"Wordsworth: A Poet's History examines Wordsworth's discovery of the linguistic resources with which to contain the traumas of revolutionary history, public and personal, and considers the ways in which his poetic language has been called upon by later generations of writers to withstand or qualify the shock of the Modern.".

"Hanley examines the full span of Wordsworth's writing career and its after-effects on English literary culture. The study traces the origins of Wordsworth's distinctive self-representation in poetry to the trauma of language acquisition in infancy, reawakened by his mother's early death, and examines the ways that personal history became reactivated yet again by the shock of the French Revolution.

It argues that Wordsworth found private relief in particular languages and practices for controlling this repeated pattern of disturbance. His literary, and particularly Shakespearean, intertextualities recuperate a political history of constitutional monarchy in which to embrace his earlier rebelliousness.

Wordsworth's own literary influence is reconstructed as promising a language through which to contain the disruptions of the Modern in such representative writers as Hopkins, Mary Shelley and George Eliot.".

"The range of Keith Hanley's study leads him to various chapters beyond Lacanian psycholinguistics and literary Oedipalism to historicise Wordsworth's peculiar kind of control in terms of the theory of Michel Foucault. His book also engages with current discussions on the Romantic Gothic, Feminist Romantic criticism, the semiotics of Revolution, and Walter Benjamin's critique of the Modern."--BOOK JACKET.