Appendix to Williams

I just realized I left out a part of my argument in the post below, though I ended up hinting at it in what's there.
It is the explicit connection of the repetition I find in the lines of Crabbe to the anxieties over memory in Goldsmith, and the connection is made thus: Williams thinks Goldsmith's observational discourse, beyond being just an experience of memory, is also an experience of anxieties about tropes in poetry. In a way, Goldsmith wonders whether with the disappearance of the village, the ability of poetry to say anything unique (i.e. without turning what it observes--in this case village life--into a trope) is also lost. I find the repetitions of Crabbe, far from being some sort of evocation of the state of mind of the villager-turned-laborer, are instead instances of this sort of anxiety about tropes: the repetitions function at the most basic level to push any line of the poem towards troping itself. The anxiety in Goldsmith that gets concretized in this folding back of the poem on itself (and, we should note, not because "all poems are troping themselves," or something like this) functions as the only way that Crabbe can describe the villagers--i.e. functions in its turn as the element of the poem that reflects or instantiates Crabbe's own anxiety. This anxiety is more total (for lack of a better word) than Goldsmith: it has to do with the ability of poetry to turn what it observes into inspiration for itself, even in its resisting of itself (i.e. being a counter-pastoral). It is a question about not the constitution or being (we'll find this in Cowper) but the role of the past that Goldsmith discovers.
Hopefully all this (which should probably go right after where I read the repetition in Crabbe closely) will make the transition between Goldsmith and Crabbe (as Williams generally sees it) clearer, and show more clearly how Williams' approach sees things at the specific level of poetic form connected to the movements of history within that form.