To call Professor Hartman's new book Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814 is about as relevant as squeezing the late C. S. Lewis between the covers of an Oxford History. Those who come to it expecting the survey its title implies will find instead a series of insights, stimulating, personal, not to be relied on. Apart from moments of chronological vagueness Professor Hartman's scholarship is exact, but his approach sometimes seems strangely beside the point as one returns to the poetry itself….

The correct title for the book would undoubtedly be Wordsworth's Apocalyptic Imagination. In The Unmediated Vision of 1954 Professor Hartman "glimpsed" "a paradox inherent in the human and poetic imagination: it cannot be at the same time true to nature and true to itself". Now he goes much farther. We are presented with "the drama of consciousness and maturation", shown a Wordsworth "plagued" by the fear "that nature is not enough, that his imagination is essentially apocalyptic and must violate the middle world of common things and loves". "The poet's later strength", it is asserted, "has its origin in experiences that intimate (negatively) a death of nature and (positively) a faculty whose power is independent of nature". Despite the occasional reassuring summary, it is not easy to isolate the stages of Wordsworth's alleged development. Professor Hartman treats The Prelude as if it recorded historical fact, and often seems to be discussing the child in terms far more relevant to the poet of twenty years later. The early poetry, too, is wrenched to fit the pattern of Wordsworth's progressive alienation from nature….

The author's central position is much weakened by his refusal to take seriously Wordsworth's belief in the One Life. In The Unmediated Vision he went to extraordinary lengths to deny that there was pantheism in "the light of setting suns", and here the question is passed over with the odd contemptuous reference to Wordsworth's "mild anima mundi religion". This is not merely an omission. In 1798–99—the period of "Tintern Abbey" and the early parts of The Prelude—apocalypse meant for Wordsworth not self-consciousness, autonomy, but communion. The two things are radically opposed….

Always at the back of Professor Hartman's mind is the Apostrophe to Imagination in Prelude Book VI…. Certainly the mind is autonomous but is the passage the climax of a prolonged struggle towards consciousness, or merely an isolated moment of imaginative power? There were after all seven Books of The Prelude to go when it was written, and yet there is no sequel. And what of Professor Hartman's admission, courageous if not wise, that it is difficult to know whether Wordsworth's imagination had in fact become fully independent before this point? His book is often dangerously far from the poetry as such, but it would be hard to feel much impressed by an autonomy reached after all but a handful of Wordsworth's great poems had been written.

The importance of Professor Hartman's central thesis may be open to doubt, but his detailed criticism can be very good…. A great deal of thought too has gone into the notes and critical bibliographies, which are well worth reading in their own right.