Is it not possible, under certain conditions and at certain times, for very important things to betray themselves in very slight indications?... So let us not under-value small signs: perhaps from them it may be possible to come upon the tracks of greater things.(Freud: 31)

Since the mid 1980s, Jerome J. McGann has been the" most influential critic of Romanticism"(Cronin: 5). McGann's interventions in this field have been decisive in opening and revising the Romantic canon as well as in altering our approach to Romantic texts. Due in large part to McGann many more very different poets from the period are today being read in the historical, contextual manner he has theorised and advocated. As such his work has been and is a salutary source of inspiration for most contemporary Romanticists. Yet one serious problem remains: in book after book, essay after essay, McGann features William Wordsworth in the role of the partly cunning reactionary, partly deluded idealist, who wrongly suppresses particular socio-historical or psychic actualities from the surface of his poetry. In his major work in Romantic criticism, The Romantic Ideology, which provided the script and set the stage for Anglo-American Romantic criticism well into the 1990s, one of McGann's central premises is that Wordsworth's poetry enacts" a strategy of displacement" whereby" The poem annihilates its history, biographical and socio-historical alike, and replaces these particulars with a record of pure consciousness"(90). Here it only remains for McGann to add" that Wordsworth's... is a false consciousness needs scarcely to be said"(ibid.).