On the surface, there seems to be little common thread binding William 
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads and Paul de Man’s Criticism and Crisis. The 
contextual circumstances that gave rise to each were radically divergent. Wordsworth
was consciously, boldly inaugurating a new movement in British poetics, away from
abstraction and impersonality and into the personal, candid, emotional realm that we are 
now familiar with as that of British Romanticism. His strategy was earnest and direct, his 
use of language purposeful and linear. Conversely, Paul de Man’s Criticism and Crisis 
emerged right in the midst of a Deconstructionist and post-structuralist revolution. The 
terms of Deconstructionism, as applied to individual writers, necessitated that the “I,” the 
constitutive subject, be subsumed. Rather than start his own counter-revolution, as 
Wordsworth might have done, de Man took on Deconstructionism on its own terms. 
There is no “I” in his piece, and the rules of the then au currant critical style were 
closely, carefully followed.