Drawing extensively upon archival resources and manuscript evidence, Wordsworth Before Coleridge rewrites the early history of Wordsworth''s intellectual development and thereby overturns a century-old consensus that derives his most important philosophical ideas from Coleridge. Beginning with Wordsworth''s mathematical and poetic studies at Hawkshead Grammar School and Cambridge University, both of which tutored the young poet in mind-matter dualism, the book charts the process by which Wordsworth came, not to reject this philosophical foundation, but to reevaluate the indispensable role of passion within it. Prompted by his reading in 1793 or early 1794 of Dugald Stewart''s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Wordsworth rejected the exclusive rationality of William Godwin''s political philosophy and the anti-passionate morality of Alexander Pope''s philosophical poetics. Subsequent exposure, between 1795 and 1797, to Cambridge Platonism and English Kantiani
