The "Lucy Poems": A Case Study in Literary Knowledge

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

interest disproportionate to their bulk, and to trace this interest
during the two centuries since Lyrical Ballads casts light not only on
the history of their reception but also on the history of criticism and
the development of theory. Jones’s treatment of the subject ranges
across cultural, textual, and hermeneutic issues, and the result is “a
case-study in the emergence of English as a ‘discipline.’”
Although some parts make pretty forbidding reading, the book as a whole
makes excellent sense.

Jones’s themes—the indeterminacies of meaning, the institutional
need to fix meaning and so produce literary knowledge, and the strategic
deceptions required for this fixing—lead him into engagements with a
large number of critics and issues. The poems have puzzled readers and
prompted interpretation since their publication. Ruskin, Arnold, and
others took Wordsworth’s own “quasi-grouping” of the poems to
indicate a definite association; Jones discloses their Victorian
readings as attempts to impose a clear and univocal order. A discussion
of parody’s relationship to criticism and to literary allusion leads
him from comical pieces by Catherine Fanshawe and J.K. Stephens to the
uses of Lucy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Melville’s Pierre.
The last two chapters focus on 20th-century critical discussion of the
poems, analyzing critical and theoretical treatments by Paul de Man,
Geoffrey Hartman, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Norman Holland, J. Hillis Miller,
and many others. The shortest Lucy poem, “A slumber did my spirit
seal,” emerges as one of 20th-century criticism’s touchstone texts.

Jones is very careful with details, and this allows him to arraign many
critics—especially Miller, Hirsch, and de Man—on grounds of
carelessness and duplicity. Some, like Hugh Sykes Davies, Holland, and
especially Hartman, emerge as more clear-sighted and trustworthy. Though
the book is dense and occasionally not very reader-friendly, it is
nonetheless valuable, exposing facile and self-serving interpretation
and reasserting the importance of ethics in academic work.