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Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth and the Prose Tradition in PoetryRobert LangbaumRobert Langbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 27, Number 1Winter 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24042482 Views: 1Total views on this site © 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessAnnual ReviewCoordinates of AngloAmerican Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle & Emerson. Richard E. Brantley.Robert LangbaumRobert Langbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 25, Number 4Autumn 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043127 Views: 1Total views on this site © 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBritish Romantic FictionBritish Romanticism and British Romantic Fiction: A ForumKarl Kroeber, Jerome J. McGann, and Robert LangbaumKarl Kroeber Search for more articles by this author , Jerome J. McGann Search for more articles by this author , and Robert Langbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 10, Number 2Spring 1979 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24040909 Views: 3Total views on this site © 1979 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessTHE WORDSWORTH HERITAGE APPEALRobert Barth, Paul Betz, Beth Darlington, David Erdman, Marilyn Gaull, Geoffrey Hartman, John Jordan, Robert Langbaum, Herbert Lindenberger, Thomas McFarland, Russell Noyes, David Perkins, Mark Reed, Donald Reiman, Chester Shaver, Jack Stillinger, Helen Vendler, and Carl WoodringRobert Barth Search for more articles by this author , Paul Betz Search for more articles by this author , Beth Darlington Search for more articles by this author , David Erdman Search for more articles by this author , Marilyn Gaull Search for more articles by this author , Geoffrey Hartman Search for more articles by this author , John Jordan Search for more articles by this author , Robert Langbaum Search for more articles by this author , Herbert Lindenberger Search for more articles by this author , Thomas McFarland Search for more articles by this author , Russell Noyes Search for more articles by this author , David Perkins Search for more articles by this author , Mark Reed Search for more articles by this author , Donald Reiman Search for more articles by this author , Chester Shaver Search for more articles by this author , Jack Stillinger Search for more articles by this author , Helen Vendler Search for more articles by this author , and Carl Woodring Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 10, Number 4Autumn 1979 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24040754 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1979 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.

In the same sense that Dante's great poem can be said to derive its meaning from a Catholic, and Milton's from a Protestant, ethos—so Browning's The Ring and the Book derives its meaning from the relativist ethos predominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. The first sign of the poem's relativism is in Browning's use of dramatic monologues to tell his story. For though he does not entirely succeed, his aim at least in telling the same story eleven times over through ten dramatic monologues and his own account in Book i, was to replace the objective view of events of traditional drama and narrative with points of view. Such a method can be justified only on the relativist assumption that truth cannot be apprehended in itself but must be “induced” from particular points of view, and that there can be sufficient difference among the points of view to make each repetition interesting and important as a psychological fact.