Among the institutionalized ways of not facing Wordsworth perhaps none continues to stand upright quite as solidly and fixedly – “as if sustained by its own spirit” (II, 280–1) – as the interpretation of the relationship between man and Nature, Imagination and Nature, in terms of a dialectic of immediacy and mediation, consciousness and self-consciousness. A most suggestive global statement of this interpretation is offered by Geoffrey Hartman in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” when he reminds us “that Romantic art has a function analogous to that of religion. The traditional scheme of Eden, fall, and redemption merges with the new triad of nature, self-consciousness, imagination; while the last term in both involves a kind of return to the first” (54). In other words, if self-consciousness marks a fall from Nature, then the only kind of return that would not be a regression to the immediacy of mere consciousness would be the return by way of still another turn of self-consciousness. “Anti-self-consciousness” is not unself-consciousness but rather self-consciousness of self-consciousness, the (self-)negation of the negativity of self-consciousness.