G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 1995. 269. $39.50 (U.S.) cloth. Wordsworth has been the subject of only a handful of really good psychobiographical readings. This one can count among the selected few. G. Kim Blank has taken a fresh, penetrating look into the hiding-places of Words worth’s strange and transformational power as a poet, and his book compellingly dramatizes both the biographical facts and their emotional con sequences. Blank’s thesis centres on Wordsworth’s “thematics of trauma” (219), beginning with the early deaths of his parents and his subsequent custody with uncaring and emotionally distant relatives. This knowledge is not new to scholars, but Blank’s reinterpretation of the biographical data provides original insights and emphases that cast Wordsworth’s early work as an allegorical “poetry of reenactment” (27) that repeats, as it seeks to understand, the poet’s feelings of abandonment, loss, suffering, guilt, and anxiety. Blank’s study has depth and momentum: his psychological in sight, combined with the forward thrust of a narrative that acquires mythic intensity, makes the reader want to imagine: yes, this is the way it must have been. Blank proceeds “to open the case file” (72) on Wordsworth’s psychoso matic symptoms, especially the incapacitating pain that Wordsworth ha bitually associated with the act of writing. Analysis reveals unresolved emotional conflicts that are repeated without being worked through in the early texts; thus Wordsworth’s poetry at points “is confessional without knowing exactly what it is confessing” (164). But Blank shows how, over time, Wordsworth’s poetry does come to terms with itself: thought comes in aid of feeling (119-20, 127, 178), and a philosophic mind ultimately allays the perturbations of the soul. The book moves fluently from biographical narrative into close reading, each chapter tracing the after effects of child hood trauma in Wordsworth’s poetry up to the Intimations Ode. Tintern Abbey, the “Lucy” poems, Nutting, Home at Grasmere, The Ruined Cottage, the 1799 Prelude, other texts from Goslar and from Lyrical Ballads — Blank has new and substantial things to say about all of these as manifestations of Wordsworth’s struggle toward “self-integration or self-actualization” (134). Blank returns to one topos, “certainly the most characteristic and perva sive of all Wordsworth’s reenacted scenarios: the figure of the child facing death” (182). While this figure has been read by critics as an instance of a proleptic imagination or the expression of an epitaphic rhetoric, Blank metic ulously relates it “to the feelings [Wordsworth] has not yet resolved out of the circumstances of his own childhood — childhood’s end and the dissolu tion of a family” (182). But Blank also convincingly shows how this figure i i 3 of “the difficult, lost child virtually disappears from Wordsworth’s poetry” (214) after the Intimations Ode, and along with it some of the “emotional intensity” (215). Here Blank counters the “decline theory” (80)— the persis tent idea that “Wordsworth’s genius failed him or that he experienced a loss of power” (80) after, say, 1807 or 1814— using psychological rather than po litical evidence: “Wordsworth’s poetry changed because the problems that earlier inspired the material of his poetry were no longer there” (80). Thus the drowned man episode in The Prelude, to take a paradigmatic example of Wordsworth’s transformational poetry, serves to turn trauma into a pur posive event, gratulant, formative, essential to Wordsworth’s development as a poet and a person. Integration, the synthesis of thought and feeling in poetry, plays a critical role in the process of psychic healing: in the swal lowing up of corpse by landscape, “an unforgettable and troubling image is integrated within the larger scene, a scene, of course, that can stand as a foundation and continuation of Wordsworth’s own life” (180). Truth — and I feel it. While here or there I might emphasize certain things differently — for example, I have a more positive reading of the coda to “Nutting” — time and again Blank’s explications are superbly persuasive in their synthesis of textual and biographical detail. One refreshing aspect of Blank’s study...