ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an essay, 'Time and History in Wordsworth', which was the third lecture on the topic of 'Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism' that Paul de Man delivered as the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University in 1967. It is a rather early essay of de Man's, which has the exceptional interest of containing a second 'layer', revisions and additions made in 1971, which allow one to see Paul de Man's introduction of linguistic and rhetorical terminology and explicit focus on the question of reading. The essay approaches William Wordsworth by way of one of the passages of The Prelude singled out as remarkable by De Quincey and Coleridge, the lines on the Boy of Winander. Re-examining the supposed shift from allegorical to symbolical imagery in late eighteenth-century poetry, the essay challenged the critical commonplace that romanticism is committed to the symbol as the most authentic and expressive kind of figurative language.
