provides an interesting set of data points through which a larger story of Wordsworth's American reception may be mapped. It also presents future researchers with many useful points of departure.

The book's editors, Joel Pace and Matthew Scott, set out the terms of engagement in their introduction: 'the influence of Wordsworth's writing on American writers', not solely in literary terms but as a broader cultural influence. Thus the volume attends to Wordsworth's impact 'in environmental studies as well as the history of radical politics, religion, education, and publishing'. Pace and Scott and their gathered contributors are interested in the American culture industry, probed in the work of specific writers, as constituting a Wordsworth for the nineteenth-century reading public. As the introduction claims (perhaps a bit too broadly): 'the human themes to which [Wordsworth] addresses himself as a writer are themselves universals that have become embedded in American cultural consciousness'. The essays that follow on from this claim attempt to make good on this vision of a Wordsworthian literary history of American culture. As individual contributions each has valuable points to make, while the overarching narrative is more suggested than pursued in detail.

Susan Manning's essay offers a thoughtful introduction to the methodological questions of transatlantic influence studies, focusing on 'literary style' as ideological marker, with metaphor and translation as key modes of 'thinking across' that such studies might engage with. In such modes, the traditional hierarchical arrangement of influence (in which precedence determines authority) gives way to a more synchronic awareness of similarity and transmission. Other contributors focus on particular instances of the Wordsworthian in American letters. Richard Gravil attends to the movement of Cooper's Natty Bumppo towards an alignment with Wordsworth's view of nature. Similarly, Bruce Graver examines Whittier's pursuit of the American picturesque and Native American culture, using Wordsworth as a model. Lance Newman gives us 'Thoreau as a Wordsworthian Poet'. Karen Karbinier reads Whitman and Richard Brantley reads Dickinson as poets engaged with a Romantic heritage that was essentially Wordsworthian. James A. Butler writes engagingly about Owen Wister, a writer whose famous western The Virginian demonstrates the range of Wordsworth's influence beyond the typical borders of the east coast. My sense is that, individually, these essays have most to offer scholars of American literature, in that they expend the bulk of their analytical energy on the ways in which their chosen authors responded to Wordsworth. Taken together, they suggest the deep and wide nature of Wordsworth's influence; the reader generally has to perform the work of synthesis on his or her own.

One might group together three other essays as engaging in a broader kind of cultural analysis, wherein Wordsworth's writing is shown to be involved with a tradition or historical moment encompassing more than the work of a single American author. Joel Pace's contribution on 'Transatlantic Gothic and Race' identifies the haunted structures of American gothic writing (by Hawthorne, Poe, Chopin, Cable and Chestnutt) as related...