Wordsworth’s “System,” the Critical Reviews, and the Reconstruction of Literary Authority

Abstract

This essay examines the critical reviews’ responses to Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems in Two Volumes, 1814 Excursion, and 1815 Poems, and specifically the repeated charge that he has constructed a “system,” in relation to Wordsworth’s attempt to reconstruct his relationship to the reading public and authorize himself a poet. Many reviewers identified Wordsworth’s “system”—his rejection of traditional poetic diction and subject matter for his own highly theorized poems of simple and rustic speech and rustic life—as a challenge to traditional poetic authority and the cultural and social hierarchy that defined literature, hence as politically and socially dangerous. Although Wordsworth’s poetry and theory did have systematic ambitions, this essay argues that he was primarily concerned with constructing an author‐centered poetics to justify his own professional autonomy, independent from traditional mediating structures of authority. The figure of the Pedlar in the Excursion, together with critics’ responses, provides a brief case study. The essay then concludes by arguing that Coleridge’s commentary on Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria, with its model of an institutionalized interpretive “clerisy,” provided a new structure of public authority that contained the ideological danger of Wordsworth’s author‐centered “system” and made it acceptable for an increasingly professionalized, middle‐class society.