SOURCE: “This, Here, Now,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. 20, Nos. 3–4, Summer–Fall, 1998, pp. 191–97.

In the following review, Wood explains the themes and artistic examples that Josipovici explores in Touch.

Visiting friends leave the poet for a while and go off for a walk. He imagines them arriving at a place he himself knows well:

The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash, Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fanned by the water-fall! 

(11–12)

Quoting these lines from Coleridge's “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Gabriel Josipovici points out very precisely what is happening. It is not, as is usually said, that the poet's imagination in itself denies his imprisonment, and not even that his words take him in...