William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic:

In his Introductory chapter, Cox begins by questioning Harold Bloom's methodology in The Anxiety of Influence, which patents its own, psychoanalytic brand in Romantic literary studies by utilizing "poetic oedipal anxiety" (2) for studying strong poets across canons.Cox argues that this theoretical approach both "distorts" and "forgets" (ibid.) the contemporaneity between the two generations of Romantic poets, and the function of "noncanonical figures" (ibid.) in empowering the interrelationship between them.Citing earlier research conducted by Tim Fulford, Jeffrey C. Robinson, and others in recent years, one could assert that Wordsworth and his poetic contemporaries were dynamically associated through eventful episodes, such as the "immortal dinner," (7), where Haydon was gradually assigned the task of the mediator, a go-between the "Lakers and the Cockneys" (11).To dismiss the dynamic entanglement between contemporaries, young and old, would lead to an unjust, gendered discrimination between the strong and the weak poets, or the masculine and the "effeminate" (21), as Bloom would like us to believe.Instead, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, Shelley and Keats were re-arranging poetical strengths on both aesthetic and political grounds by attacking the (creative) conservatism of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth in important texts, renegading by travestying them, by generating a democratic "vision" (30) against their autocratic, poetic tyranny.This creates the foundation for Cox's counter-psychoanalytic framework in his book.In 'Cockney Excursions', Cox elaborates on his earlier argument by drawing a discriminatory line between the egotism of the Lakers, especially Wordsworth, and the careful deconstruction of such egotism amongst the Cockneys, vis-vis Hazlitt's criticism of The Excursion, in Shelley's "Alastor", Byron's Manfred