The Currency of Wordsworthian Ideals in Modern and Postmodern Poetics Modernism, although any definition of it inevitably betrays the very purpose, had at its heart in general finding new ways of thinking, expressing, and living in the new world the 20(th)Century suddenly seemed to open up. The modernist injunctions against traditional mores and various forms of absolutism thus necessarily focused on undoing Victorian sensibilities and Romantic ideals. Accepting these precepts, modernism in poetry often made William Wordsworth, the ultimate Romantic poet, an easy target. A careful reading of his major poems and his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," his "defense of poetry," reveals an entirely different figure. His constant undoing and self-erasing, and the deeply self-conscious psyche that accompanies them, in fact, form a predominant mode through which Wordsworth generates further elaboration, further apologetics and conclusions always evolving into a more comprehensive and holistic point of view. The modality that the poet gleans in the preface to modernize naively idealistic and "romantic"devotion to the public finds a similar pattern in his poetry. The much talked about issue of poetic voice, for example, has in it the prototypeof a poet whose poetic quest is inseparable from the struggle it creates: the topic of poetic voice, thus, becomes the topic of vocation in Wordsworth`s poetry. So, too, the various dilemmas and knotty issues that come up in his poems are solved within the texts where the poet`s struggle, with all its confusions, self-doubts, and faltering authority, is there for his readers to witness. The poet as a rule refuses to go outside the text to smooth out these floundering moments, resolutely content with presenting texts that are uneven and heterogeneous-quite a postmodern feat, indeed. Under his idealistic facadeof public commitment to which Wordsworth binds himself is an innovative thinker/poet who pioneered and practiced the poetics his modern, postmodern descendents were forced to adopt by modernization and its multifaceted environment, the very poetics that they often accused him of lacking.