Introduction
After struggling in his middle years to win more than a coterie readership, William Wordsworth lived to savour success. He died full of honours in 1850, Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, a man recognized, in John Keble’s words, as ‘raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poesy, but of high and sacred truth’.1 Over the next fifty years his status as an English classic was confirmed in innumerable printings of his works, anthologies, and eventually scholarly studies. By 1950, however, it seemed that his time was over. At an event to mark the centenary of Wordsworth’s death, Lionel Trilling, one of the foremost American critics of his generation, summed up what he took to be the current perception of the poet: ‘Wordsworth is not attractive and not an intellectual possibility.’2 Although Trilling’s lecture went on to demonstrate that this was not his own view, his decisive and memorable formulation sounded right, as if Keble’s words on the plaque in Grasmere Church were being given their sad but inevitable addendum. But such has not been the judgement of history. Since the muted celebrations in 1950, shifts in intellectual concerns have brought the Romantics into new focus and have rediscovered Wordsworth as a fully ‘intellectually possible’ figure. Western culture’s preoccupation with identity and the self; the linguistic turn of much current theory; the interest in power and politics and nationhood; the return to history; environmental issues – all of these dominant features of the cultural landscape of the last half-century have been mapped across the terrain of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.
That today’s ‘Wordsworth’ (the name constituting the object of study in its totality – poetry, prose, biography, historical context, critical history) is substantially different from that of 1950 is partly due to the labours of editors. As Keith Hanley’s chapter in this collection spells out, multi-volume editions of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose, as well as editions of his letters and of Coleridge’s and of other members of their circle, have enormously enlarged our factual knowledge. As far as Wordsworth the poet is concerned we can say more: editorial interventions have reconfigured ‘Wordsworth’. Students now routinely refer to poems which Wordsworth did not publish. The Prelude in thirteen books completed in 1805, was not brought to light until seventy-six years after his death. Since then other texts have emerged through scholarly activity, such as Salisbury Plain, The Ruined Cottage, The Pedlar, The 1799 Prelude, The Recluse. And this is not a case of editors beavering away at trivia. No one would doubt that the 1805 Prelude is Wordsworth’s finest poem; recent criticism has treated the others mentioned as central to Wordsworth’s achievement.
So strongly have these texts emerged, in fact, poems Wordsworth did not publish, that Jack Stillinger, himself an experienced editor, has warned against the effacement of the poetic canon Wordsworth did choose to authorize (for details see Hanley). But what is actually happening is not effacement – Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes, for example, are too powerful to accept relegation – but rather a realignment of texts in relation to one another as readers encounter an enlarged poetic corpus, with all the uncertainties inherent in the new apprehension that such an encounter must involve.
Something of the same sense of continuity bracketed with newness must strike us when we consider ‘Wordsworth’ more largely. I will consider three examples, but more could easily be adduced. In 1916 it was at last revealed publicly (scholarly insiders had known for some time) that Wordsworth had fathered a daughter on a French Royalist sympathizer when he was twentytwo years old. To some it was a relief to learn that Wordsworth had been like Keats and Shelley and Byron, a man with flesh and blood appetites, and not just a solitary visionary communing with Nature and the Universe, which is the figure most of the late portraits, busts, and statues conveyed. For others, though, the news had a more exciting meaning. Now one could see why Wordsworth’s early poetry is peopled with abandoned women and destitute figures and haunted guilty men. The haunted, guilty one was the poet himself. Further speculation about Wordsworth’s relations with his sister, Dorothy, added to the sense that the poetry up to, say, 1803 was the product of a tormented spirit.
That Wordsworth was a driven man in the 1790s is not in dispute, but more recently scholars struggling to penetrate the opacities of The Prelude’s account of those years have focused on the poet’s politics, on his allegiances and betrayals as they can be inferred, and in so doing have wonderfully thickened our sense of what it meant to be a radical poet in a country gearing up for a war of survival. But as Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) persuasively demonstrates, it is not the case that a newer, more fashionable angst has just supplanted the old. Johnston reminds us how complex the relation was in the 1790s between the private and the public and his work – as does that of David Bromwich in Disowned by Memory (1998) – invites still further investigation of Wordsworth in the most turbulent decade of his life.
Or consider the issue of Nature’s healing power. In The Prelude it is claimed that ‘Nature’s self, by human love/Assisted’ (1805 x 921–2) guided Wordsworth out of the labyrinth of error in which he was bewildered in the 1790s and one might say that in a sense his whole creative output is a thankoffering. Following up the question of quite how Nature’s self saved the poet must lead us into Metaphysics, but it also must lead into appreciation of what the poetry does with Nature in the form of rocks and stones and trees. Wordsworth’s poetry is about the ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’, but much of it is immediately and overtly about mountains and lakes, about clouds and weather and growing things. This immediately attractive aspect of the poetry eventually became the primary identifier of ‘Wordsworth’ – Wordsworth the ‘Nature poet’. His spirit brooded over the foundation in Great Britain of the National Trust, charged with the preservation of landscape of exceptional beauty, and in America over attempts by John Muir (1838–1914) to persuade his contemporaries that the survival of wilderness was vital for the nation’s soul. But it was also invoked by anyone wanting to persuade town-dwellers to part with their money on a day out in the country. ‘One impulse from a vernal wood’ (‘The Tables Turned’) can be the text for a monograph on Wordsworth’s religion, but it can also be used to sell hiking boots.
Until recently it seemed that this bifurcation could only become more pronounced. Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime’ was increasingly alien, or simply unintelligible, to a post-Christian, urbanized readership. What has come to be called ‘eco-criticism’, however, has begun one kind of recuperation. Victorians found reassurance in their ‘Prophet of Nature’; a few fanatical Wordsworthians testified that they carried a Poetical Works along with their Bible. Few if any readers in the twenty-first century are going to return to that. But it is with a sense of urgency that much criticism is reconsidering Wordsworth’s writings about the natural world and the place of human beings in it. Coleridge thought it part of the special power of Wordsworth’s poetry that it could nourish us ‘by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’.3 As Ralph Pite’s essay in this collection ably shows, the eco-criticism of our own time reaches across the centuries to Coleridge here.
A final example: Wordsworth and the New World. After Wordsworth’s death American admirers raised money for a memorial in Ambleside Church in the Lake District, confirming, what was already clear from the stream of visitors to the poet’s home at Rydal Mount, that his work continued to be esteemed in America. Quite what the esteem amounted to, though, has been the question, one whose challenge was not adequately met by routine gestures towards Emerson and Thoreau. Recent work, however – and the pioneering studies of Alan G. Hill deserve tribute here4 – has begun to convey some sense of the diversity of response Wordsworth elicited in the new Republic, and Joel Pace’s essay in this collection indicates how much more fascinating evidence is waiting to be investigated. But there is more work to be done, as Pace implies, not only on what Wordsworth meant to America but on what America meant to him.
What I am trying to suggest in these examples is that contemporary Wordsworth scholarship is vibrant because it is alive to its continuity with that of the past whilst being fully aware of historical distance, and in this respect it honours, in fact, a primary force in the creative powers of the poet himself. Wordsworth was obsessed with ensuring that nothing was lost from his past: ‘I look into past times as prophets look / Into futurity’. Memory reaches, chains bind, bonds sustain, links link – the poetry and much of the prose celebrates whatever preserves affinities ‘Between all stages of the life of man’.5 But the intensity of Wordsworth’s gaze as he hangs ‘Incumbent o’er the surface of past time’ (1805 Prelude, iv, 263), is a function of his equally obsessive awareness that making sense of the past calls for a lifetime’s revisiting, open to the possibility of and recognizing the necessity for reinterpretation. All of the specially commissioned essays in this Companion share something of the same awareness. Their topic, too, is Wordsworth past and present.
NOTES
1 The tribute from the dedication to Keble’s Oxford lectures on poetry, De Poetica Vi Medica: Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1844), was inscribed on the plaque to Wordsworth in Grasmere Church, where he is buried.
2 Lionel Trilling, ‘Wordsworth and the Rabbis’, in The Opposing Self (London, 1955), p. 118.
3 Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv.
4 Alan G. Hill, ‘Wordsworth and his American Friends’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81 (1978), 146–60. Much freshly researched information is also compressed into the footnotes of Hill’s volumes of the Wordsworth letters.
5 PW ii 481.