ABSTRACT
Samuel Smith’s ‘On Reading Wordsworth’s “Excursion” ’ was posthumously published in 1836 2 , at the time in which the poet was resurfacing on the American scene with the publication of his Yarrow Revisited in Boston and New York 3 . Like the author of Benjamin the Waggoner, Smith focuses on the large quarto size of the publication, juxtaposing its ornateness of format with its severity of language. Simplicity of tone alternates with digressive opacity. Smith’s pseudo-Excursion works on both a verbal and a typographical level. By calling attention to the large areas of ‘vacant paper’ left by the London printer, he implicitly likens them to the blank spaces in Wordsworth’s mind. These voids represent not only flaws in his logic, but also the marginal inspiration with which (according to Smith) he wrote The Excursion.
