Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation by James M. Garrett

Abstract

Book Reviews James M. Garrett. Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x+214. $99.95. In Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation, James Garrett makes the case that Wordsworth’s construction ofa public poetic selfwas inseparable from his participation in the collective construction of British national identity: the writing of “the nation” as a powerful abstraction upheld and preserved by national institutions. The book traces Wordsworth’s career, focusing particular attention on works published between 1814 and 1820, a time when the poet, “active in the creation of his own self-image” (8), was in­ tensely involved in revising, rearranging, and republishing his writing. Ac­ cording to Garrett, these years constituted a “crucial period” during which Wordsworth was also making a “deliberate and self-conscious effort to write a national poetry and become the national poet” (69). The book uncovers and elucidates the vital connections between Wordsworth’s writings of this period and such government-sponsored pro­ jects as the census, the geological survey, and the museum: projects devised and carried out to produce “empirical representations of the nation” based on the results of increasingly systemized “[cjounting, classifying, surveying, mapping, collecting, and preserving” on a national scale (2). Aware that his approach may seem “dangerously close to what Alan Liu has called the ‘embarrassment ofthe New Historicism,’ the holding up ‘to view a histori­ cal context on one side, a literary text on the other, and, in between, a connection of pure nothing’” (5), Garrett explicitly defends his approach by emphasizing that his focus is on “the abstract modalities of power” as these involve both “the institutional methodologies reified by that power” and “agents, such as Wordsworth, who both participate in and are subtly resistant to such modalities” (5): rather than occupying separate “sides” connected by “nothing” of substance, authors and institutions, on this higher level of abstraction, share a common engagement with the same modalities and encounter versions of the same attendant conflicts and con­ tradictions. Pairing the national projects with Wordsworthian counterparts, Garrett attends closely to the specific ways in which both Wordsworth’s poetics and the methodologies of such institutional undertakings as the census and survey interact with these modalities. As the detailed analyses in this thoroughly-researched and well-executed book demonstrate, what SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 715 716 BOOK REVIEWS might seem to be an unbridgeable gap between these distinct realms of British culture more closely resembles a crossroads. In his Introduction, Garrett lays out the multiple dimensions of his topic with impressive clarity, defining his approach in relation to the work of other critics and theorists. Of all those who have written on Wordsworth, from Matthew Arnold to current scholars, few of the household names are omitted. The primary effect of this abundance of references is, somewhat unexpectedly, to widen the scope and broaden the implications of Garrett’s arguments. The readable exposition comes to life not only in generous col­ legial acknowledgments but also in biographical sketches of some of the “bluff empirical men” who “fanned out across Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century to construct empirical representations of the na­ tion” (2). These men shared with each other, and with Wordsworth, an in­ tense enthusiasm for collecting and classifying data. As Garrett acknowl­ edges, this keenness to subsume particulars under a classificatory grid conjures up a Foucauldian “picture of disciplinary mechanisms and docile bodies” (3). But this is not the whole picture. Equally characteristic of the archiving mind—whether its object be poems, populations, terrain, or na­ tional traits—is its readiness to perceive distinctions. The “modality” that Garrett traces is a dialectic springing from this conflict between the en­ deavor to categorize and the intractable detail that resists categorization. The book is divided into three parts—Census, Map, and Museum—and generally follows the chronology ofWordsworth’s career. Individual chap­ ters describe and contextualize particular forms of empirical representation and recount the history of their conception and development. For exam­ ple, chapter 1 traces the origins and evolution of the British census. These historicized accounts are skillfully interwoven with analyses of Words­ worth’s writings and poetic practice. Chapter...