SOURCE: Eilenberg, Susan. “The Haunted Language of the Lucy Poems.” In Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession, pp. 108-35. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Eilenberg focuses on Wordsworth's “Lucy” poems as they reflect his sense of loss and his relationship to nature and his own poetry.

The economy of the Lucy poems involves neither property nor, in any obvious sense, possession. It figures no struggle for ground, no exorcism of previous inhabitants. For such loss as these poems record—emotional rather than financial or literary—there can be, it would seem, no recompense. The poems confound both poet's and critics' accounting.

But although issues of property never become explicit here, the economically-worded Lucy poems exhibit the same kinds of behavior and raise the same sorts of issues we have seen in the poems more openly concerned with possession and dispossession. Concerned...