William Wordsworth's centrality to any review of English Romantic period writing continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and methodologies change, but as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a canonical core of writers. Of those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre stage either as the best support of the new theories, or as the writer whose authority they must displace in order to show their innovative power and originality. One might risk saying that, for good or ill, Arnold has proved right in his predictions and Swinburne wrong: it is Wordsworth and Byron, not Coleridge and Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canonical English poetry of the romantic age. In Wordsworth and Byron inhere the definitive contrasts of the period's sensibility and style, the consistent Englishness of the former and the cosmopolitan inconsistency of the latter. But the recognition Wordsworth received in his own lifetime was not so straightforward.

These days, the lingua franca on the Boardwalk in Brighton Beach is Russian. For every ice cream parlor there are two Gastronoms named after another city in the former Soviet Union. On any given morning, rain or shine, winter or summer, you can see a group of Russian Jews doing calesthenics on the beach. For some, the boardwalk joining Brighton Beach to Sea Gate via Coney Island represents Odessa. For others, its Russian restaurants, nightclubs, fruit stands, and bookstores represent their ethnic haven in the New World, within earshot of the ubiquitous El (New York elevated railway).

These Russian Jews have closed the circle of the mass immigration to America, not only because the beaches and baths, Luna Park and Dreamland, Thousand-and-One-Nights and Tower of Seville were the first taste of paradise for millions of their coreligionists, but also because, with their backs to America and their faces to the ocean, the new immigrants have replicated a whole era in Jewish American culture. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Coney Island became the physical and psychological boundary between the Old World and the New, a liminal, conflictual space where one's longing – and loathing – for the Old World were experienced most keenly; where, awash in the sea of humanity, or as pilgrim to this mecca of mass amusement, the Jewish newcomer sometimes felt more alone than anywhere else. On the beach itself, a million footsteps and a thousand sand castles are washed away daily with the tide. So too the Jewish cultural experiment whose bold contours were highlighted so clearly against the backdrop of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It has vanished, with nary a trace, so that each generation is left to repeat the cycle all over again: from exile, to deliverance, to exile.

Almost twenty-five years ago, Irving Howe introduced his collection, Jewish American Stories, by declaring that Jewish American writing had “probably moved past its high point,” having found “its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approache[d] disintegration” (16, 3). Today, Howe's essay still remains the best discussion of the distinctive “voice and passion” that he identified as the trademark of writers of “the immigrant Jewish milieu”: “the judgment, affection and hatred they bring to bear upon the remembered world of their youth and the costs exacted by their struggle to tear themselves away...the vibration of old stories remembered and retold...[and] the lure of nostalgia” (3). Indeed, the terms by which Howe championed such writers as Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow have largely determined what has come to be known as the Jewish American literary canon – so much so that it has become impossible not to cite him in any discussion of this literature. However, by defining Jewish American writing as he did – as a “regional literature” that “would be incomprehensible to a reader who lacked some memory or impression” of its particular context (5) – Howe's prediction of the decline of Jewish American fiction was already inherent in his definition. Given its very specificity of place and time, it was inevitable that the body of literature that he described would eventually cease to appear.

The 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' was prefaced from 1815 on by an excerpt from a lyric written much earlier:

It would be difficult to better this as a characterization of Wordsworth's own poetic development. All the central preoccupations of his maturity are to be found in his earliest writing. It is as if he were born with his literary identity fully formed. Just how true this is has only recently been revealed, because until 1997 no comprehensive edition of the juvenilia had been published. Now, thanks to the labours of Jared Curtis and Carol Landon for the Cornell Wordsworth series edition of Early Poems and Fragments, 1785-1797, we can fully appreciate the achievement represented by Wordsworth's first long poem, The Vale of Esthwaite, completed when he was seventeen in 1787. His earliest verses, on the subject of 'The Summer Vacation', had been written three years before as a school exercise; inspiration would have come partly from his reading.

Thomas Bowman, the master of Hawkshead Grammar School, was among Wordsworth’s mentors, and lent his precocious charge copies of Cowper’s The Task, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, and Burns’ Poems when they were first published. Few facts testify so eloquently to Wordsworth’s good fortune in his teachers. Contemporary poetry formed no part of the school curriculum in those days, and would not do so until the twentieth century. Virgil and Horace, on the other hand, were on the syllabus, and Bowman must have understood that their influence fed directly into the literary mainstream of his own time. In retrospect it is possible to see how significant it is that Wordsworth was early reading Cowper, Smith, and Burns.

For more than half his long life, from 1798 until he was nearly seventy, Wordsworth was writing - or thinking about writing - an immense epic poem, to be called The Recluse, which he intended to be his magnum opus. References to The Recluse occur throughout his correspondence and appear, increasingly, in modern textual, critical, and biographical writings about the poet. But since no poem with that title appears anywhere among his published works (except for a reference to it in the preface to The Excursion), many readers conclude that The Recluse does not exist, or that they, or the poet, are labouring under some kind of misconception. These suppositions are at once correct and incorrect, and both suppositions are useful.

It is true thatWordsworth never completed The Recluse. But he did finish, and publish, one part of it: The Excursion (1814), which was to be the narrative, ‘Human Life’ part of its projected three-part sequence, ‘on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’. Book I of Part I also exists in manuscript: the popular Home at Grasmere, first published posthumously in 1888, and many times since. ‘The Tuft of Primroses’ (1808), a long manuscript poem first published in 1949, is another instalment of The Recluse, conjecturally a second book of Part I. But no Part III exists, and if it was to be ‘on Nature’, while Part I was ‘on Man’, remains a mystery, not least because The Recluse’s three thematic terms interweave so closely throughout its extant parts – as indeed they do throughout Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre.

For decades, a New York-based radio station whose multilingual broadcasts served the needs of immigrant communities would identify itself in the following words: “This is WEVD, the station that speaks yourlanguage.” For most of the Jewish listeners, this meant Yiddish. During the first half of the twentieth century, Yiddish fueled the immigrant and second-generation community, with daily newspapers, theatres, novels, poetry, folksongs, and radio programs such as those on WEVD. All of this has been well documented, and all of this is history. In recent years, New York City subways have displayed bold posters of the American flag in the shape of an Aleph (first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), sporting a banner with the words, “Read Hebrew America.” By dialing a simple toll-free number, 1-800-444-HEBRE(W), anyone can acquire information at any time about free classes in “the language of our people.” But what does “speaking your language” mean in these two advertisements, or in Jewish American culture more generally over the past century? In one case, Yiddish is a sign of the Old World, of an immigrant community tuning in to WEVD as a form of nostalgia. In the other, Hebrew is a sign of an even older identity, not of family history but of ancient history, not of relatives but of ancestors. One is listening, the other is reading; one is remembering, the other is re-enacting; one is Yiddishkeit, the other is Judaism.

“Try not to love such a country!” exclaims Mottel the cantor's son, the orphaned Russian Jewish immigrant child in Sholem Aleichem's only New World novel, when he discovers that in America “it's not allowed to hit somebody smaller than yourself” (Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son, 260). Mottel's bittersweet Yiddish praise echoes – if unintentionally and somewhat ironically – a declaration made more than a hundred years earlier by the Sephardi banker Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in an address to George Washington, newly elected President of the United States:

These two passages help chart an important theme in the history of Jewish life in America. For millennia, Jews had lived under the rule of many other peoples, both in the Land of Israel and in exile in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. They sometimes enjoyed periods of tolerance, prosperity, and quasi-autonomy; often they suffered oppression, poverty, and violence. Throughout their history, in good times and bad, the Jews were considered to be different – religiously, ethnically, racially, and hence politically – a distinction, by the way, they did not always contest. When they came to America, however, they discovered – whether with unambiguous relief, or cautious optimism, or seasoned skepticism – that America was different.

“America is God's Crucible,” explains Russian Jewish immigrant David Quixano, protagonist of Israel Zangwill's 1908 play, The Melting-Pot, “...where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming” (37). As he tells his Uncle Mendel, “the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible...he will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman” (37-38). At the play's first performance at Washington's Columbia Theatre, Theodore Roosevelt listened approvingly to David's impassioned speech. The proper course for the immigrant was not in question for Roosevelt, who, a decade and a half prior to the performance, had cautioned the readership of The Forum that “the man who does not become Americanized nevertheless fails to remain a European, and becomes nothing at all” (“True Americanism,” 26). At the same time, the President did not extend his welcome indiscriminately, finding it “urgently necessary” both “to keep out laborers who tend to depress the labor market, and to keep out races which do not assimilate readily with our own” (27). While popular opinion of the time might well have put David Quixano in both categories, Roosevelt wholeheartedly approved the explicit message of the British Jewish writer's play.

From the political platform to the popular press, from the pens of reformers and sociologists, Americanization – the concept and its terms – was among the most hotly debated topics of the first half of the twentieth century. In a nation in which the foreign-born rose from 16.5 percent of the population in 1880 to 21.5 percent in 1920, such debates are not surprising (Higham, Send These to Me, 15). For those who sought to restrict immigration, eugenics arguments were almost as frequent as economic ones; they feared that the South and East European immigrants who dominated the influx in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would dilute both the labor pool and the bloodlines.

The various essays that constitute Wordsworth's prose oeuvre bear a strange relationship to the literary marketplace. They are the work of a writer frequently interested in current issues and events (when he writes about the Convention of Cintra, for example, or the Kendal and Windermere Railway, or copyright). Yet even these, the most topical of Wordsworth's essays, also manifest his consciousness of being at some remove from those events. It was a detachment, in part, simply circumstantial. Think, for instance, of Wordsworth's political analysis of the Convention of Cintra, which concluded Napoleon's efforts to bring Portugal into the 'Continental System', his Europe-wide closure of ports to British trade, and to oust the British. Wordsworth wrote the essay on the Convention of Cintra in the Lake District, relying on British newspapers from the middle of September 1808 for news of the Convention and the complex political manoeuvring that Napoleon engaged in with the Spanish and Portuguese, and was continually adjusting his understanding of his audience. He initially planned to express his views at a County Meeting, but later sought publication for the essay as a series of entries in Daniel Stuart's daily newspaper The Courier, and then commissioned De Quincey to shepherd the pamphlet through publication by Longman's at the end of May 1809. Delays overtook the project. The essay that had begun as a contribution to current political debates lost most of its audience before it ever reached them. Sales were minimal, and Wordsworth's earlier plan to bring out a second edition of Cintra dissolved in the face of scant demand for the first.

It may seem self-evident that the Bible should begin “in the beginning.” But Rashi, the quintessential medieval Jewish exegete, did not think so. He plainly understood a thousand years ago what we post-moderns think only we have discovered, that every narrative has a purpose, that every beginning is a means to an end.

The Bible begins at the beginning, Rashi tells us, because, in narrative terms, it will eventually take the Children of Israel not only to the foot of Mount Sinai but also to the banks of the Jordan – because, in terms of genre, it is not only a book of laws but also a national chronicle, a historical defense of sovereignty. Cosmogony legimates conquest.

Textual Issues

Students of Wordsworth are confronted with an unusual array of different editions, especially of the poetry, which represent much more than commercial competition. Some of the leading issues in contemporary textual criticism have been pioneered in the conception of these editions as they have progressively sought to redefine the poet's works. So much is this so that an informed choice of texts must nowadays be the basis of any serious engagement with Wordsworth's writings.

The prevailing questions have been long standing. Wordsworth’s extraordinary lifelong habits of constant revision presented his nineteenth-century editors with the problem of judging the relative status of many considerably variant readings and versions. Though his final intentions were authoritatively registered in his latest edition of Poetical Works, 1849–50, those readings indirectly efface previously completed works which had in many cases already produced a separate history of reception. Also, from Poems, 1815 the poet arranged his poems according to a psychological or subject focus system which for the most part ignored a chronological reading. While Edward Dowden followed Wordsworth’s final wishes in respect of versions and arrangement (the ‘Aldine’, 1892–3), as did Thomas Hutchinson in his edition of Poetical Works (the ‘Oxford’, 1895), William Knight attempted to reconstruct a chronological ordering in his (1882–9; the ‘Eversley’, revised and corrected, 1896), though the dates of composition were often uncertain, and yet to retain the final versions for the main texts.

The appeal of the Left

The literary category of US Writers on the Left was initially delimited by Daniel Aaron in his 1961 Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. The genus pertains chiefly to mid-twentieth century authors and literary intellectuals inspired by the ideas of Marxism, most notably through an attraction to the Communist-led cultural movement. During the first two decades, only a modest number of distinguished poets, novelists, critics, and dramatists declared themselves socialists; they fashioned an amorphous, somewhat Bohemian legacy of art in the service of the emancipation of the working class in the pages of publications such as the Masses and the Liberator. This heritage would be revivified in new form as a repercussion of the social crisis of the 1930s when an extraordinary number of the most gifted writers veered precipitously in the direction of the revolutionary Left. During the 1940s, this tradition of “littérature engagée” evolved as a constituent component of the cultural mainstream, but in the 1950s it was ultimately marginalized by the anti-radical political repression of the McCarthy era.

The Bolshevik rendition of Marxism is the conspicuous political feature at the heart of this legacy. Sundry of the most capable writers were passionately enthralled by the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, which they believed to be embodied in the activities and ideology of the Communist Party. Even Left critics of the Stalin regime often based their condemnation on writings by Lenin and Trotsky. The attraction remained potent through World War II but waned as the Cold War began.

We know more about Wordsworth than before. The Cornell Wordsworth Series and new biographies - Gill, Johnston, Barker, Wu - have enhanced understanding of the poems and the life. And there have been startling discoveries. The National Library of Scotland yielded a manuscript of Wordsworth's Imitation of Juvenal, a satire on government and aristocracy dating from 1795 which the poet had determined should be suppressed. The Public Record Office, London, disclosed correspondence between the Home Office and their agent James Walsh who in August 1797 was sent to spy on Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth's letters to Mary Hutchinson, found in 1977 among scrap paper at Carlisle, offered unprecedented insight into their marriage. So we do know more about Wordsworth, but not all about Wordsworth. Gaps and silences in The Prelude, and the conjectured career of the 'hidden Wordsworth', now seem as significant as the documented life. Emile Legouis's pioneering Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798, first published in 1896, announced its source and subject as 'A Study of The Prelude'. One hundred years later Kenneth Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) set out to dispel the 'Wordsworthian cover-up' by revealing how what 'seem to be metaphors' in the poetry 'often turn out to have a literal correspondence to the life'.

After struggling in his middle years to win more than a coterie readership, William Wordsworth lived to savour success. He died full of honours in 1850, Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, a man recognized, in John Keble's words, as 'raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poesy, but of high and sacred truth'. Over the next fifty years his status as an English classic was confirmed in innumerable printings of his works, anthologies, and eventually scholarly studies. By 1950, however, it seemed that his time was over. At an event to mark the centenary of Wordsworth's death, Lionel Trilling, one of the foremost American critics of his generation, summed up what he took to be the current perception of the poet: 'Wordsworth is not attractive and not an intellectual possibility.' Although Trilling's lecture went on to demonstrate that this was not his own view, his decisive and memorable formulation sounded right, as if Keble's words on the plaque in Grasmere Church were being given their sad but inevitable addendum. But such has not been the judgement of history. Since the muted celebrations in 1950, shifts in intellectual concerns have brought the Romantics into new focus and have rediscovered Wordsworth as a fully 'intellectually possible' figure. Western culture's preoccupation with identity and the self; the linguistic turn of much current theory; the interest in power and politics and nationhood; the return to history; environmental issues - all of these dominant features of the cultural landscape of the last half-century have been mapped across the terrain of Wordsworth's poetry and prose.

America as a site of Jewish liberation has been one of the guiding myths of the modern Jewish imagination. Above all, America meant redemption from Europe, which symbolized both Judaism's subservience to Christianity and Jews' confinement within the strictures of Judaism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish thinkers spoke of America as the great hope for the future of Judaism because its democratic principles embodied the true moral essence of Judaism. American Judaism was the real Judaism, while Europe represented a Judaism distorted by centuries of persecution and economic discrimination. Protestant thinkers, well before the colonial period, had identified the New Land with the Bible, and themselves with Israel; as Herman Melville declared in White Jacket (1850), “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world” (Redburn, White Jacket, Moby Dick, 506). For Jewish thinkers, Protestantism could not stand alone in claiming a privileged place in America; Judaism, the original Israel, had to stand beside it as the religion informing the American democratic enterprise and bearing its own manifest destiny in the world. In an 1898 resolution, leaders of Reform Judaism in America declared that “America is our Zion...The mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political...to spread the truths of religion and humanity throughout the world” (Sarna, “Converts to Zionism,” 189).

Until well into the twentieth century, America was imaginatively constituted by Jewish thinkers through a set of projections drawn from Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom of religion, all of which were identified as biblical ideals.

How do you know that someone is a virgin? This question is implicitly posed in the Nativity pageant of the N-town collection of biblical drama, just after Mary has given birth. Salomée, one of the two midwives attendant on Mary, refuses to believe that the Virgin is still a virgin. She insists on 'touching' Mary's body. Terrifyingly, her hand turns 'ded and drye [withered] as claye [earth]' (line 256). An angel appears, and orders her to touch Jesus' swaddling-clothes. Frightened, Salomée obeys the angel and the hand is miraculously restored to health. But a number of questions are left unanswered. Since female roles were all played by men, the scene calls for some ingenuities of staging and suspension of audience disbelief. Readers today may wonder why Mary's virginity, and medieval virginities in general, are invested with such powers of magic and danger. And what exactly does Salomée touch? Does she really touch inside Mary's body? Surely (we think now) this is sacrilege - or bad taste? In the Chester version, the figure of Expositor steers the audience towards a general moral, 'that unbeleeffe [lack of faith] is a fowle [evil] sinne' (line 721), keeping the audience from pondering too closely the troubling complexities of Mary's physiology.

But the N-town pageant goes out of its way to emphasize physical ‘touch’. Zelomye, the other midwife, asks to ‘towch and fele’ Mary’s body to see if she needs medicine, and Mary invites her to ‘[t]ast [feel] with 3oure hand’ to find out if she is a ‘clene mayde and pure virgyn’ (lines 224–5). The Latin stage directions say that Zelomye ‘palpat . . . Beatam Virginem . . .’ [feels the Blessed Virgin]. Though the exact form of verification is unclear, Zelomye is satisfied: ‘Here opynly I fele and se: / A fayr chylde of a maydon is born’ (lines 238–9). But sceptical Salom´e demands to ‘preve’ [test] Mary’s virginity by ‘hand towchynge’ (line 247). Mary assents: ‘Towch with 3oure hand and wele asay [find out]’ (line 251).