There is little dispute that the early poem of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) called An Evening Walk (1793) draws heavily on eighteenth-century descriptive traditions. Wordsworth made explicit connections to Thomson Gray and other eighteenth-century poets in textual allusions. Wordsworth’s relationship to his eighteenth- century precursors has dominated critical reaction to the poem, but in a specific, indeed, limited manner, focusing on Wordsworth's ability to break free of his influences. Because the mainstream of twentieth-century criticism represented Romanticism (the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century movement of which Wordsworth became a defining figure) as a salutary revolt against the sedate norms of eighteenth-century culture, the fortunes of the poem have waxed or waned according to how solid a case could be made for placing it on the far side of the Romantic divide.