In exploring Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer, the author's interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socioeconomic status.

Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Shedding fresh light on Wordsworth's contested relationship with an England that changed dramatically over the course of his career, James Garrett places the poet's lifelong attempt to control his literary representation within the context of national ideas of self-determination represented by the national census, national survey, and national museum. Garrett provides historical background on the origins of these three institutions, which were initiated in Britain near the turn of the nineteenth century, and shows how their development converged with Wordsworth's own as a writer. The result is a new narrative for Wordsworth studies that re-integrates the early, middle, and late periods of the poet's career. Detailed critical discussions of Wordsworth's poetry, including works that are not typically accorded significant attention, force us to reconsider the usual view of Wordsworth as a fading middle-aged poet withdrawing into the hills. Rather, Wordsworth's ceaseless reworking of earlier poems and the flurry of new publications between 1814 and 1820 reveal Wordsworth as an engaged public figure attempting to 'write the nation' and position himself as the nation's poet.

The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.

Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.

Where others have oriented Wordsworth towards ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or - more recently - political repression, Paul H. Fry argues that underlying all this is a more fundamental insight - Wordsworth is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities, but rather that it simply exists.

Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, 1800–1830: Romantic Crises is a study of the political lives of William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans between 1800 and 1830. Tracing trajectories from the first decade of the nineteenth century to the meeting of the two authors in 1830, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsargues that the dominant paradigm for their political thought was that of “crisis.” Obsessed with the mysterious connections between the individual, the home, and the state, Wordsworth and Hemans portrayed all three in a common crisis that would be resolved in the future. Both writers articulated historical moments when the tenuousness of the present society gave glimpses into a future one. Building on and reacting to the strong critical statements of the 80s and 90s that tended to see the political views of Wordsworth and Hemans as formed by personal crises, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsargues that far from being tied to personal circumstances, crises were staged by Wordsworth and Hemans to argue for clear political positions on a wide variety of topics. Because crises come with claims of singularity, the use of crises to explain historical change finds its origin in revolutionary ideology. But because imagined crises proliferated throughout the Romantic period, crises no longer signaled earth-shattering change, but business as usual. The ideology of crises carried the tension between revolution and modernity that haunted the Romantic period. Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicspresents revisionary readings of major works and contributes to long-standing discussions on a number of different topics: dissenting politics, poor relief, gender roles in peace and wartime, and the nature of historical memory, to name a few. By focusing on the dramatic nature of crisis narratives, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politicsresponds to master narratives of the Romantic period that limit and simplify political expression. The book restores complexity to the political lives of two poets who fashioned revolutionary ideology for their own ends.