To round off this assessment, I would like to turn at the last to address some of the interpretive assumptions upon which the two volumes appear to me to rest. Both sides of this old argument about Wordsworth as it here centers on the issue of Wordsworth's intellectual life strike me as resting on a questionable assumption about reading, which we might call the Attenborough Thesis. I want to suggest that such a limited set of assumptions is inadequate to the complex traffic between books and life. This last formulation seems to me to begin to get at something important going on in Wordsworth's reading. I read Wordsworth's celebrated and very guarded approach to the reading of books as being of a piece with his desire to keep his distance from others, to preserve self-possession against the demonic character of another's discourse.
Discourse is demonic, possessive, dispossessing.
It is perhaps the demonic nature of discourse that gives us the idea that we have consciousness, feelings, imagination, a poet's mind. But it must be stressed that that fact can be interpreted in several different ways, and I am inclined to resist the prevailing assumption from De Quincey onward that it is necessarily a discreditable fact. Some of the great readers of history surely also have been, paradoxically, some of the great nonreaders, a class of readers who sometimes must have chosen not to read because they had discovered just how dangerous it can be. If you want to know what Wordsworth was reading in the summer of 1809, for example, you'll need to work your way through the whole book from A to Z, watching for that date.