This book engages a controversy over the relation between Wordsworth's poetry and his politics that dates back to the early reviews of the Lyrical Ballads, but has never been more hotly debated than in the last decade.

Unlike some influential recent commentators on Wordsworth's politics, John Rieder argues that Wordsworth's poetry achieves its power not by suppressing social and political aims, but rather by projecting a fantasy of community that finds its material counterpart far more in the literature itself than in the rural occupations or natural scenes Wordsworth depicts.

Arguing throughout that Wordsworth's originality springs from his invention and elaboration of a peculiarly literary form of community, Rieder maintains that the didactic element in Wordsworth's concept of community was doomed to irrelevance by the course of English economic and social development.

Yet, Wordsworth's writing became enormously influential, not by virtue of the agrarian community it envisioned, but rather by virtue of the literary form of community it modeled and produced in its dissemination.