ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine how and why William Blackwood’s represented him as a great genius at a time when his position in literary culture was uncertain. Blackwood’s was often represented by its writers very differently: as a supporter of genius and as a journal, which sought to educate and improve its audience, rather than pander to its prejudices. William Wordsworth needs Blackwood’s Magazine to mediate his work to early nineteenth-century readers, whether he likes it or not. The Edinburgh’s influence was apparent in the critical and commercial response to Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807, which represented the nadir of the poet’s reputation and sales, and in the following few years, the critics tended to denigrate the Lake Poets, and Wordsworth in particular. In an essay published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1835, Thomas De Quincey argued that his ‘appreciation of Wordsworth’ as a young man had put him thirty years in advance of his contemporaries.
