Narrative Identity in Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere

Home at Grasmere offers a coherent statement of Wordsworth’s identity as a major poet. Some critics have characterized its affirmative assertions as marked by an egotism unable to reach out to the community the poem seeks to affirm. This essay counters such negative readings by viewing the poem in terms of John Eakin’s influential notion of narrative identity: it is the master narrative of a self fully at home and in possession of itself that works in tandem with the notion of a reconstituted family even as the poet confronts the threat of separation, absence, and death.