Like many recent readings of Wordsworth, my reading has attempted to render him a more interactive and less imposing poetic presence. Practitioners of high literary history, like the early Geoffrey Hartman, and even deeply formal critics of the Demanian school, seem now to need correction; we feel that Wordsworth's poetry should somehow be described as (in my broad terms) poetry that a person might write. A person, that is, instead of a personification of either language or literary history itself. I have used Walter Scott's eminently worldly figure to help me pivot into an ambitious history of Wordsworth's accomplishment.

Pairing Wordsworth with Scott (pairing any writer with Scott) has the beneficial effect of insisting on an at least partly practical vocabulary. There are two important differences, though, between my discussions of these two writers, and I want to use these differences as a way of generating a concluding perspective. First: in discussing Wordsworth's writing I have talked much less about the worldly calculation and strategy that formed a major focus in all four of the other chapters. Secondly, I have implicitly described Scott's accomplishment as of a different order than that of Wordsworth. Exploration of these two subjects – making them explicit instead of implicit – turns out to be the same task, formulated by the second; it is the recovery of the distinction between Scott and Wordsworth.