| Though it is traditionally assumed that Wordsworth was never able to complete his intended masterpiece, The Recluse, I argue in this dissertation that the extent sequence of Recluse texts--The Prelude, Home at Grasmere, and The Excursion--forms a continuous whole whose structure is patterned on that of the Romantic "Circuitous journey" documented by M. H. Abrams in his now-classic Natural Supernaturalism. I argue, moreover, that Harold Bloom's entire critical corpus is, in turn, patterned after The Recluse, whose design was of course to encompass, implicitly, Wordsworth's entire poetic oeuvre. I thus conclude (in Bloomian fashion) that, although Bloom was profoundly influenced by Wordsworth, Wordsworth was influenced--albeit rather surrealistically, by retrospective anticipation ("metalepsis")--by Bloom. |
