‘There was a time’ in any given literary critic's life at which he or she was not a literary critic. When such a person comes to read Wordsworth and, say, to face the Ode (‘There was a time’), perhaps with the intention of writing about it, he or she may, provided that the repressive apparatus generally in place to push such intimations back into the well have in it a small defect of any kind, stumble across a sense that their own activity, literary criticism, represents an instance of just the kind of loss which the poem is talking about. The tremblings or nausea with which such a person may turn to face the task of writing about this Ode arise not only from the usual causes (anxiety before the peer group or groups currently in possession of it; guilt at the likely prospect that the critic's words will merely burble or drone fluently and stupidly when set against the poem itself) but also from an awareness of how much energy of repression is about to be called upon, to shut down the ‘purely subjective’ features of the concrete history of the individual's experience of this poem in favour, perhaps, of the notional ‘experience’ of it supposedly had, and which would now in fact first be constructed, by the individual's paid persona, the critic.