The following are short extracts from a rich and complex set of arguments for and against a New Historicist reading of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." Levinson's argument includes interesting discussion of the industrial landscape around the abbey in 1798, as well as the meditation on the title in the passage below. The arguments of both Levinson and McFarland should be read in full to appreciate the significance of the issues.

The map below is from Cary's New and Correct English Atlas (London: John Cary, 1787).

From Majorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 53, 55.

As I mentioned, each of the four odal sections corresponds to a physical movement toward or away from Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth said he composed the poem on the way to Bristol. As Moorman and others have noted, this means that his phrase, "A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" should have been "A Few Miles Below Tintern Abbey" No one has been terrifically exercised by the discrepancy.

The first -- the very first -- impression made by Wordsworth's snake of a title is that the speaker gazes down upon the Abbey from some peak a few miles above it. It takes a split second for "miles" to sink in, especially if the reader's expectations have been formed by poems such as "Grongar Hill" and the "Eton College Ode" -- topographical poems that situate the speaker on an eminence offering a wide prospect to his view. The conventions of nineteenth-century landscape painting would also reinforce this impression.

In substituting -- unintentionally, I believe -- 'above' for 'below,' Wordsworth not only puts himself above the polluted segment of the river, he implies his possession of a Pisgah prospect -- an overlook permitting comprehensive and composed vision. The preposition 'above' gives us the poetic action of 'looking over' Tintern Abbey. In that nuance hides a "'play on words,' (Wortspiel) that is necessarily impenetrable for its author." In that nuance lies the authentic explanation of this great escape, "Tintern Abbey."

The Abbey is precisely what gets looked over and overlooked, as does the significance of 13, 14 July 1798, 1793, 1790, and the actual appearance of the banks of the Wye. The inward vision for which the poem is properly renowned is produced by the controlled constriction of object-related social vision. "Tintern Abbey"'s transcendence does not confirm the narrator's discovery of "the thing he loved," it betrays his flight "from something that he dreads." Wordsworth's negotiations with an impossible reality sketch a response one is likely to share, understand, and forgive, if such things need forgiving. I have hoped to bring "Tintern Abbey" back to earth that we may do more than worship it.

I have suggested that criticism's failure to address the occasion of "Tintern Abbey" is part of a more general problem. Most of the poems we call Romantic resist historical elucidation in particular and particularly effective ways, as we have begun to observe. "Tintern Abbey," however, even among Romantic poems is an especially difficult work to situate, for its primary action is the dramatization of a man reading a landscape, an exhibition offered as a model for our own reception of the work.

From Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 5-6.

Levinson here not only beckons us towards her own interpretation of language, but as it were applies a Herculean headlock to force us toward that interpretation. However bizarre her notion that 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey' means either a few miles up in the air above the abbey, or an elevated hypotenuse that allows one to see the abbey miles away while beholding the steep and lofty cliffs, the hedgerows, and the rest, however bizarre this may seem, that is what she claims. She obliquely concedes the fantasticality of the claim by positing that it 'takes a split second for "miles" to sink in'. One supposes that readers will have to testify for themselves whether the split second occurs in their own readings of the title; I can only supply witness that it has never occurred in mine.

But Levinson urgently needs her bizarre reading of 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey' in order to validate her contention that Wordsworth is excluding the abbey. If, as she says, the 'preposition "above" gives us the poetic action of "looking over" Tintern Abbey', we do indeed have a 'play on words' that allows us the conjunction of 'what gets looked over' with what gets 'overlooked' -- and the further conjunction of the essay's title, 'Insight and Oversight: reading "Tintern Abbey"'.

Alas, no chain is stronger than its weakest link. If there is no oversight, there can be no insight; if nothing is looked over, then nothing can be overlooked; if 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey' does not mean, or even subliminally suggest, the bizarre notion of elevation to a prospect above the abbey, then there is in fact no abbey in the poem itself for Wordsworth to exclude. The abbey is not in the poem because Wordsworth is nowhere near the abbey, not because he is overlooking the abbey either visually or metaphorically. Why then should he have the abbey in the title of the poem at all? Simply because, as the most widely known landmark in the district, it gave a precise location for the equally precise further specification, 'a few miles above'. Granted, but why then be so precise, and add the further specification, 'July 13, 1798'? Coleridge supplies the answer, in his classic formulation about Wordsworth's procedure: the title is a choice example of Wordsworth's 'anxiety of explanation and retrospect'.

If we resurvey the title in the matrix of such an anxiety, we see that, against Levinson's interpretation, all its elements, not simply the abbey itself or the date, are equally anxious in their explanation and retrospect: 'Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798'. The explanation that the visit was 'during a tour' is perhaps even more needlessly specific than the date 13 July 1798; the explanation 'revisiting the banks of the Wye' perhaps even more needlessly specific than the location 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey'. Another poet, unburdened by Wordsworth's anxiety of explanation and retrospect, might well have called the same poem 'Lines Written in Monmouthshire Around the Turn of the Century'.

For another response to the Historicist argument on "Tintern Abbey," see this essay on Prometheus Unbound by Mary Herrington-Perry.