Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (review)

David Simpson’s Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity is a book at once familiar and bracingly strange. On the one hand, it is a tightly conceived, single-author study that addresses a well-defined set of tropes and themes in Wordsworth’s poetry with clarity and grace. Simpson reads outward from the “spectral personifications” and “ghostly conjurations” that populate so many of Wordsworth’s poems to the large-scale historical transformations that shaped and reshaped the world as Wordsworth wrote (1, 2). Wordsworth’s poetry, Simpson argues, “explore[s] the processes and consequences of modernization experienced at one of its most critical transitions” (4), but he develops this large claim through detailed analysis of a small number of poems, focusing in particular on “The Ruined Cottage,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “Poor Susan,” “Gipsies,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “Resolution and Independence,” and several episodes from The Prelude (including those of the hunger-bitten girl, the convent of Chartreuse, the spots of time, and the crossing of Leven Sands). Simpson’s approach is at once historically nuanced and theoretically informed and adeptly balances the sometimes conflicting demands of history and theory in a way that will be familiar to readers of his other work, in particular his two previous books on Wordsworth. For these reasons alone, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern represents a significant contribution to Wordsworth scholarship and to the study of Romantic poetry and Romanticism more generally.

The book’s strangeness, on the other hand, has to do with Simpson’s argument about the peculiar nature of Wordsworth’s “social concern.” If my synopsis suggests that Simpson situates Wordsworth in the historical context of the emergence of modern capitalist society, one of the book’s most notable accomplishments is in fact its refusal of any easy schematization of text and context. Instead, Simpson is guided throughout by the troubled and troubling character of Wordsworth’s encounters with the poor and the dispossessed. While he pays close attention to the long tradition of Wordsworth scholarship and more often builds on than contests other scholars’ insights, Simpson’s approach is neither to judge Wordsworth’s attitudes, for good or ill, nor to explain them, once and for all. Instead, he might be said to “trouble” what is most troubling in Wordsworth—a critical posture that echoes the Wordsworthian disposition he describes. “To be concerned,” Simpson reminds us, “usually means not having an answer, not having finished with an issue, being in a state of suspended attention that may produce a resolution but has not done so yet” (5). This is at once an account, elaborated throughout the book, of the particular shape of Wordsworth’s attention to social issues and a sketch of Simpson’s most powerful claim about Wordsworth’s poetics. His interest in Wordsworth at this moment—the spur perhaps to write a third book on Wordsworth—has to do with the sense in which Wordsworth’s predicament, or the predicament made visible in his poetry of social concern, is in a compelling sense still ours as well. Wordsworth’s is a poetics of modernity, Simpson contends, because it addresses what the Preface to Lyrical Ballads calls “a multitude of causes unknown in former times,” a phrase that Simpson glosses in a variety of historical and theoretical registers. Wordsworth’s causes include extreme poverty, global war, homelessness, and machine labor; new forms of communication, consumption, and economic exchange; a profound sense of the increasing rapidity of historical change; and, above all, the development of the commodity form. It is Wordsworth’s engagement with such issues that “renders this poetry prospectively contemporary with our own present and indeed with our foreseeable future because the conditions that generated it have not gone away” (2–3).

This conjunction, which is deeply historicist rather than presentist, is perhaps the strongest warrant for continuing to concern ourselves with Wordsworth. Indeed, Simpson never loses sight of the distance that separates the twenty...