Wordsworth Now and Then

Conventional criticism discusses Wordsworth's poetry in terms of what his writing might have meant then, around 1800. Antony Easthope writes about how we can read that poetry now, nearly 200 years on. His Wordsworth is produced by the ideologies of Romanticism but is also our contemporary, a poet to be read alongside today's popular culture (if Wordsworth has regrets about his past, so does Frank Sinatra). Professor Easthope draws on recent critical theory to show how Wordsworth's poetry works, how the love of Nature, sincere personal experience and telling the truth about yourself all come about as effects of language.