'There is a current fashion in Anglo-American criticism of the materialist and New Historicist varieties— odd mixtures of Marx and Foucault—to condemn Wordsworth for not having remained political enough, once he had given up his early support for the French Revolution. By 1797 Wordsworth had surmounted a long political and psychic crisis, and his poems ceased to urge political solutions for social distress. “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” The Ruined Cottage, “Michael,” and Wordsworth’s other poems that depict the sufferings of the English lower classes are masterpieces of compassion and profound feeling, and only shallow ideologues could reject them on political grounds. Our new breed of academic moralists should reflect upon the reception of Wordsworth’s poems by Shelley, politically the Leon Trotsky of his day, or by radicals like Hazlitt and Keats. What Shelley, Hazlitt, and Keats marvelously realized was that Wordsworth had a miraculous genius for teaching one how to feel sympathy for those in all manner of distress. If our academic commissars knew how to read, Wordsworth might humanize them, which is the great program of his poems like The Ruined Cottage.' Harold Bloom, The Western Canon