Current descriptions of British literary Romanticism are almost entirely grounded on the writing of six male poets. The cultural and scholarly descriptions of that phenomenon we call Romanticism are gender-biased. As poets, women were patently excluded from the "masculine tradition." It also entails a gender ideology which subtly denies the value of female difference. Positive feminine characteristics - sensibility, compassion, maternal love - are metaphorically appropriated by the male poet, while attributes of difference - independence, intelligence, willpower, aggressive action - are denigrated. The exploration of Nature found in canonical Romantic poetry also masks a gender politics. Nature is usually gendered as cultural metaphors of Mother Earth, Dame Nature, Lady Bountiful. But by identifying it as the external objective world which the self-conscious subject must penetrate, possess and interpret, the Romantic poets often deny to Nature her own authority. What I emphasize in this study is the way in which the self of consciousness linguistically constructed by Wordsworth is not the higher and potentially universal self he dreamed of, but rather a specifically masculine self. A subtle gender politics is at work especially in his autobiographical poems, "Tintern Abbey," "Nutting," and The Prelude. While he acknowledges the power of female Nature, he also appropriates that power, leaving her silenced, even absent. The masculine self attempts to eliminate her otherness, her difference, and her separate being.