ABSTRACT
The themes and arguments of The Excursion are, in a way that is very typical of William Wordsworth, announced in a mode that is at once subjective and objective. The dramatic form The Excursion is never quite declared in such poems as 'Gipsies' and 'Alice Fell' is explicit, although such explicitness by no means solves the problems of attribution that the poem raises. Some of the most memorable paragraphs in William Hazlitt's review of The Excursion are devoted to his negative pronouncements on country life. The religious debate in The Excursion is not, the subject of the same dramatic specificity as are the social and educational debates. Critics have rightly focused on the end of the first book of The Excursion, and on the various draft manuscripts that preceded it, as one of the great points of crisis in Wordsworth's writings. The Wordsworthian syndrome is such that almost all self-descriptive moments are implicated in both affirmation and negation.
