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“... Wordsworth’s poetry has been able to animate critical writing, relevantly, from several different points of view. Narratologists have discussed the gaps in his storytelling and the vulnerability of the selves that do the relating; historically-minded criticism has unearthed the contemporary writings with which Wordsworth’s interact, and also shown how far he was involved not only in the politics of poetry but in the politics of public affairs; textual criticism has uncovered an exceptionally rich store of newly published texts and variants, many of them representing his first and arguably best thoughts; deconstructionists have homed in on the paradox of a poetic mission which aims to realise the ‘sad incompetence of human speech’, while both deconstruction and psychoanalysis have been attuned to Wordsworth’s sense that crucial human insights are founded, not on achieved knowledge, but on moments of loss, absence and negation – the ‘Fallings from us, vanishings;/Blank misgivings’ of the ‘Immortality Ode ...”

“... is not matched by visual or verbal precision. His palette is vivid, but his facture is slack. Peter Robinson’s Leaf-Viewing is a slender, finely-produced pamphlet which comes complete with a commentary by Peter Swaab. The commentary is helpful and perceptive, but it raises the question of why – other than to ...”