ABSTRACT
Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’ was written in late October 1814 and first published the following year. As soon as the poem appeared, Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth to tell him how ‘original’ he had found it: ‘original,’ he explained, ‘with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.?1 It is probably because ‘Laodamia’ is, as Lamb points out, so apparently unWordsworthian that the poem has not seemed of much importance to twentieth-century critics. To a number of his early admirers, however, the poem was one of Wordsworth’s greatest achievements. Henry Crabb Robinson described it as one ‘in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them’, and he was surprised to find that Wordsworth himself did not value it so highly.2 De Quincey found ‘Laodamia’ ‘exquisite’, and arguably the more so for not being written in ‘the idiomatic language of life’ that had characterized Wordsworth’s earlier poems.3 Haydon thought it one of Wordsworth’s ‘finest things’, and Hazlitt seems to have admired the poem more as he came to like Wordsworth less.4
