Wordsworth's Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context

Goslar, that "melancholy dream" the poet endured in isolation with Dorothy, bereft of Coleridge's presence, provides an illuminating context for the composition of the Lucy poems. Critics usually ignore or treat the circumstances of the Lucy poems' composition perfunctorily, despite the convention of analyzing Wordsworth's poetry with full biographical apparatus in hand. This critical anomaly is probably due in part to an assumption that identifying Lucy is the synecdochic equivalent of reconstructing Wordsworth's Goslar experience. Rather than become entangled again in the morass of biographical speculation over Lucy's real-life counterpart,' critics have profitably shifted their interest either to the poet/narrator's developing consciousness or to the language and imagery of the cycle. Consequently, one hesitates to ask, "Who was Lucy?" because, as one critic has stated, "there is no answer to this question except to say that it is irrelevant."2 The charge of irrelevance cannot be made categorically, however; issues are relevant or irrelevant with respect to contexts of preoccupation, not a priori. The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive psychological and biographical ambience for the Lucy poems that will dispel the mystery of their genesis and account for their intriguing peculiarities; and to reach this objective, an important assumption must be made about the identity of Lucy. Ultimately, I concur with F. W. Bateson that Wordsworth's