The philosophic poet
When the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell learnt that a friend was planning to visit the Lake District, she urged him to pack something by Wordsworth, not, as one might expect, his Guide to the Lakes, but the long, philosophical work in blank verse, The Excursion.1 The poem is set in the heart of the Lake District and its scenes and characters could have been of interest to any tourist going there; but Gaskell is not recommending The Excursion just for this reason. It is rather that to her mind Wordsworth is the prophet of the mountains and valleys, the best tutor and guide to the spiritual nourishment available from natural beauty, and The Excursion is his inspired word. Four figures occupy the ground of the poem, supposedly in dramatic interaction, but few readers have ever doubted that the most important of them is the Wanderer and that through him speaks Wordsworth the Sage. When the Wanderer declares that ‘To every Form of being is assigned . . . / An active Principle’ (Excursion ix 1–3), his confession of faith recalls ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the early Prelude and it is no surprise to learn that the discourse of the Wanderer first published in 1814 was actually drafted in the year of ‘Tintern Abbey’, 1798.2
Whether or not Gaskell’s friend, Charles Bosanquet, was uplifted by the Wanderer’s sermon among the mountains is not known, but it is unlikely that a student nowadays will be moved by the passage, simply because it is not likely to be read. The Prelude offers much greater pleasure and interest than The Excursion and even the most assiduous student can only take so many thousand blank-verse lines before wilting. But though the ‘active principle’ passage may escape the notice of most readers nowadays, there are many others like it in Wordsworth’s most studied poems, equally difficult and equally challenging. For example: ‘Wisdom and spirit of the universe, / Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, / That giv’st to forms and images a breath / And everlasting motion’ (now recognized as Prelude, 1805 i 428–31, but published in Wordsworth’s lifetime as a discrete poem, ‘Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth’); the Pedlar’s exhortation to the Poet at the close of The Ruined Cottage, that he must no longer question the ‘purposes of wisdom’, reading the ‘forms of things with an unworthy eye’ (MS d 509–10); the final lines of The Prelude which mystifyingly declare that it will be Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s task as ‘Prophets of Nature’ to teach how ‘the mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells’. The list could be greatly extended. In Wordsworth’s body of work there are many passages which, from the strangeness of their vocabulary and conceptual frame and often from the complexity of their syntax, are difficult to understand in themselves and very difficult to know what to make of as a body of poetic utterance once one starts linking them up. Wallace Stevens was unspecific when he alluded to ‘those pages of Wordsworth, which have done so much to strengthen the critics of poetry in their attacks on the poetry of thought’, but it was surely such passages he had in mind.3
Growing awareness of philosophical aspiration was integral to Wordsworth’s discovery of his poetic vocation, the discovery, as Kenneth Johnston’s chapter in this volume explains, that was inextricable from Wordsworth’s conceiving the scope of his planned great work, The Recluse, from 1798 onwards. This chapter proposes simply to highlight some of the problems this fact poses for the modern reader, especially for one coming to Wordsworth’s poetry for the first time. I will waste no time asking ‘Is Wordsworth a philosophical poet?’, since this is invariably the prelude to pointless manoeuvres aimed at redefining the word ‘philosophical’ to ensure that the answer is Yes. A glance at the poetry discussed in this chapter will show that it is at least what Stevens calls ‘poetry of thought’, and familiarity with Wordsworth’s poetic forebears will indicate how securely he was working within a tradition of meditative verse. Nor will I offer a summary of ‘Wordsworth’s Thought’, believing this to be a wholly reductive and useless exercise applied to Wordsworth or any other poet, nor a survey of what other scholars have written about Wordsworth and Hartley, Wordsworth and Kant, and so on. To repeat: the aim of the chapter is modest. It is to play light on the assertion that philosophical aspiration was integral to Wordsworth’s sense of his poetic vocation and to bring into focus some questions about the poetry.
Wordsworth the Sage of Rydal Mount was a Victorian construction, but the real beginning of Wordsworth as philosophic poet was in the year when almost every aspect of his life took on a new complexion, the annus mirabilis of 1797–8. In 1794 he had introduced into revision of An Evening Walk (published 1793) a striking passage on the Life in (or to be perceived in) Nature:
A heart that vibrates evermore, awake
To feeling for all forms that Life can take;
That wider still its sympathy extends
And sees not any line where being ends;
Sees sense, through Nature’s rudest forms betrayed,
Tremble obscure in fountain rock and shade,
And while a secret power those forms endears
Their social accents never vainly hears.
(An Evening Walk, ed. Averill, p. 135)
The meditation, sustained over many lines, undoubtedly enlarges the intellectual field of the poem, but not markedly beyond that already traversed by earlier eighteenth-century poets of meditation, notably James Thomson in The Seasons (1726–30), Mark Akenside in The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), and William Cowper in The Task (1785).4 Wordsworth’s work of 1797–8 was of quite another order. Confident in a steadily growing selfassurance, hard-won over the previous few years, Wordsworth was sure at last that he was destined to be a poet. Coleridge was sure that he was to be a certain kind of poet: ‘I dare affirm that he will hereafter be admitted as the first & greatest philosophical Poet’ (letter 15 January 1804). That assertion may date from a few years on, but it expresses what Coleridge had believed ever since his intimate knowledge of Wordsworth began. It underpinned Wordsworth’s declaration in the summer of 1798 that he was starting work on a poem so ambitious that ‘I know not anything which will not come within the scope of my plan’ (letter 6 March 1798) and the vauntingly ambitious ‘Prospectus’ he drafted to the whole project two years or so later (for reference and discussion see Johnston’s essay in the present volume).
From the outset, however, insofar as the two poets had any clear conception of what a philosophical poem should be, they differed without knowing how crucially they differed. Coleridge looked for Wordsworth to pronounce ‘upon authority’ a ‘system of philosophy’, whereas Wordsworth had declared only that his ‘object’ was ‘to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society’ (6 March 1798) and in the only part of the poem he published, The Excursion, he pointedly disavowed in a preface any intention ‘formally to announce a system’.5 Inevitably Coleridge was disappointed. When Wordsworth heard of this he asked Coleridge to send his ‘remarks’ on the poem and added that, ‘One of my principal aims in the Ex[cursion] has been to put the commonplace truths, of the human affections especially, in an interesting point of view; and rather to remind men of their knowledge, as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds, than to attempt to convey recondite or refined truths’ (22 May 1815). But Coleridge was not disarmed by this defensive manoeuvre and how deeply disappointed he was is evident in his long, careful, and devastating letter to Wordsworth of 30 May 1815, in which he explained what kind of philosophic poem he had imagined him to be writing for so many years. Coleridge looked for a survey of ‘the faculties of Man in the abstract’ and of the ‘Human Race in the concrete’ from origins to the present, orchestrated to ‘conclude by a grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true Philosophy with true Religion’ – and a great deal more. The letter is too long to quote and resists excerpting. Coleridge’s vision could not be more different from what The Excursion is and his delineation of it effectively killed the project of which he had been the joint begetter.6
Wordsworth’s description of his aim in The Excursion is a brilliantly perceptive characterization of the bed-rock of his achievement and he made many similar observations over his lifetime. Repeatedly he emphasized that his poetry rests on fundamentals, on the shared. ‘If my writings are to last’, he declared in late life, ‘it will I myself believe, be mainly owing to this characteristic. They will please for the single cause, “That we have all of us one human heart!” ’7 Just though it is, however, Wordsworth’s 1815 letter to Coleridge is disingenuous. Yes, he wanted to be (and surely is) the poet of the naked, simple, elemental, but there is also abundant evidence that his most creative period began with struggles in poetry with matters which were not at all simple, or rather, matters which defied simple formulation.
In a letter on 3 February 1801 Coleridge reported:
I have been thinking vigorously during my Illness – so that I cannot say that my long, long wakeful nights have all been lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the Relation of Thoughts to Things, in the language of Hume, of Ideas to Impressions.
This quintessentially Coleridgean utterance finely catches the difference between the two poets. It is impossible to imagine Wordsworth passing wakeful nights thinking in the language of Hume or of any other philosopher. Nowhere in his letters is there a statement at all like this, whereas Coleridge’s letters and notebooks are full of them. But it does not follow from the overall flatness of Wordsworth’s letters that such matters as the ‘Relation of . . . Ideas to Impressions’ were of no interest to him. They were, but his way of actively thinking about them was through poetry – literally, through writing in metre.
Over the period 1798–1800 Wordsworth drafted hundreds of lines of poetry, some in short passages, some for longer stretches of consecutive explication. These manuscript workings were plundered for The Prelude (not published in Wordsworth’s lifetime) and The Excursion (published 1814), but much of the drafting was not used in completed and published poems and awaited transcription and dissemination by Wordsworth’s later editors. It is a fascinating body of work, in which Wordsworth grapples with the main questions of epistemology as they presented themselves in the century after John Locke and Isaac Newton (‘epistemology: the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods and validation’, OED): (a) how do we know the world – that is, what is the relation between what we think of as our independent minds and the world ‘out there’; (b) can perception of the world out there give knowledge of the world’s creator – that is, of a transcendent power; (c) what is the relation between our sensory being, that which perceives, knows, learns, and our moral being?
Coarsened by reduction into a textbook list, of course, this body of work sounds anything but inviting, save perhaps mildy to a historically minded philosopher curious about what poetic concerns were in the late eighteenth century. Looked at from the opposite direction, however, from the point of view of someone primarily interested in Wordsworth, the poetry in these notebooks beckons precisely because it so evidently issues from personal experience and not from an attempt to think through, point by point, topics listed in a philosophical primer.
‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’, declared Keats (letter, 3 May 1818). A human pulse beats in these drafts. Formulations which verge upon becoming philosophical questions take shape as if they are being insisted on by the uncertainty of the personal experience from which they arise and which, reciprocally, they seem to help the poet grasp. Here, for example, is one draft passage not introduced elsewhere into a published poem:
Oh ’tis a joy divine on summer days
When not a breeze is stirring, not a cloud,
To sit within some solitary wood,
Far in some lonely wood, and hear no so[und]
Which the heart does not make, or else so fit[s]
To its own temper that in external things
No longer seem internal difference:
All melts away, and things that are without
Live in our minds as in their native home.
(Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, p. 322)
This is a very characteristic utterance from the period of Lyrical Ballads. ‘Solitary . . . lonely’, the mystery of perception is felt profoundly in alone-ness. But the 1794 revisions to An Evening Walk had introduced the concept of the ‘social accents’ inherent in perception of the forms of life and pursuing it becomes the motor force of the later drafting. Through one line can be traced Wordsworth’s growing absorption in memories of sensory experience, which culminated soon after in the first part of the two-part Prelude. But inextricable from it also is the verse which continually touches on and slowly brings into definition questions about the moral power, and spiritual value, of yielding as ‘free gift’ our ‘whole being’ to ‘Nature and her impulses’ (Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, p. 324). In mid-summer 1798 the poet of ‘Lines . . . Tintern Abbey’ was ready to honour ‘nature and the language of the sense’ as ‘The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.’ The confidence, the note of exultation, rests in part on his having as it were taken possession of his own convictions in the struggle with a long and demanding passage which begins:
Not useless do I deem
These quiet sympathies with things that hold
An inarticulate language, for the man
Once taught to love such objects as excite
No morbid passions no disquietude,
No vengeance and no hatred needs must feel
The joy of that pure principle of love
So deeply that unsatisfied with aught
Less pure and exquisite he cannot chuse
But seek for objects of a kindred love
In fellow-natures and a kindred joy.
(The Ruined Cottage, ed. Butler, p. 372)
Wordsworth never published this exposition – which continues for another 100 lines – in its entirety, but it was for him what certain lines in Endymion were for Keats, ‘a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a Truth’ (letter 30 January 1818). They appeared in part in The Excursion, but it would be true to say that even without appearing they are everywhere in Wordsworth. The poet’s sense of how the mind’s relation to the external world might best be understood was continually to change during his poetically most creative years and so was his understanding of ‘the one/Surpassing Life, which out of space and time, / Nor touched by welterings of passion, is / And hath the name of God’ (Prelude vi 54–7), but what remained constant was the conviction – even if the language of that conviction could alter – that love of nature’s ‘beauteous and majestic’ scenes (Prelude i 636) was inseparable from, in a mysterious but absolutely certain way, moral growth, knowledge of the divine, and acceptance of the nature of human life. The exchange between Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1815 may serve to highlight the fact that from its very inception the idea of Wordsworth as philosophical poet had a question mark over it – what kind of poet is that? It was a question that nagged at many of his great contemporaries, Keats, perhaps most of all. Throughout his short writing life Keats was uncertain about the relative worth of poetry and philosophy and his estimation of Wordsworth correspondingly wavered. The Excursion was one of the things in the age to rejoice at (letter, 10 January 1818) and Wordsworth was a greater poet than Milton because of his greater human sympathy – he thought more deeply ‘into the human heart’ (letter 3 May 1818). But Wordsworth’s grandeur could also overwhelm and oppress: ‘. . . for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist – Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself . . . We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’ (letter 3 February 1818).
The opposition which troubled Keats (‘fine imaginative or domestic passages . . . certain Philosophy’) reached an advanced point of definition later in the Victorian era in opposed essays by Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold. Both profoundly sympathetic critics of Wordsworth, they agreed that he was a great poet but disagreed sharply as to why one might think so. In 1876 Stephen argued that Wordsworth’s poetry retained its capacity to inspire and console, and ‘wears well’ because it is solidly based on ethics capable of ‘systematic exposition’.8 This was not its only appeal, of course, but it was the virtue without which all other attractions must ultimately fade. Not so, Arnold demurred three years later. This is the kind of claim no ‘disinterested lover of poetry’ could make, but which is made with deep and complacent satisfaction by Wordsworthians, disciples of the Sage of Rydal Mount, whose yearning for spiritual counsel renders them incapable of recognising that Wordsworth’s ‘poetry is the reality . . . his philosophy is the illusion’.9
Arnold’s essay is one of his most attractive and its culminating affirmation of what really does matter in the poetry, Wordsworthian in its directness and simplicity, is more heart-stirring than anything in Leslie Stephen. But Arnold’s no-nonsense clearing of the decks is too thorough. In Wordsworth’s case, he insists, ‘we cannot do him justice until we dismiss his formal philosophy’. Reviewing a Primer of English Literature (1876) by Stopford Brooke, himself a passionate Wordsworthian, Arnold had made a much more nuanced observation on this point: ‘No one will be much helped by Wordsworth’s philosophy of Nature, as a scheme in itself and disjoined from his poems. Nor shall we be led to enjoy the poems the more for having a philosophy of Nature abstracted from them and presented to us in its nakedness.’10 But this is not how he put it in the clinching declaration in the wittiest and most persuasive part of his essay. Here there is no middle ground: Wordsworth’s philosophy is in contradistinction to his poetry. We cannot do justice to the one without dismissing the other.
In an important sense Arnold is surely right. No one could put together a treatise called The Philosophy of William Wordsworth that would satisfy professional philosophers, and a little red book, The Sayings of William Wordsworth, would change no one’s life. But in a more important way Arnold is wrong, in that he drives a wedge between philosophy and poetry, where what is needed in Wordsworth’s case is a bridge. For the philosophical poetry underpins everything else. The Ruined Cottage and ‘Tintern Abbey’; much, perhaps most, of The Prelude, especially Books ii, iv, vi, viii, x, xii, and xiii; the conclusion to Home at Grasmere, later printed as the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse; the re-written ‘Pedlar’ of 1802; ‘Ode to Duty’; ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’; much of The Excursion, notably Books iv and ix; and all of the manuscript drafting not finally incorporated in published poems. This wonderful body of meditative, discursive, expository poetry is not opposed to ‘pure’ lyric poems such as ‘The Solitary Reaper’; nor is it the setting against which jewels such as the ‘Lucy’ poems sparkle more brightly; nor is it, to anticipate another much used figure, the ore which when refined yields gold. To ‘do justice’ to all of Wordsworth’s poetry, the challenge of the philosophic verse must be embraced.
What problems face readers fresh to Wordsworth who try to follow that injunction? One is I think easily resolved. Much of the verse is difficult to follow. The explication of a point is often sustained over many lines and the concentration required to keep eye and attention on the syntax of the developing argument is enormous (I am not, of course, suggesting that Wordsworth is alone in making such demands). Read out loud, however, many a difficult passage will yield itself up because the rhythm will make the emphases and supply the punctuation. Never were Hopkins’s words more applicable, that ‘the true nature of poetry’ is as ‘the darling child of speech, of lips and spoken utterance: it must be spoken’.11
Three problems at least, though, will remain. The first is vocabulary (leaving aside the issue of familiar words such as ‘plastic’ and ‘vulgar’, which have simply shifted in meaning). When Wordsworth describes childhood experiences the language is usually accessible, as in, for example, Prelude ii 176–80:
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart and held me like a dream.
But when meditating on these experiences Wordsworth habitually employs the language of eighteenth-century philosophical discourse, not with the professional’s concern about terminological niceties, but not casually either. And this language is not readily accessible; if it seems so on occasion it is probably treacherous. Take ‘sense’.12 ‘Tintern Abbey’ ’s ‘language of the sense’ and Prelude, i’s ‘hallowed and pure motions of the sense’ should not cause too much difficulty, but one might begin to struggle with the cluster of affirmations which contrast worlds of life and death:
They need not extraordinary calls
To rouze them – in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
But quickened, rouzed, and made thereby more fit
To hold communion with the invisible world.
I mean
Oppress it by the laws of vulgar sense,
And substitute a universe of death,
The falsest of all worlds, in place of that
Which is divine and true.
I, long before the blissful hour arrives
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation: – and, by words
Which speak of nothing more that what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures . . .
These three quotations, it should be noted, are taken not from manuscript drafts familiar only to a few scholars, but from key canonical texts: the climax of Wordsworth’s greatest poem, The Prelude xiii 101–5; 139–43; and the manifesto to what he hoped would be his greatest work, The Recluse.
The second is that the poetry appears to entertain a variety of views, whose apparent chafing would not discompose a trained philosopher or an eighteenth-century historian, but which probably will the late twentieth-century reader who is neither. Within the two poems just mentioned, Wordsworth avers, for example, that Paradise can be the produce of the common day, but also that our home is with infinitude and only there; that our dignity originates and is maintained by an interchange of action from within and from without, but also that it is from within ourselves that we must give or else we never can receive; that his calling with Coleridge is to be a prophet of Nature, but also that his high argument is how much more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells is the mind of Man.
These two difficulties are obvious – they will strike any serious reader at once. What makes the third difficulty so troublesome is that it is not obvious enough. It is that much of Wordsworth’s meditative verse explores ideas which have become – in part from his influence – such half-accepted commonplaces of nineteenth and twentieth-century western culture that they no longer stand out as needing inspection. Consider by contrast a moment in Milton’s Lycidas. At its climax the elegy for the drowned Edward King insists that grief must ultimately be assuaged by the assurance that Lycidas,
is not dead
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
. . .
but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.
These lines are either understood or they are not. A note that ‘him that walked the waves’ refers to Jesus Christ will be of no help to a reader who has no idea about Christian doctrine. In what way does Christ’s power ‘raise’ King? Unless we know or learn the answer, the turn of the poem’s argument will be baffling. In other words, it is obvious that here is a mystery which must be attended to. Many passages of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the other hand, which ought similarly to signal the need for close attention, don’t any longer. Whereas what was once the intellectual core of western culture – specific Christian doctrine – has been marginalized to the point where it is all but invisible, Wordsworth’s ideas about ‘Nature, Man, and Society’ occupy the ground of what is now matter of everyday discussion and debate. They are part of the cultural furniture of our lives. In one form they survive in the ideals of the emerging ecological movement, but at the other extreme they underpin copy from advertising agencies and the pitch of tour operators who specialize in transporting clients to ‘unspoilt Nature’. In short, the third difficulty about Wordsworth’s philosophical verse about the relation between human beings and the natural world is that its drift is now too familiar to shock and challenge readers into the kind of alertness which poetry demands.
How then might the student best approach Wordsworth’s philosophical poetry? Not, I suggest, at first through scholarly investigations into his intellectual indebtednesses. In 1881 J. H. Shorthouse lectured members of the Wordsworth Society on ‘The Platonism of Wordsworth’ and he was harbinger of many others who have sought to establish the poet’s philosophical affiliations: for example, Arthur Beatty, Wordsworth’s Doctrine and Art in their Historical Relations (1922), Newton P. Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought: Studies in William Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Man and Nature (1945), John A. Hodgson, Wordsworth’s Philosophical Poetry 1797–1814 (1980), Keith G. Thomas, Wordsworth and Philosophy: Empiricism and Transcendentalism in the Poetry (1989), Melvin Rader, Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach (1967). Books of this kind tend to over-emphasize the degree of Wordsworth’s indebtedness to a particular figure or school of thought, but they mostly contain much fascinating historical material, which illuminates the verse by placing words such as ‘impressions’ and ‘plastic’, and allied concepts, within the philosophical lexicon available to the poet. To follow up all these leads, however, in a study such as Rader’s (which remains the best starting-point) serves primarily to establish that Wordsworth was not a zany; that his thought was within the expected parameters of an intelligent, Cambridge-educated, and enquiring man of his time. And the downside to this historical approach (again I stress at first) is that tracing Wordsworth’s use of a word or concept back to Hartley, or Locke, or Spinoza, or Boehme, or the Cambridge Platonists (which any advanced student is going eventually to enjoy doing), encourages a way of looking through the verse to something beyond, rather than at it.
As verse, what are the most striking characteristics of this body of writing? When Arnold notoriously pronounced that Wordsworth had no style, his verbal flourish was meant to reinforce an argument about the simplicity of the poetry being like the grand simplicities of Nature, but it licensed the idea that Wordsworth’s poetic technique does not repay close attention as Keats’s, for example, clearly does. Disputing Arnold, a number of excellent critics have highlighted the unobtrusive but highly effective function of certain elements in Wordsworth’s verse. In his classic essay already mentioned William Empson demonstrated Wordsworth’s subtlety in exploitation of the potential of one word. Donald Davie has emphasized the distinctiveness of the syntax of the Prelude’s blank verse and in a much-admired essay Christopher Ricks has examined Wordsworth’s sense of the dynamics of balance and rhythm in verse lines. More recently Susan Wolfson has initiated an overdue attempt to redirect critical attention to the specifics of Wordsworth’s metrics and language use.13
The word-limit on this chapter leaves too little space for mention of other aspects of poetic craft which make Wordsworth’s poetry at its strongest so alive. So I want to emphasize what continues to strike me as as the dominant characteristic of Wordsworth’s philosophic verse overall, its signature. It is that the poetry shifts continually on the axis between the exultantly affirmative and the hesitantly exploratory. Keats’s remark that Wordsworth’s was the ‘egotistical sublime’ (letter 27 October 1818) and Hazlitt’s, that Wordsworth seems to exist ‘as if there were nothing but himself and the universe’,14 both profound comments, acknowledge the poet’s selfconfidence, but the poetry also registers other tones. In the drafting touched on earlier, uncertainty, equivocation, opacity even, are present in varying degrees, as might be expected, for these drafts are as near as one gets in Wordsworth’s manuscripts to sensing poetry as what Byron termed it – ‘lava of the imagination’ (letter 29 November 1813). The poet’s thought is visibly taking shape under pressure. The pressure is the resistance of language itself:
nor had my voice
Been silent often times had I burst forth
In verse which with a strong and random light
Touching an object in its prominent parts
Created a memorial which to me
Was all sufficient and to my own mind
Recalling the whole picture, seemed to speak
An universal language: Scattering thus
In passion many a desultory sound,
I deemed that I had adequately cloathed
Meanings at which I hardly hinted[, ] thoughts
And forms of which I scarcely had produced
A monument and arbitrary sign.
(The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Parrish, p. 163)
As Kenneth Johnston has recently pointed out, however, the exploratory–affirmative tension is evident not just in drafting but in finished and highly wrought verse, such as that of ‘Tintern Abbey’, whose triumph, he suggests, is its ‘awareness of its own weakness and proximity to failure’. Though the poem ‘is usually read as a deeply affirmative statement of secular or existential faith, it achieves its affirmation’, Johnston declares, ‘in ways that are shot through with signs of their own deconstruction’.15 The observation could be extended to include, for example, the comparably ‘deeply affirmative’ climax to the two-part Prelude, which, even as it unfolds to a majestic hymn of gratitude and indebtedness, insists, with a sort of dogged honesty, that viewed sceptically Wordsworth’s experiences might be susceptible to various interpretations (ii 426–96). It may be, says the poet, that my sense of life in Nature was entirely self-created, but it may be, on the contrary, that I was being granted a glimpse of divine truth ‘in revelation’. Either way, ‘I at this time / Saw blessings spread around me like a sea.’ A crucial philosophical distinction is paraded, as if to demonstrate the poet’s intellectual bona fides, before being swept aside with an assertion of what he knows for certain:
I was only then
Contented when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of being spread
O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still,
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart,
O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings
Or beats the gladsome air, o‘er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
And mighty depth of waters: wonder not
If such my transports were, for in all things
I saw one life and felt that it was joy.
‘Saw’, ‘felt’, ‘transports’ – these are the key words. The immediate sensation of the ‘most despotic of the senses’ (Prelude xi 173) is diffused into feeling, conviction, and an overflowing sense of joy, ‘transports’. Yet within a few lines Wordsworth concedes that this ‘might be error, and another faith / Find easier access to the pious mind’, only to use the concession as introduction to a still more vehement affirmation that everything that is best in his nature, everything that has supported him through an iron time, all his gifts, in short, are Nature’s:
Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations, and in thee
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion.
Despite all the exploratory gestures, the rhetorical hesitancies of ‘yet’, ‘but’, ‘if’ and so on, the affirmatory note is clearly the dominant and its best known and most easily memorable formulations have become the identifiers of Wordsworthian faith: ‘I saw one life, and felt that it was joy’, ‘A never-failing principle of joy / And purest passion’, ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her’. There is another element to the affirmation, however, quite as important as Wordsworth’s ability to recall the profoundest moments of his experience or his ability to place them within philosophical discourse. It is that he is doing both of these things in poetry.
This obvious point is one that is often overlooked in discussions of Wordsworth’s discovery of his vocation. In the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, in Home at Grasmere, in the ‘Preamble’ to The Prelude, Wordsworth reveals that he is a man who bears what is both a burden and a mark of divine election, as when in Home at Grasmere 897–902, he declares,
Possessions have I wholly, solely, mine,
Something within, which yet is shared by none,
Not even the nearest to me and most dear,
Something which power and effort may impart.
I would impart it; I would spread it wide,
Immortal in the world which is to come.
What this ‘something’ consists of is an important question. But equally so is the question, ‘Why impart it in a difficult, minority art form, Poetry?’
The answer is that by the summer of 1798 Wordsworth had come to entertain a sublime vision of Poetry which was to underpin the whole of his life’s effort, to affect Keats and Shelley deeply, and to help shape the history of poetry and the criticism of it ever since. It was a vision of Poetry as both a species of knowledge and a vehicle for knowledge of the profoundest kind, which in its operation brings into unity mind and heart. ‘Aristotle . . . hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so’, Wordsworth averred in the 1802 additions to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and much of this manifesto is given over to making good such an inordinate claim by indicating the scope of poetry’s engagement with human life. It is central because it deals with central things, the great, elemental passions of our existence. But it is equally important for Wordsworth to stress, immediately following the words just quoted, that Poetry’s especial claim is that, to put it crudely, it works. This most philosophic of all writing carries Truth ‘alive into the heart by passion’. A year or two earlier Wordsworth, who by his own account in The Prelude had once devoured books and pamphlets on topics such as political justice, rounded on the author of one of the most famous of them all, William Godwin, and others like him, declaring their work ‘impotent [to] all their intended good purposes’. All attempts ‘formally & systematically [to] lay down rules for the actions of Man’ are misguided, because they cannot reach the human heart: ‘I know of no book or system of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt into our affection[?s], to incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds’ (Prose i 103).
Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly hammered out the ideas which appeared in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads 1800 and 1802 and their later discovery of how widely they differed about The Excursion makes it all the more poignant that it should be Coleridge’s formulations about philosophical poetry which are the really memorable ones and deservedly well known. As in every aspect of his thought, Coleridge sought to unify and his quest inevitably determined his vision of the ideal poet: ‘a great Poet must be, implicité if not explicité, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact / for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest –; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child’ (letter 13 July 1802).
Coleridge had at one time believed that he was such a poet: ‘I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without thinking, or think without feeling. Hence tho’ my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness, or Passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed & simple tenderness or Passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with, or deduced from, my feelings: & this, I think, peculiarizes my style of Writing’ (letter 17 December 1796). Once convinced that it was Wordsworth who possessed the powers exactly suited to what the age (and Poetry) most needed, Coleridge transferred to him all claim to the ambition he had himself cherished to effect ‘a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought & Feeling’ (letter 15 January 1804). Addressing Wordsworth in a letter of [23 July 1803], Coleridge reported that he had told Sir George and Lady Beaumont exactly what to believe: ‘that you were a great Poet by inspirations, & in the Moments of revelation, but that you were a thinking feeling Philosopher habitually – that your Poetry was your Philosophy under the action of strong winds of Feeling – a sea rolling high’.
However, though Coleridge’s definitions of the capacity of Poetry may be the more memorable, they are only marginally more so than Wordsworth’s in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and it is important to recognize that Wordsworth’s sense of Poetry was no less exalted than Coleridge’s and that his personal ambition was commensurate. It is Wordsworth who confesses in The Prelude (xii 307–12) to an early hope,
That unto me had also been vouchsafed
An influx, that in some sort I possessed
A privilege, and that a work of mine,
Proceeding from the depth of untaught things,
Enduring and creative, might become
A power like one of Nature’s.
Annotating his copies of The Excursion and Wordsworth’s 1815 two-volume collection Blake furiously registered his disagreement with what Wordsworth was saying about the ‘fitting’ of the Mind and Nature, about Memory and Imagination, and about the influence of natural objects in fostering Imagination. His anger at some lines was so hot that it brought on a bowel complaint he feared would kill him. Wordsworth might have been shocked at Blake’s repudiation of his ideas, but he would, I think, have approved the nature of the response in itself, becaue it demonstrated just how seriously Blake was reading his poetry. This observation may serve to introduce the coda to this essay. I stated earlier that three difficulties face us in Wordsworth’s philosophic verse. There is, I believe, a fourth, but it is less a difficulty than one of those potential embarrassments which are handled by not being talked about. It is that much of Wordsworth’s poetry requires you to ask whether or not it is true.
For all that Wordsworth struck Carlyle as ‘essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual work of some sort in the world’,16 he was not literal-minded and on occasion defended his work, against literal-minded Christians especially, by stressing the licence of Poetry’s domain. In 1815, for example, he insisted that a passage in The Excursion of seemingly straight Spinoza must be read with a sense of its ‘dramatic propriety’ (letter (January 1815)). The 1843 Fenwick note to the Ode: Intimations explains that the notion of pre-existence appears in the poem not in order to promote it as a doctrine, but because Wordsworth felt that its long acceptance in various cultures authorized him ‘to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet’.17 Most of Wordsworth’s poetry, however, is not fenced round by such protestations. It does not invite us to consider the nature of the truth claims made by Poetry as the Supreme Fiction: it asks us to consider its claim to truth.
Across his creative lifetime Wordsworth returned repeatedly to meditations on such topics as the relation of human beings to their world, the formation of moral development, and the core values which give life its worth. Of course the emphasis and tone of the poetry changes, but there is much continuity between early and late. In 1798 in ‘Not useless do I deem’ Wordsworth was exploring convictions about the moral value of looking ‘with feelings of fraternal love / Upon those unassuming things that hold / A silent station in this beauteous world’ (Prelude xii50–2). Six years later he was drafting over two hundred lines about the foundations of moral growth, beginning, ‘We live by admiration and by love, / And even as these are well and wisely fixed, / In dignity of being we ascend’ (see The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, vol. ii, 378–88). Nearly forty years later he composed this beautiful lyric:
Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove,
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
This is a poetry of conviction and what needs to be emphasized about it is that Wordsworth was invariably direct about his stance towards his readers. His declaration to Sir George Beaumont that he wished ‘to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing’ (letter (February 1808)) is much quoted, as is the claim he made to Lady Beaumont that there is ‘scarcely one of my Poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution’ (21 May 1807). But Wordsworth did not reserve such comments only for private letters. He alerted his readers to his demands upon them in 1802, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and what he maintained then was his blazon for the rest of his life:
And if, in what I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without enemies, I would remind such persons that, whatever may be the language outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost unknown.
Such a ‘palpable design’, as Keats termed it, has always divided readers. Early on, when Wordsworth was failing to make any impact at all nationally, his reputation was fostered by a coterie of devotees, who were jibed at as ‘disciples’ or ‘worshippers’. Later they were referred to more respectfully as ‘Wordsworthians’, members of a growing sect, and until very recently the term was still in use. Fine scholars such as Ernest de Selincourt, Helen Darbishire, Mary Moorman, Basil Willey, and many others counted themselves as Wordsworthians in a line stretching back to the poet’s most ardent nineteenth-century scholar-proselytizers, William Knight, Edward Dowden, Stopford Brooke. Today, in academic circles, the term means only, ‘someone who works on Wordsworth’.
This essay is not an attempt to revive its older meaning, but it is worth dwelling briefly on what a strange but very instructive usage it was, for to lose entirely the fuller connotation of the term is to diminish what is absolutely central to Wordsworth’s work. Has any other poet’s name been used in this way, to denote both the characteristics of the poetry (‘what a Wordsworthian use of the preposition!’) and the characteristics of its readers (‘I am a Wordsworthian’ – Matthew Arnold)? To describe oneself in the 1870s, say, as a Keatsian would imply that one was steeped in his poetry, that one revelled in his imagination, but not that one necessarily shared his views about Beauty, Truth, Christianity and the Pagan World. When Gerard Manley Hopkins explained in a wonderfully inventive letter to Alexander Baillie (10–11 September 1864) why he has ‘begun to doubt Tennyson’, his trouble of mind concerns the signs that the Poet Laureate is becoming, paradoxically, ‘what we used to call Tennysonian’ and has nothing to do with losing faith in a Tennysonian creed. With Wordsworth it is different. His poetry asks us to become Wordsworthians, and that means not that we are required to ‘believe’ this poet’s philosophical utterances, but, at the very least, that we acknowledge that his poetry is the way it is because he wants us to.
NOTES
1 For references and a fuller account see my Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 129.
2 Full information and a reading text are presented in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 309–10.
3 Wallace Stevens, ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (London, 1959), p. 187.
4 Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 (Oxford, 1976) remains the best starting-point for work on Wordsworth’s relation to eighteenth-century poets.
5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), i, p. 307. Entry for 21 July 1832. Recalling the ‘plan’ of The Recluse even after such a long time Coleridge strikingly echoes his letter of 30 May 1815.
6 It is one more of the sad ironies of the Recluse project that shortly after he had unwittingly doomed it, Coleridge made public in chapter 22 of Biographia Literaria (1817) his continuing faith in what Wordsworth might do: ‘What Mr Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy: but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. It is the first genuine philosophic poem.’
7 Letter [c. 27 April 1835]. The quoted line is from Wordsworth’s own poem, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’.
8 Leslie Stephen, ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, Cornhill Magazine 34 (1876), 206–26; reprinted Hours in a Library. Third Series (London, 1879).
9 Matthew Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40 (July 1879), 193–204; reprinted as the introduction to Arnold’s Poems of Wordsworth (1879).
10 Matthew Arnold, Essays Religious and Mixed, ed. R. H. Super (1972), p. 250.
11 Gerard Manley Hopkins to Everard Hopkins, 5/8 November 1885. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Prose, ed. Gerald Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 137.
12 William Empson’s classic essay ‘Sense in The Prelude’ in his The Structure of Complex Words (1951) remains essential reading.
13 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (1955); Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (1987); Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997). For a good discussion of poetic language see also Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (1995), esp. pp. 119–25.
14 William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Mr Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion’, Examiner, 21 August 1814. The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (1930–4), xix, p. 11.
15 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet. Lover. Rebel. Spy (1998), p. 595.
16 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (1892), p. 55.
17 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (1993), pp. 61–2.