Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth's 'Excursion'. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-804-729719 (hbk). Price: £30/$39.50 (hbk).

Francis Jeffrey thought The Excursion would never do; Shelley saw it as a sell-out, Byron as a drowsy, frowsy bore. Few critics have worked up convincing enthusiasm for the poem, though, of late, there have been some efforts. One, as yet not fully explored, fact about the poem coming more and more into focus is its intricate compositional history; parts date from as early as the late 1790s, and as Mark L. Reed remarks, 'the chronology of the poem remains, in all, highly speculative' (quoted on p. 183). Alison Hickey draws on this fact in her sophisticated and thought-provoking bid to persuade us to look anew at The Excursion. For Hickey, the poem is 'a complex textual system that defies linear notions of temporality, not just on the level of composition history, but, more important, on a thematic or figural level' (p. 8). She sees the poem as altogether more complex, shifting, and unstable than has been allowed, and reads it in terms of its 'impure conceits' (The Excursion, 2.485): a phrase that she uses, in deconstructive fashion, to highlight 'gaps and strayings', themselves 'thematized in the poem's plots of deviation and deferral, usurpation, broken lineages, and unfulfilled promises' (p. 14). So, for instance, she revisits the question of the poem's epitaphic ambitions, developing Frances Ferguson's observation that Wordsworth's 'incarnational claim' for language in the third Essay upon Epitaphs is 'at least partially at odds with the very notion of epitaph as a sign pointing to a de-incarnation' (p. 72). Hickey suggests that Wordsworth's talk of 'incarnation' marks an unrealizable trust in 'aspiration'. Epitaphs themselves, she goes on, can never embody a 'life', gesturing, as they do, 'to past and future but enclosing neither' (p. 73). The entire poem, for Hickey, is engaged in the attempt to 'contain or channel temporality' through 'figures' that only end up disclosing their own 'precariousness' (p. 75). All this might have made for a certain logic-chopping sameness in the writing, and yet Hickey's book is more than a rhetorical demonstration of how assertions undermine themselves. She is able to show how anxieties about language bear intimately on Wordsworth's political concerns. For instance, in chapter 3 she addresses the ambivalences lurking within his (or the Wanderer's) eloquent anticipation in Book 9 of a time when 'this imperial Realm' shall prize 'knowledge as her noblest wealth / And best protection'. Wordsworth is not sure whether education 'frees or subdues' (p. 108); education seeks ' To impress a vivid feeling on the mind', in the words of Book 8, line 828, a way of putting it that is, in Hickey's words, 'an equivocal, if typically Wordsworthian, blend of imposition and inspiration' (p. 108). This equivocalness extends to Wordsworth's view of Andrew Bell's Madras system of education. The Madras system, on Hickey's account, arranges 'children in pairs made of a tutor and tutee (both pupils under the regulation of an overseer'. It lent itself both to 'the spread of democracy' and to 'the extension of exploitative structures' (p. 109). Wordsworth's interest in the system is bound up with his career-long concern with the relationship between imagination and education, and with the fear that there may be 'a fundamental incompatibility between native power and education'. 'Knowledge not purchased with the loss of power' may have been The Prelude's desire, but, for Hickey, the Madras system provoked in Wordsworth the mixed feelings attendant on his view of the 'diffusion of imaginative power'. This diffusion might be seen as 'democratization' or as 'indoctrination' (p. 113). Hickey is alert, here and throughout, to the poetry's hesitations, stallings and …