1. See, for instance, Margaret Homans, in the first chapter of Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Mary Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender: Genre Theory and The Prelude," Diacritics 14 (1984): 47-57, later published in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981): 324-60; later published in In Other Worlds: Essays in Culture and Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). More recently Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), has seen Wordsworth and the other male Romantics as poets who appropriate the feminine. For a strong challenge to these views, see Susan J. Wolfson, "Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William," in R&F, 139-66. See also Laura E. Haigwood, ''Oedipal Revolution in the Lyrical Ballads," Centennial Review 33 (Fall 1989): 468-89.

2. Keats refers to "the wordsworthian [sic] or egotistical sublime" in the letter to Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, 157. (References to Keats's letters are from the edition by Robert Gittings, Letters of John Keats [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]. Letters are identified by date and page number.) The movement from solitude to relationship is an important part of John Jones's argument in The Egotistical Sublime. Jones sees Wordsworth moving away from the sublimity of solitude in the course of his poetry; the gender distinctions, although not explicit in this pre-feminist work, are implicit in Jones's argument, as well as in his references to the attitudes of Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt toward Wordsworth (see pages 29, 47, and passim). More recently, Thomas A. Vogler has seen this move toward relationship in psychoanalytic terms, arguing that Wordsworth spent most of his life "in recovery of a primal relationship with an idealized maternal 'nature,'" whereas I see Wordsworth as moved by both a masculine and feminine nature. I would also disagree with Vogler's assumption that "She was a Phantom of delight" refers to Dorothy Wordsworth rather than Mary Wordsworth. See Vogler's " 'A Spirit, Yet a Woman Too!' Dorothy and William Wordsworth," in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 243.

3. For an example of this argument, see David Simpson, "Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth's 'Gipsies'?" in South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Summer 1989): 541-67.

4. Wordsworth also follows Burke in linking the sublime to feelings of pain, but pain held in check by distance. Wordsworth knew Burke's aesthetic and political theory in both the Enquiry and the Reflections on the Revolution in France.

See James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), for an elaboration of Wordsworth's complicated relationship to Burke's thought. For a brief but incisive analysis of gender in Burke's poetics, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129-31. Meena Alexander also touches on this gendered dichotomy in Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 29-30. See, in addition, Mellor's discussion in Romanticism and Gender, especially "Domesticating the Sublime," 85-106. Although Burke is the much more likely direct source for Wordsworth, Kant also analyzes these qualities in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

5. Without explicitly discussing issues of gender, Theresa M. Kelley, in Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), argues that a "rhetorical competition" between figures of the beautiful and the sublime forms the basis of Wordsworth's aesthetics. I have benefited throughout from Kelley's ideas and from her sense of the movement of Wordsworth's imagination from the sublime to the beautiful.

6. William Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (1906; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 35.

7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1958), 63.

8. This is actually a description of Windermere, from Arthur Young's Six Month Tour, vol. 3, quoted in Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (1784; rpt. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), 69.

9. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), especially chap. 3, 57-87.

10. See Moorman 1:438-42 on Wordsworth's financial anxieties, as well as Wallace Douglas, Wordsworth: The Construction of a Personality (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968). See also David Simpson, Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1987), for an analysis of Wordsworth's financial and familial problems.