In 1921, David Nichol Smith described Wordsworth as 'our greatest nature poet' and it is a judgement many would still accept. The poem generally called 'Daffodils' ('I wandered lonely as a cloud'), like Kipling's 'If', is one of the last remaining genuinely popular poems. From it, one gains an image of Wordsworth as someone sustained and cheered by the flowers he finds when walking among the dales and hills. In other words, Wordsworth's natural world seems to be restricted to the country - implicitly denying that urban life is 'natural' - and, secondly, Wordsworth is seen as emotionally nourished by attractive, rural objects. This example of his nature poetry is easily aligned with pastoral and, at the same time, it seems to support a tourist's or holidaymaker's experience of the countryside.

‘Nature’ in this context means, roughly speaking, the non-urban or rural and this meaning of the word now predominates (partly because of the way in which Wordsworth was understood by his Victorian readers). When celebrating Wordsworth as a nature poet, it is easy to assume he is no more than a spokesperson for rural values or for the National Trust, the society established in the late nineteenth century for the preservation of the finest of the English landscape, amongst the founders of which were many admirers of his poetry. It is easy, in other words, to forget that in Wordsworth’s day ‘Nature’ was a term continuously employed in profound theological, philosophical, and political debates. Nature could be seen as brutal or as a harmonious system reflecting the perfect order of its creator or as the world of the heart not the head – as a realm of intuitions and affections which counterbalanced the overly strict dictates of reason. Each of these readings could be employed in support of different political positions: natural brutality justifies an oppressive tyranny, natural harmony reflects not only God’s order but the settled order of the established state, and natural feeling encourages the rebel to believe that his or her impulse of defiance is right.

Of the many literary and intellectual groups that fueled the emergence of Jewish literature in America, none was as well situated to take advantage of the country's opportunities as the cohort centered in New York City during World War II. While social conditions alone can never inspire a renaissance, the quality of Jewish culture – and even the language in which it was produced – always depended on the Jews' relations to the surrounding polity. The radical intellectual community dominated by Abraham Cahan between 1897-1917 had drawn tremendous energy from the concentrated mass of Yiddish readers and theatergoers, but the urgent needs of immigrant audiences riveted the writers' attention on crises of security and material subsistence. Subsequent groups of Yiddish poets and writers,like the Yunge (Young) and Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), managed to distance themselves somewhat from the social and national claims of their immigrant society, yet their reliance on a Yiddish readership put them essentially at odds with English America even as their work responded to its atmosphere. During the 1920s, when American nativism spurred a fear of immigrants and tried to set limits on the advancement of those who had already entered the country, Jewish enthusiasts of the Russian Revolution tried to introduce its egalitarian ethos into America, but their dependence on directives from the Soviet Union limited ever more of their autonomy of mind and spirit the longer they stayed under its ideological influence.

In the third of the Zuckerman novels, Philip Roth includes the following poignant detail concerning the protagonist's dying mother:

Roth's figure of the Holocaust lodged in the brain of the American-born Jewish mother in a 1985 Jewish American novel that seems in no way a work of Holocaust fiction can be taken as a measure of the place of the Holocaust in the Jewish American imagination. As Norma Rosen puts it in the foreword to the recent republication of her 1969 novel Touching Evil: “As safe Americans we were not there. Since then, in imagination, we are seldom anywhere else” (Preface, 3). For most Jewish Americans (and many non-Jewish Americans as well: Rosen's own novel deals with non-Jews as does Emily Praeger's even more recent Eve's Tattoo [1998]), this Holocaust consciousness is largely unspoken and, as compared with the daily concerns of ordinary life, it is almost of radical disconcern.

In sketching Wordsworth's life, two portraits might be drawn, almost as mirror images of one another. The first would present a child who was orphaned by the age of thirteen, and to whose family the first Lord Lonsdale refused to pay the substantial debt (over £4500) that was owing to Wordsworth senior at his death; a boy who rebelled against his guardians, slashed through a family portrait with a whip, and failed, first to gain anything more than an unclassified BA (from St John's College, Cambridge, 1791), and then to take orders or enter one of the professions; a graduate who in 1792 travelled to revolutionary France, where he was converted to its cause and fathered an illegitimate child; a 'vagabond' who returned to England and several years of apparently aimless roving, leading, in 1796, to some kind of nervous breakdown; a young 'democrat' who kept dubious, if not actually dangerous company, and in 1798 was thought worthy of surveillance by a government spy; a republican who laid plans for a radical monthly called the Philanthropist, and may have been involved in a liberal London weekly of that name, which ran for forty-two issues, 1795-6; an author of oppositional political tracts, the unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), written in defence of the regicide in France and rights of man at home, and The Convention of Cintra (1809), which accepted that fighting imperialist France constituted a just war, but was highly critical of the deal by which a Spanish revolt ended with Britain allowing the defeated French army to evacuate Portugal without loss; a 'Semi-atheist' whom Coleridge persuaded into an unspecific form of Unitarianism, and who in 1812 still had 'no need of a Redeemer'; a would-be populist who argued that poetry was not the exclusive property of the middle and upper classes, and attributed to his own work the polemical purpose of showing that 'men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply' (letter to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801); a financially insecure poet who until his mid-forties lived in relative poverty, adopting a lofty defensiveness against an uncomprehending 'public' and the diffuse notoriety provided by hostile Tory critics, among whom he was synonymous at once with childishness and insubordination.

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.