Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...

The poem’s full title, following the 18th-century tradition of locodescriptive poetry, establishes the occasion of the poem, noting the precise place and time of its composition. Though commonly abbreviated as “Tintern Abbey,” the poem makes no mention of the famous ruined church and its immediate environs, and only a passing reference to the hordes of “vagrant dwellers” (20) that inhabited the ruin, with whom Wordsworth most certainly had contact during his tour of the vicinity with Dorothy. Several New Historicist and political critics, such as Marjorie Levinson, have seized upon this omission, arguing that Wordsworth erases the sociopolitical setting of the poem, substituting an idealized, abstract, pastoral landscape for a politically charged location rife with complex historical significance and unsettling contradictions. For Levinson, “Tintern Abbey” voices Wordsworth’s attempt to escape from cultural values, historical institutions, disturbing facts, and conflicting ideologies—in short, the political moment at hand—to realize an imaginative fiction of memory and desire. Other critics, such as Helen Vendler, argue that such cultural materialist readings, based on mimetic ideals of historical and political factuality, are appropriate for social literary forms like the novel but misunderstand the purpose and character of