Wordsworth and Italian Criticism

The article outlines the different stages of Wordsworth’s critical reception in Italy and reads the connection between Wordsworth’s poetry and Italian Romantic scholarship as an intermittent dialogue. By focusing on the gap between two distinct eras of Wordsworthian criticism that runs parallel to the establishment of English literature as a disciplinary field, the article argues that it is possible to detect in the Italian critical encounter with Wordsworth the persistence of patterns of thought associated with a long-standing difficulty to grapple with the elusive naturalism, as well as with the ostensible Protestant matrix, of his poetic language.