Some Lucretian Elements in Wordsworth

Abstract

W HAT constitute legitimate grounds for comparison? In V manifold answers to this perennial question we can trace both history of academic literary studies during past century and rich tensions among contemporary speculative schools. Comparisons are usually made with reference to tropes or topics: first a rhetorical and formal, second a thematic and ideological, way of establishing connections among writers. One sure ground for finding stylistic or substantive relationships is genetic: philology, as basis of an organic, diachronic historicism, and Quellenforschungen of old-fashioned sources and analogues sort started it all. Recent rhetorical analyses which trace tropes and echoes metaleptically through a single literature or across national and linguistic borders continue historicist model, as does eccentric revisionism of Harold Bloom, energetically discovering or imposing configurations among contemporary American poetry, English Romanticism, psychoanalytic theory, and Jewish mysticism.' The other habitual basis for comparison, less stylistic than thematic, and synchronic rather than diachronic, isolates periods, enlarges ideas that may have been mere motes in eye of Zeitgeist into isms and schools and movements, and produces those topical handles and convenient labels (e.g., the city in Baudelaire, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, the Romantic Hero, post-modernism) so necessary to literary pedagogy. But grounds keep shifting, and today's canon may become tomor-