Introduction

Abstract The Introduction explores the intertwined histories of romantic criticism and psychoanalysis and considers how Wordsworth might be productively read with and against the legacy of Freud’s writing. It traces the ongoing role of psychoanalytic concepts in romantic criticism, focusing on the particular prominence of trauma. Yet trauma, and its associated methodologies, are precisely what foreclose the notion of unremembered pleasure. By situating Wordsworth’s thinking within a diverse romantic interest in unconsciousness across the nineteenth century, rather than within a genealogy of psychoanalysis, it reads Wordsworth against Freud as a distinct writer of unnoticed experience. By sketching the aesthetic and ethical significance of such experience, it demonstrates the limitations of understanding Wordsworth strictly as a poet of memory. Finally, it considers some questions of terminology and presents an initial account of Wordsworthian retrospection to be developed in subsequent chapters.