Abrams's Argument on Wordsworthian Diction

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 9, Chapter 2, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

M. H. Abrams argues that Wordsworthian diction is a poetic form of the divine accommodatio. See "English Romanticism and the Spirit of the Age," in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 117; see also Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 395-399.

Last modified December 2000