Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordsworth's Genius

Abstract

This essay examines how and why Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine represented Wordsworth as a great poet in the period from 1818 to 1822, in the context of the complex relationship between the Romantic “myth” of genius and the operations of the literary marketplace in the early nineteenth century. A number of strong commercial and ideological reasons contributed to the magazine's support of the poet: for example, its opposition to the Edinburgh Review, and its desire to put forward an account of poetic genius as, ideally, a locus of timeless, orthodox values, rather than a dangerous, transgressive force which threatened the sociopolitical status quo. The second part of the article focuses on the third of John Wilson's “Letters from the Lakes” (1819), a panegyrical account of Wordsworth as both private gentleman and solitary genius. But it is argued that Wilson had ambivalent feelings about his fellow “Lake Poet.” He sought both to improve Wordsworth's cultural status, and to offend him by publicizing his private life, thus imbricating him in the contemporary culture of “personality” which the poet so deplored.