Biographia Literaria - Chapter IV (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Chapter IV [of XXII] [To read other chapters, click here.]
The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems—On fancy and imagination—
The investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts.
myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from
the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly
sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose,
if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own
furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of
poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and
proselytes.
As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in
themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in
the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have
precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this
declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it
up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to
derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or
ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which
the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso,
that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,
the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as
actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and
passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been
considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to
perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives
chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in
easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but
little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which
seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the
volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet
habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented
themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in
proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few,
perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern
Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old
Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with
kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other
poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place
between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style;
as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon
Lee. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain
unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them,
that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned;
yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed
them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole
work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new
writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently
the proper direction of the author's genius.
In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the
Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of
the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been
since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems
themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the
theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or
forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked
direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of
choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as
excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number,
though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being
deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for
granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few
exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems
and the poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which
predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author
possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very
positive,—but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the
right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind,
which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by
wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and
argumentative essay to persuade them, that
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]
That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to
believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own
knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost
every different person on some different poem. Among those, whose
candour and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who
expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same
words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting,
that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange
as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable,
another quoted as his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind,
that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as
was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have
been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the
one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.
However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and
subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were
some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find
a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I
mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with
more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--
that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the
Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the
remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have
heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single
poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier
kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise.
This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had
not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of
the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable
of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a
twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the
usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright
simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in
feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of
mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters,
should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost
religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds,
liberal education, and not
———with academic laurels unbestowed;
and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still
continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in
Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed
to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;—
CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.
D. All' exoloisth' auto koax.
Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha
g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di' haemeras,
brekekekex, koax, koax!
D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.
CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.
D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di' haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
CH. Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!
During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled
Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an
original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently
announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in
the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a
harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images
all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world,
where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell,
within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only
peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own
impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images,
acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands
always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,—at all events,
than descriptive poetry—has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore
justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have
sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the
author's genius as it was then displayed.—
'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.
The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as
many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is
remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults
and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest
compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as
heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they
constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or
we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours,
and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from
their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had
the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory
lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by
his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished,
but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of
The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the
Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced
diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath
himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly
reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an
additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and
appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor
permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect
control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly
disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the
attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my
judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the
fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in
modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of
spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height
of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which,
for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up
the sparkle and the dew drops.
This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I
no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led
me first to suspect,—(and a more intimate analysis of the human
faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my
conjecture into full conviction,)—that Fancy and Imagination were two
distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according
to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at
furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is
not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in
all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain
collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to
desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which
the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as
the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents
of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in
mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be
proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under
one and the same word, and—this done—to appropriate that word
exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one,
to the other. But if,—(as will be often the case in the arts and
sciences,)—no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a
word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and
been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties
generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To
the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the
term imagination; while the other would be contra-distinguished as
fancy. Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no
less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's
Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,
from Shakespeare's
What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?
or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the
fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some
additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects
furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and
ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes
by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination
and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production.
To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of
originality.
It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long
been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,
are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I
trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in
the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I
confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception
of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by
the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a
time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the
belief that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out
the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed
the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's
recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his
specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be
both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added
to the late collection of his Lyrical Ballads and other poems. The explanation
which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine,
chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. It could scarcely
indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent
conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first
directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made
more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation
of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to
consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their
diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal
principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has
drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I
wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift
themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our
common consciousness.
Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw
more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a
miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the
Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious
author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port
and dignity of his language,—and though he wrote for men of learning
in a learned age,—saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard
against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his
subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which, (continues
he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more
needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem
by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them)
dark and intricate." I would gladly therefore spare both myself and
others this labour, if I knew how without it to present an
intelligible statement of my poetic creed,—not as my opinions, which
weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises
conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a
fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we
shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in
their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to
endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so
much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have
supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other
authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as
to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory
which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the
grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its
justification.
[Here ends chapter 4. To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]
* * *
FOOTNOTES [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
[18] In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never
before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of
an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state
of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place
when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her
two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense,
of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which
constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate
vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the
consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly
abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull, "I was
a fine child, but they changed me:" the first conception expressed in
the word "I," is that of personal identity—Ego contemplans: the second
expressed in the word "me," is the visual image or object by which the
mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal
identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
existed,—Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for
another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by
its immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered
possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each
singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by
its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add
only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words
I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct
meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness,
sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that
act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose
the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the
connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such
connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were
standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly
standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course
have a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as
persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are
known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.
[19] Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan
reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to
the recent collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with
Xanthias—
su d' ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,
kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di', oud' ephrontisa.—Ranae, 492-3.
And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and
pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth's style, that at once to
conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and
dulness, as is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry,
of our Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events
of satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and
childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more
childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the
parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and,
what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry
seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor,
naked half human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics:
and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone
satirize by copying. At least the difference which must blend with and
balance the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation,
existing here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller's
heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding.
[20] The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul's fair emblem, and its only name—
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.
[21] Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The Evening Walk
and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this latter defect
than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may however be
exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure construction, in
which he more often offended, in the following lines:—
"'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,
Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;
Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray,
And apple sickens pale in summer's ray;
Ev'n here content has fixed her smiling reign
With independence, child of high disdain."
I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other
purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be
regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems
entire.
[22] This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and
to the other an exclusive use; as "to put on the back" and "to
indorse;" or by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist,"
and "physician;" or by difference of relation, as "I" and "Me" (each
of which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the
cases singular of the first personal pronoun). Even the mere
difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if
it have become general, will produce a new word with a distinct
signification; thus "property" and "propriety;" the latter of which,
even to the time of Charles II was the written word for all the senses
of both. There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula
infusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute
beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point
appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature
divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of the
halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no
means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the
conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few
simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each new
application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a
different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The
after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation,
will modify it still further till at length all trace of the original
likeness is worn away.
[23] I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which
I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty
specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire
the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the
greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their
accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a
second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query;
whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed,
as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute
synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many
which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and
which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue.
When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,—
(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive
and of course imperfect)—erroneous consequences will be drawn, and
what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in
toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the
things themselves—(whether in or out of the mind)—for a knowledge of
the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the
equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the
appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been
used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and
of such general currency that the language does as it were think for
us—(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for
arithmetical knowledge)—we then say, that it is evident to common
sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was
born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at
large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At
least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it
is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in
genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal
reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world was
called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers
exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy
would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion
and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what
appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a
mere confusion of terms.
Categories: British,Autobiography,Poetry,Coleridge (Samuel T.),1800s,Philosophy
Tags: British Literature Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria
Page after page of tedious and pedantic thought from Mr. Coleridge. Now I understand why Miriam gave up her dissertation on Wordsworth. It was out of sheer boredom so she remains ABD.
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LOL...
Interesting that you, of all people, commented on this. I originally bought my copy of Biographia Literaria around the corner from your house at Miranda Books -- used, for $2.50, on June 3rd 1993 - before I knew you lived there.
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Did you expect anyone to comment?
With the exception of myself I doubt if anyone else read it since it is so dense and to add to this the copious notes that follow the text. I guess it is worth at least $2.50 if you are a Wordsworth scholar. Miranda books no longer exists but Mind Fair took its place. 1993 is a long time to have had this book.
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It can be a bit "dense," as you put it - but the book covers a lot of other ground as well, and I suspect you might find some of the later chapters (there are 22 in all) a bit more engaging. That said, I haven't read the whole thing yet.
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