Review of ‘The Excursion, being a portion of the Recluse, a Poem. By William Wordsworth’, in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, No. XLVII

November, 1814

Storage Journal AP4 E32

Edinburgh: Constable

‘This will never do’. So begins one of the most notorious reviews of British Romantic poetry. Francis Jeffrey edited and regularly wrote for the Edinburgh Review. He had previously described William Wordsworth as a talented but misguided poet. For Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s The Excursion, a 400-page discursive poem set in the countryside, was the last straw: ‘The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism’.