ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth relationship to William Shakespeare works runs much deeper than was once recognized, a powerful countercurrent to the more obvious and direct influence exerted by John Milton. Literary history owes the commonplace distinction between the talents of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, like so many of its operating assumptions, to criticism written during the Romantic age. In the effort to deduce aesthetic principles from the way one poet figures the achievement of another, a further point comes into critical focus: the adaptation of Wordsworth’s poetry that is required to make it available for uses. Deprecating rhetoric aside, the juxtaposition of Wordsworth with Rembrandt, who probably represents the highest attainment of mimetic realism in European painting, is especially striking given the interpretation of Wordsworth it implies. Wordsworth understands his poetic identity by grappling with the limitations of his imagination and the historical embeddedness that the self-consciousness discloses.
