About this time last year, fresh on the heels of teaching (with limited effectiveness) Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," I officially declared him "my nemesis." And then I taught him again. And then Dr. Crazy posted this lovely excerpt from that very poem as part of Poetry Friday.

Now, today, I got a little comic mileage from depicting the little deluded world in which I am a literary superhero, and Wordsworth, bald and be-caped, tries to thwart me at every turn. I believe students find this stance occasionally reassuring (If the professor finds him difficult, it's ok if I do to!).

But the dirty little truth is: God, he's good. And that "Tintern Abbey"? Gooorgeouuus! Even as someone who loves the city, and finds a greater affinity with Wilde's aesthetics of artificiality, I've got to admit, the poetry is beautiful, the thinking about natural beauty as a gateway to the sublime (which seems to me to run counter to much conventional thinking that sought to demarcate the beautiful from the sublime), the notion of recollection of nature as a calming, restoring force....It's rich, it's lovely, it's relevant, it's politically engaged, it's idealistic.

So while in class, I will conitnue to hold up Wordsworth as this hard guy who buries pronoun antecedents 8 lines back, I now have to admit, in that same class, that doing the work of reading is pretty damn rewarding. And I challange anyone who's ever enjoyed a national park or even a little walk in the woods, to tell me he's on the wrong track.