ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth wanted his poem to have a 'star-like virtue', shedding 'benignant influence, and secure'. As Wordsworth becomes more comfortable with the bourgeois compromise, his stars shine less temptingly and more calmly. In 'There is an Eminence', the poem in which Wordsworth describes the naming of a place after himself, he had imaged a self that was at once located in the 'loneliest place we have among the clouds' and also guaranteed a communion with others such that 'no place on earth/ Can ever be a solitude to me'. His social self walks along the 'public way', in the company of others, beneath his attributed self, 'so distant in its height'. Wordsworth's wanderings may have lost their anxious identifications with the great displaced figures of the cultural and literary past, Satan, Ulysses, Aeneas, Spenser's knights and Bunyan's pilgrim, all trying to turn crooked paths into straight and narrow ones, or glorying in their choice of error or indirection.
