Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience ed. by Alexander Regier, Stefan H. Uhlig (review)

284 BOOK REVIEWS difficult this history is but also how much the Romantics were obsessed with it. But this book is not a history of money and Romanticism nor, I think, was it intended to be. Writing such a history would have under­ mined Rowlinson’s and the Romantics’ nuanced understanding of capital­ ism and literature’s “curious” relation to it. Alexander Dick University of British Columbia Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds. Wordsworth's Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. l’p. vii + 220. $75.00. “What has a poet to do with a theory?” William Whewell asked. In their introduction to Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory, Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig respond that “Wordsworth makes his contribution to our modern ways of thinking about poetry both inside his poetic writing and alongside it,” and moreover that his theory “forms a decisive part of his work’s claim on us” (1). Regier and Uhlig’s collection of eleven essays by emerging and well-established scholars explores key areas of Wordsworth’s “poetic the­ ory,” from the poems and prose of Lyrical Ballads to The Excursion and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” At the heart of this book’s wide-ranging analysis of Wordsworth’s aes­ thetic theory is neither the privileging of “low and rustic life” announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads nor the Preface’s controversial claim that the volumes’ poems approximate the “real language ofmen.” It is the Pref­ ace’s most famous, twice-stated, claim: that “all good poetry” is produced by “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” As several essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory help us to see, this claim’s elaboration reveals the inherent difference and complexity that predominate in the creative pro­ cess. Any “good” poem may originate in a superflux of sensation, but po­ etry can at best only point toward that origin by way of mediating kindred feelings and the superadded “pleasures” of material language, form, and meter. As Regier and Uhlig’s book title aptly suggests, the focus of the essays is thus not only upon Wordsworth’s theory of poetry but also upon the “po­ etic” character of that theory and its articulation. In the Advertisement and Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as in the subtler workings of the Essays upon Epi­ taphs and 1850 Prelude, the poet’s theory is poetic in part both because it is predicated upon a complex process and because it posits a poetics of an in­ determinate character, yet situated within the theorized bounds ofa system. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 285 The Preface imparts not just a “systematic defense of the theory” upon which the poems ofLyrical Ballads were composed, as Wordsworth states; it also presents a systematic theory ofpoetic complexity and poetical limits set against a world of experience and material things. Several of the essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory in fact draw upon what Bill Brown and other theorists herald as “thing theory,” concerning the connections between culture, including poetry, and material thinglincss, where a “thing” is that which precedes the categorized object apprehended through perception and representation. Indeed the great virtue of Regier and Uhlig’s collec­ tion is the way it helps us to see familiar aspects ofWordsworth’s theory in new and uncanny ways. The book also serves as a useful companion of sorts to Lyrical Ballads, as ten of the eleven essays consider works from one or both of the volumes. The subtitle of Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory signals three sites of interre­ lated tensions in Wordsworth—knowledge, language, and experience—and in the leadoff essay, “Wordsworth’s Poetic Ignorance,” Andrew Bennett pro­ vocatively addresses the first of these. Following upon his book Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology, he contends that the poet’s works often involve “the possibility of making the reader not know his or her own world” (21). For Bennett, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ultimately privileges a condition of “not knowing, of ignorance” (21), and the 1798 volume’s “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy” are likewise at bottom agnoiological narratives “consti­ tuted by and constructed around ignorance and around ignorance...