“Empire of the Muse”: American Encounters with Wordsworth

Abstract

This essay investigates a series of encounters – critical, textual, and personal – between Wordsworth and his American Romantic contemporaries that helped to solidify the poet's transatlantic reputation. In keeping with negative British reviews, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and William Ellery Channing initially scorned Wordsworth's experimental poetics, but they became earnest advocates of both his poetry and his values as a result of their contemplative reading and their conversations with the poet himself. These writers function as case studies of the larger history of Wordsworth's reception in America: a history fraught by both nationalist suspicion and tremendous creative exchange.