Leon Waldoff. Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics: The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation. Columbia, MO: U. of Missouri Press, 2001. ISBN 0826213294. Price: US$29.95.

After a lucid review of most of the prevailing approaches to Wordsworth of the past 30 years or so--deconstructive, New Historicist, dialogic, intertextual, feminist, cultural--Leon Waldoff informs the reader that there is a basic formal and psychological project yet to do on "Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and Independence," the "Immortality Ode," and "Elegiac Stanzas." On the face of it, this seems an amazing claim, for how can anything of importance on these rigorously scrutinized lyrics have been left undone? Waldoff says: Following a first chapter of foundational reflection on how the idealized "I" of the poems can also be a biographical reality of a poet speaking in his own person, each chapter on the poems proceeds to carry out a significant formal and psychological analysis of Wordsworth's rhetoric of dramatic self-representation. In "The Lyrical 'I' as a Self-Dramatization," Waldoff argues against considering the poet as a persona in his autobiographical poems, because that is "an artificial boundary between life and art that is particularly inappropriate for Wordsworth" (20). Instead, Waldoff argues to support Wordsworth's claim--and Keats's affirmation of the egotistical impulse of Wordsworth's poetry--that when he is not speaking through the mouths of his characters, he is speaking "to us in his own person" as the subject of his poems "in two senses of the word, as speaker and as theme" (17). To deal with the paradox of an idealized "I" employing a range of rhetorical strategies and yet still being, not "Wordsworth," but Wordsworth, Waldoff hypothesizes a transitional self that moves, as Freud said, in "an intermediate region between illness and real life" (29). Building on the theorizing of Winnicut on "potential space" for transitional experience, of Murray Schwartz on the psychological space between subjective and objective worlds the reader of literature enters in the act of reading, and of Peter Brooks's refinement of an "artificial space" shared by the reader and text or the speaker and listener where "real investments of desire" can occur (31), Waldoff describes the experience of the "I" in the poem thusly: "the experience of the 'I' of a poem is not purely fictional or illusory, but rather a piece of the poet's real life. It is a transitional experience in a potential space and the 'I' acts out certain potentialities of the poet's self in a theater of the poet's mind" (33). The lesser goal of the transitional experience is self-transformation; the higher is self-realization, of becoming, at least for a moment, the self one wishes to be. Epiphanic moments of self-realization constitute "both a structural principle and a principle of being . . . for the 'I' of the major lyrics" (36). This is the theoretical highlight of the study and I think a significant contribution to the always difficult issue on the relationship of even autobiographical literature to biography, or to life. But why does Wordsworth repeatedly put his "I" through successive poetic structures to reach "new awareness" again and again? Waldoff begins the practical criticism of the poems with the self-dramatizing strategies of "Tintern Abbey," the poem most assuredly spoken by the "poet in his own person," or so it would seem. Waldoff walks a fine line here in achieving a balance between the autobiographical/historical Wordsworth and the Wordsworth designing a rhetorical structure of a transitional self, dramatizing his way to self-transformation. The dramatics begin with the poet stationing himself on-site and apparently alone, and speaking in the present tense ("Once again do I behold"), when by his own report the poem was composed on a four-day walking tour with Dorothy after leaving Tintern. As Waldoff remarks, he is intent at …