Wordsworth's poetry presents us with one of the most disturbing paradoxes of survival and an engagement with its ultimate failure: the fantasy of survival is, finally, bound up with the possibility of non-survival. To the extent that one's survival is predicated on the survival of others, one's survival of them is ‘self-destructive’, ‘self-defeating’. Wordsworth's sense of posterity, I want to suggest, is, like the survival poetics of a Hemans or Landon, intimately involved in the scene of the family. While Wordsworth's major poetry and poetics are centrally concerned with the anonymous and generalising futuring of audience that I am suggesting is characteristic of the (male) Romantic culture of posterity, his work is also determined, and in some ways compromised, by his investments in personal, familial survival. Wordsworth's survival poetry, then, brings out the complex disturbances predicated on the idea of personal continuation in Romantic poetics. To survive, for Wordsworth, means, fundamentally, to live on in the lives of others. The possibility that those others, the others in whom Wordsworth survives, will die therefore produces a crisis in writing, a scandal of representation.