Simon Jarvis. Wordsworth's Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 267. $39-99. Despite the emphasis on expanding the canon in professional studies of British romanticism over the past quarter-century, Wordsworth remains a uniquely salient figure in the landscape. Efforts to reconceptualize romanticism always involve some kind of nourishing or bruising encounter with him--or at least with an attenuated Wordsworth-avatar: a specter whom the critic conjures up in order to caricature away (as male egoist; as "idealist"). Something about Wordsworth's poetic project seems irrevocably bound up with academic romanticism's ability (and desire, and need) to ask and answer large, urgent questions about who we are, and what it is we do--what literature is, or criticism, or history or life. If Simon Jarvis says little about romanticism as a concept or event or institutional discourse in Wordsworth's Philosophic Song, this is mainly because his eye is trained on even larger game. The near-range target is the currently popular misreading of Wordsworth as a representative of "aesthetic ideology"; but Jarvis, the author of a fine monograph on Adorno, understands his local acts of interpretation to be always in some way wrestling the hundred-handed phantom of Western modernity itself. How should or do we read poetry, or, more generally, experience art? Is disenchantment possible or desirable? What is ideology, and what would a genuinely materialist criticism look like?
