ABSTRACT
Michael Friedman, one of the few other critics to attend to 'Gipsies', attributes William Wordsworth's unease to the presence of 'alien social forces'. Anxieties about labour, poetry and property are addressed here in an especially urgent way, revealing both the historical features of Wordsworth's predicament, and the personal turn that he gives to it. 'Resolution and Independence', read as the record of a profound historical and individual displacement, becomes a true companion poem to 'Gipsies'. Anxieties about the business of poetry, and its place in the labour cycle and in the respectable world, in fact occur throughout the 1807 Poems, in 'Two Volumes', the collection in which 'Gipsies' first appeared. Raisley Calvert and John Wordsworth are both, then, writ large in the poetry worked on in the years around 1807, and published in the volume that includes 'Gipsies'. These lived experiences must have significantly informed Wordsworth's anxieties about whether poetic labour was a properly accountable pursuit.
