Wordsworth and America: reception and reform
On the morning of 28 August 1833, a thirty-year-old American trekked up a steep road in northwest England. He was on a pilgrimage to the home of the poet who had kindled his belief in the intrinsic value of (Human) Nature. The poet’s family bade him enter a ‘modest household where comfort and culture were secured without any display’. Here, in a sitting room overlooking a downward-sloping garden, he awaited the master of the house. The young man was somewhat surprised when there appeared a ‘plain, elderly, white-haired man . . . disfigured by green goggles’, which he wore to soothe and protect his troubled eyes. The Englishman sat down and held forth on one of his favourite topics – America. There, society is ‘being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion [to the restraint of its] moral culture’. Getting and spending Americans lay waste their power, for ‘they are too much given to the making of money; and secondly, to politics . . . they make political distinction the end and not the means’. In a statement that seemed paradoxical to the visitor, his host noted that ‘they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting social ties stronger’.1
When the young Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) made this visit to Wordsworth’s home at Rydal Mount, he anticipated meeting the radically optimistic author of the Lyrical Ballads, but instead was bewildered by the conservative-minded man wearing green, rather than rose-tinted, goggles. After meeting Wordsworth, Emerson proclaimed that Americans had drawn an idealized portrait of the poet, who was not the free-thinker they thought him to be, but was bound by ‘the hard limits of his thought’ (294). Nevertheless, he noted in his account of this visit that Wordsworth ‘alone, treated the human mind well and with absolute trust’. This treatment of the mind’s ‘divine’ fabric became central to Emerson and his group of literary and spiritual reformers, soon to be known as the Transcendentalists. Wordsworth’s trust in the human mind and his belief that ‘we have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’) expressed sentiments of equality that became watchwords for not only Emerson and his circle, but a number of other American reformers as well.
Wordsworth once informed an American visitor that although he was known to the world as a poet, he ‘had given twelve hours thought to the conditions of society, for one to poetry’.2 Indeed, the editor of the 1888 Boston Prelude could proclaim quite confidently that ‘Americans should claim a close relationship with Wordsworth, for he is spiritually akin to those patriots who stood by the side of Washington.’3 America’s interest in Wordsworth was quickened by Wordsworth’s interest in America and the advice he gave his visitors about the need for reform. Wordsworth received over 100 American visitors who came to talk to the bard about American reforms – poetical, political, social, and religious.4
How did Wordsworth’s name come to be associated with nineteenth-century reform movements in America? The answer lies in the severalhundred thousand pirated editions and reviews of Wordsworth printed in America. By and large, these works have been left unexamined by scholars and students of the poet, yet they contain many new and exciting points of departure and are essential to a complete understanding of Wordsworth. Stephen Gill has remarked that Wordsworth in America is a book waiting to be written:
Wordsworth’s poetry was being freshly set by American printers from as early as 1802; his first editor, during his lifetime was an American, Henry Reed; The Prelude and Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth were better received in America than in Great Britain; American admirers contributed substantially to the Wordsworth memorial in Ambleside Church; the greatest private collectors of Wordsworth books and manuscripts were (and still are) Americans . . . Wordsworth’s presence in literature and art has not been fully explored, and how much remains to be done can be indicated by the fact that at the time of writing no comprehensive bibliography exists of the publication of Wordsworth in America.5
This chapter briefly sketches the ways in which Wordsworth and his poetry were received in America and the roles they played in US reform movements. It begins with the first American edition of Wordsworth’s verse, the 1802 Philadelphia Lyrical Ballads, tracing the work’s reception in post-revolutionary Philadelphia. The argument then focuses on Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Wordsworth was being reinvented by the Unitarians and the faction that grew out of them, the Transcendentalists. Next, exploring several sociological lines of thought coalescing towards the turn of the century, there is cause to examine Wordsworth’s role in Dorothea Lynde Dix’s (1802–87) pan-American asylum reforms and the ways in which his poetry was utilized by abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and environmentalists, especially John Muir (1838–1914). This study concludes with thoughts on several recent critical approaches to Wordsworth, most notably Transatlantic Romanticism.
Publication, reception, and reform in post-revolutionary Philadelphia
From the first, Wordsworth’s poetics were associated with American politics: in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania, James Humphreys (1747–1810), the publisher of the 1802 Philadelphia Lyrical Ballads, was one of the most outspoken critics of American independence. During the British occupation of Philadelphia, Humphreys was made ‘Printer to the King’. He waged war with type and images by printing the royal arms above his name on the masthead of the Pennsylvania Ledger. This infuriated printers in favour of the revolution, who noted that James Humphreys owned a press ‘whose weekly labors manifestly tend to . . . throw disgust on the friends of America’.6 When Humphreys retreated with the British troops, the patriots confiscated his press and found him guilty of high treason.
When Humphreys returned to Philadelphia, he printed several revolutionary tracts and published the Lyrical Ballads on paper that bore the watermark of the American Eagle, emblem of the new country over which Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was presiding.7 To Humphreys, these poems were not only a means of reintegration into America, but also a continuation of his press’s engagement with radical politics. These verses exemplified the liberty and equality on which the country was founded, and it was his hope that they would also remind citizens of how much work was left to bring these principles to fruition.
Many of the underlying principles in the poems reflected the spirit of the city in which the Declaration of Independence had been penned and approved. The Preface to the Ballads contained a poetical manifesto similar to that of the Declaration’s political one. Accordingly, it buttressed its own revolution: it declared a break with the poetry of his aristocratic predecessors and a democratic focus on the common woman and man, who are entitled to unalienable rights. Wordsworth expresses his ‘deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind’.8 The Preface is the declaration of independence for the citizens of the Ballads: Michael, the forsaken Indian woman, and many others. The ballads themselves are the voices of these characters, the representation of the under-represented. Henry Reed (1808–54) gave Wordsworth a ‘copy of the first American Edition of his poems – a proof of the early appreciation of them in the United States’.9 Wordsworth replied that it ‘is gratifying to one whose aim as an author has been to reach the hearts of his fellow-creatures of all ranks and in all stations to find that he has succeeded in . . . a distant country’.10 The similarities between the ideals expressed in Wordsworth’s poems and those on which the country was founded secured a readership for the Ballads in the new world; moreover, it was those same ideals that brought about a political conversion in their publisher and spurred him on to continue his press’s ameliorative efforts.
The Ballads were written by men who, in the not too distant past, had harboured republican or ‘democratic’ ideals. Coleridge gave vent to these sentiments in his 1795 lectures in Bristol, and Wordsworth developed similar views in revolutionary France under the tutelage of Michel Beaupuy, captain among the republican forces. Coleridge once planned to move to America, which he assumed would be the ideal environment for realizing human perfection through democratic living. If America were meant to be the ideal place for writing pantisocratic literature, would it not be the place for reading it as well? John Sargent (later a Whig vice-presidential candidate) wrote to Henry Reed about the reception of the Philadelphia Ballads, which were ‘so simple in their dress, so humble in their topics, so opposite to the pomp and strut of what had been the poetry of the times immediately preceding . . . that they touched a kindred chord in the heart’.11
In one set of advertisements in which Humphreys markets the Ballads, he notes that his publications are all ‘calculated to instruct and amuse, and to instill and disseminate those Principles which cement society, and on which its general Happiness is founded’.12 Humphreys’ advertisement for the Ballads resounds with language of social amelioration: ‘let not the name of Ballads give rise to prejudices in the minds of those who have never seen this work; for it is as much Superior to those things commonly known by that name, as happiness is preferable to misery’.13
Humphreys acquired a diverse American readership for the poems through a set of thoroughly ‘American’ characteristics. At a time when the appearance and price of a publication had political and social resonance, Humphreys’ Ballads (which contained – in one volume – the complete contents of the 1798 and 1800 English editions) only cost a little over a dollar, or a day’s wages for a labourer. In England, a labourer would have to part with a week’s wages to buy the 1800 London edition. Here were poems written about (and, in part, for) the labouring class, and yet in their native country they were placed well out of the grasp of this readership. The American edition was just as politically charged as its overseas counterpart, yet it realized the Preface’s ideas and ideals more so than the English editions by making use of the American publishing virtues of affordability, portability, and typographic simplicity.
Understandably, the Ballads made a very strong contribution to the ongoing debate over the rights of the lower classes. Wordsworth’s use of their language is censured in Robert Rose’s parody of Wordsworth’s Preface, which is not only among the first American burlesques of the Ballads, but predates all published English ones as well. After Rose read the Ballads, he sent a parody entitled ‘A Lyrical Ballad’ to the editor of the Port Folio; the lampoon is prefaced by an explanatory letter: ‘I never once had the idea that I was a poet’, confessed Rose,
till the other day, when I got a very pretty book to read, and found, that the author and I felt exactly alike. I always thought that to make verses, and them like, was right down hard; but it ain’t so at all. You wouldn’t, perhaps, believe it, sir, but I declare I can write as fast as any of your correspondents; besides, what I write is so vastly natural, that I’m sure you’ll like it. I’m sure its better than writing about things one don’t understand. However, as it an’t right to say too much for one’s self, you shall have a specimen of my abilities.14
Rose’s mock preface implies that composing poetry is beyond the grasp and language of the poor. He criticizes Wordsworth’s democratization of poetics through the language of ‘minstrelsy’, a musical form that parodied the vernacular spoken by African Americans. The speakers of such songs held nonsense discourse on political matters in an attempt to present such issues as incomprehensible to them.
The poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, like Wordsworth’s, was ridiculed for its use of common language. By publishing Wheatley – who advocated Abolition and equality for slaves as well as American Indians – Humphreys subtly criticized Jefferson, who had written in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) that the ‘compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism’. Humphreys doubtless realized that statements of equality could be inferred from several poems in the Ballads, including ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, which states ‘we have all of us one human heart’ (146). When this statement is considered in the context of Jefferson’s subsequent policies towards slaves and American Indians, it echoes (and yet lays bare the hypocrisy in) the sentiments of equality he expressed in the Declaration. Jefferson heads the list of subscribers to a Humphreys’ publication on passing laws to ameliorate the conditions of slaves; his presence on the list provides further proof of Humphreys’ political reintegration.15
Humphreys viewed books as the very thing that ‘cements’ society, and this explains his Loyalist efforts to keep America from a revolution he thought would be harmful. After the war, as a convert of the new American republic, he enlisted his press in the philanthropic cause of buttressing, but also critiquing, the direction in which Jeffersonian America was moving; of the utmost importance to students and scholars of Wordsworth and Coleridge is that Humphreys chose to publish the Lyrical Ballads as a means of accomplishing this reform, and that it was efficacious. It is the crowning achievement of Humphreys’ press that Isaiah Thomas, the most renowned patriot printer of the Revolution, forgave him for his transgressions against the budding country and referred to him as a ‘good and accurate printer and a worthy citizen’.16 Just as the Ballads were instrumental in converting Humphreys to the cause of America, so also did these poems play a shaping role in the conversions of William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, enlisting their pens in the American literary revolution.
Literary and religious reform
In 1810, Dr Peter Bryant purchased the Humphreys edition of the Ballads and brought it back from Boston to his sixteen-year-old son, William Cullen, who became one of the most popular nineteenth-century American poets. When the young Bryant was later serving out a clerkship with an established lawyer, he received a firm upbraiding from the attorney, who had caught him ‘wasting his time’ reading the Lyrical Ballads. Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), poet and newspaper editor, replies to the attorney’s expostulation, for he did not see Bryant’s time as ill spent:
I shall never forget with what feeling my friend Bryant . . . described to me the effect produced upon him by . . . Wordsworth’s Ballads. He lived, when quite young . . . at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol in the Temple of Art. He said, that upon opening Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden, to change into a strange freshness and life. He had felt the sympathetic touch from an according mind, and . . . instantly his powers and affections shot over the earth and through his kind.17
In a letter of 25 November 1837 to an American friend, R. Shelton Mackenzie, Wordsworth noted that ‘several of Mr B[ryant]’s pieces have fallen in my way from time to time, some of which had merit of a very superior kind’.
Wordsworth also had this effect on Dana, as is most apparent in ‘The Changes of Home’, which garners characters and narrative lines from nearly every Wordsworth long poem. Bryant and Dana both applied Wordsworth’s techniques of natural description to American landscape, and so created their own strain of American Romanticism. Bryant’s nature description influenced Romantic prose as well, especially the Wordsworthian tales of James Fenimore Cooper.18 The Transcendentalist, feminist, and reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–94) wrote to Wordsworth to let him know that his American readers regarded him as ‘the Columbus of Poetry on whom a new world has opened with its mines of solitudes – I would even say more – as the messiah of the reign of the saints – a true Christian prophet’.19 Peabody references Wordsworth’s literary reform (Columbus of Poetry) and his spiritual reform (Christian prophet) because for her circle, the Transcendentalists, literary and theological renewal went hand in hand.
Harvard Divinity School became a Wordsworthian stronghold when the Unitarians gained control of it. Andrews Norton (1786–1853), Harvard professor and social reformer, acquired as many Wordsworth editions as possible for the library. Norton and William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the leading Unitarian reformer of religion, paid visits to Wordsworth. Channing – and this was one of the many reasons why he encouraged Emerson to make a similar pilgrimage – found Wordsworth and his poetry a ‘fountain of spiritual life’ (WLMS).20
As a student at Harvard Divinity School, Emerson was an avid reader of Wordsworth, the visionary who had opened the young student’s eyes to see beyond the confines of Harvard Unitarianism; but when Emerson met his spiritual mentor, he found that the poet’s vision was troubling him in more ways than one, noting that, among other things, he was ‘deficient . . . in insight into religious truth’. Emerson accurately estimated that Wordsworth would not be able to sustain a movement from Lyrical Ballads through to culmination in The Recluse, the long-promised great work which certain Americans hoped would provide a panacea to society’s ills.21 Emerson’s Nature (1836) and the Divinity School ‘Address’ (1838) are attempts to complete Wordsworth’s unfinished task.
Eventually, Norton became aware of the heresy that Wordsworth was inspiring in students, and made every effort to stem it. His conservative Unitarian reading of Wordsworth was elucidated by his sermon on ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ (printed in The Offering for 1829). Norton’s interpretation is contrasted with that of Emerson, who used a quotation from ‘The world is too much with us’ in his revolutionary Divinity School ‘Address’, which voiced the heresies conservative Unitarians most feared: that Nature and the human mind are divine. These works distilled Wordsworth’s thoughts as presented in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (especially 94–112). Norton attempted to correct Emerson by publishing Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (1839). Divergent interpretations of Wordsworth were at the heart of the Emerson–Norton controversy, the defining moment for Transcendentalism as well as one of the most famous debates in American theology.
Theodore Parker (1810–60), part of the graduating class of the Divinity School, referred to Emerson’s ‘Address’ as the noblest strain he ever heard. Marginalia in Emerson’s and Parker’s copies of Wordsworth reveal that they both marked similar passages: poetry about Nature’s revelations. Emerson’s copy also reveals a marginal note that has gone undiscovered by scholars for over 170 years: in the margin below the ‘Intimations Ode’ Emerson remarks that the ‘Ode is truly noble’ and that there is ‘Wonderful eloquence of sentiment . . . in the v and the xi stanzas’.22 The fifth stanza expresses a theory of the soul’s pre-existence, and the eleventh provides instructions for the spiritual perception of Nature. Differing views and interpretations of Wordsworthian Nature were debated by the Transcendental Club, which met at Emerson’s home. The many works of the Transcendentalists consolidate an American literary tradition based on the revelatory experience of Nature. According to Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), these authors derived their words properly by transplanting them from Nature to the page ‘with earth adhering to their roots’.23 In an effort to keep Wordsworth abreast of this exfoliation of his principles, Peabody sent Wordsworth Emerson’s Nature and ‘Address’ as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–64) Twice-Told Tales (1837).
Social reform
Peabody also sent the poet one of her own works, which documents how she and Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) taught Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations Ode’ as theological fact to young Massachusetts children in the Temple School. Alcott’s readings and discussions of the poems and the students’ responses to them are detailed in Peabody’s Record of a School Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1836). Wordsworth read the work and replied with the wish that her ‘efforts for the benefit of the rising generation may be crowned with the success they so amply deserve’.24 Peabody achieved success by pioneering the Kindergarten Movement in America. It was Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ that first drew her attention to the value of the child’s perspective and she noted in her first letter to him that ‘poetry is the best means to develop the nobler part of their [children’s] nature . . . except yours I have never found any that would answer my purpose’ (WLMS).
The influence of Peabody and Alcott’s school is a case for transatlantic study in its own right: English educationalists founded Alcott house, a school dedicated to the education of children’s minds and the reawakening of their souls. In America, several other Wordsworthian schools were established – including a Rydal Mount Seminary. Horace Mann’s (1796–1859) reforms of Massachusetts schools were based, in part, on conversations with the poet. According to Mann’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, Wordsworth’s poetry was able to ‘connect together the heart and the intellect’, and give a ‘new & deeper tone . . . to the art of education’ in America (WLMS). Peabody wove Wordsworth’s verse into her epistles (on education reform) to Dorothea Lynde Dix. Dix compiled several readers for the young, including Hymns for Children (1825) and Garland of Flora (1829), which included selections from Wordsworth. Her efforts were not only literary: she converted the Dix Mansion in Boston to a school which rescued ‘America’s miserable children from vice and guilt and dependence on the Almshouse’.25 Dix was inspired by a visit to the poet – as well as by his poem ‘The Idiot Boy’ – to embark upon her pan-American reform of asylums for the mentally ill. Dix devoted her time to visiting the mentally ill in every quarter of the United States, and found that many were kept in cages, cellars, almshouses, and jails. She, like Wordsworth, believed in the therapeutic qualities of nature; thus, the asylums she founded were surrounded by acres of woodland. She began her reform in her native state by presenting a Memorial (to the Legislature of Massachusetts Protesting against the Confinement of Insane Persons and Idiots in Almshouses and Prisons) (1843). In presenting something of such monumental importance, Dix needed a means of documentation that portrayed actual details and facts so as to draw out the sympathy, empathy, and understanding of her auditors. She found just such a model in the Lyrical Ballads. Her first victory was her memorial to the Massachusetts State Legislature, in which she presented a work, well adapted to interest humankind permanently ‘and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads).
What Dix found interesting in Wordsworth was his treatment of the mind, an interest that recalls Emerson’s comment that the poet ‘alone treated the human mind well’. Emerson’s Wordsworth had unveiled the divinity of all human minds and souls, and in so doing he became part and parcel of the Transcendentalists’ growing support of Abolitionism. Emerson mentions Wordsworth’s prescient notion of American civil war, and George Ticknor (1791–1871) spoke with Wordsworth for hours on the topic. Wordsworth was also visited by Charles Sumner (1811–74), one of the most famous advocates of the cause.
The poet received an appeal for help from William P. Atkinson who, in his letter to Wordsworth, explained all his reasons for his faith in the cause and in Wordsworth’s approbation of it:
I am one of the few in this country who are actively engaged in behalf of the slave: one of those called Abolitionists . . . I am now, – and it is this which leads me to write you, – preparing for the press a selection of poetry, the proceeds of the sale of which will be given to the support of lectures and papers devoted to the cause of Emancipation . . . I have collected many fugitive pieces, and marked many that are well known. For the latter, I have been many times to your published writings. I am now bold enough to ask of you an unpublished contributio[n.] I should not ask it for myself, but I trust your interest in a great question of philanthropy . . . Such a contribution from you would be of the greatest value to my undertaking.
Accept herewith the renewed acknowledgement of my obligation to you. In times of peculiar spiritual loneliness, when my mind was but half developed, my principles half formed, your words were more to me than anything save the Gospel. It is the confidence this knowledge gives me, that leads me to write you now.
(WLMS)
Wordsworth wrote the poem for the anthology although many years earlier he declined a similar request for an English collection. His support of the Abolitionists indicates that the radicalism of his earliest anti-slavery statements – ‘To Thomas Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’, ‘The Banish’d Negroes’, and his sonnet addressed to Toussaint L’Ouverture – was being rekindled by American correspondents and visitors. Wordsworth’s praise of L’Ouverture, who had incited his fellow slaves to a bloody revolution, was translated by many Americans into support for the Abolitionist cause in the Civil War. Emerson and Thoreau were two of many Wordsworthians who spent their time writing Abolitionist manifestos; others – like Walt Whitman (1819–92), Louisa May Alcott (1832–88), and Dix – nursed wounded northern troops. Throughout the war, many northerners continued to read Wordsworth, while many southerners following the example of their leader, Jefferson Davis, creased the spines of their copies of Byron. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92), poet and founder of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, used Wordsworth’s sonnet as a model for his own poem on L’Ouverture. In a note to Antislavery Poems: Songs of Labor and Reform (1848), Whittier quotes Wordsworth’s sonnet in full. Wordsworth mentions the ‘unconquerable mind’ (14) as a power that will carry on L’Ouverture’s struggle for freedom long after he has gone. Whittier, like Emerson, sees this as a call to pens and mentions the ‘immortal mind’ in his verse as well.
Whittier appeals to ‘that strong majesty of soul / which knows no color’ as one of his muses. The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ espouses a similar sentiment – that all souls pre-exist with God and are merely clothed with flesh; thus, all have souls exactly alike, despite differing earthly appearances with regards to colour of skin. According to this interpretation of ‘The Ode’, the souls of men and women would also be the same regardless of corporeal differences. Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865), famous poet and Wordsworth correspondent, advocated women’s rights in Popular Letters to Mothers (1838). Wordsworth entertained feminist visitors such as Caroline Kirkland (1801–64) and was aware of Sarah Green’s efforts to ‘adorn “Rydal Mount” Seminary with a cluster of stars that will not be unworthy of the sunlike genius of its great namesake, and to show the defamers of our sex – “how divine a thing / A woman may be made”[ – You will be crowned with] honor and praise when this transient distinction has lost its charm and value’.26
Most important, perhaps, was Margaret Fuller’s (1810–50) combining of Wordsworth’s views with Transcendentalism and feminism. Fuller was involved in many philanthropic causes, including the humane treatment of the mentally ill, female prisoners, and the blind. Like Emerson, she uses a Wordsworth quotation – in her work The Great Lawsuit Man versus Men Woman versus Women (1843) – that buttresses her literary liberation of women from societal roles.
Fuller’s essay first appeared in the Dial, the Transcendentalist mouthpiece published by Peabody and edited by Fuller and Emerson. Peabody also expressed her gratitude (in a letter) to Wordsworth for his depiction of women in his poetry:
Let me thank you in the first place for all you have sung of women (in the name of my sex) from the ‘Phantom of delight’ opening out into the . . . ‘woman breathing Nought but breath’ even unto the ‘statue of soul’ . . . You have done all that Milton left undone.
(WLMS)
In a different letter, she explains that if Wordsworth’s poetry ‘moulds’ American society,
we might see grand souls indeed, which would do in the republic of letters . . . what they did fifty years since in politics. And it is necessary that this more interior revolution should take place, to . . . perpetuate those forms of freedom which Washington and his friends left to us . . . [S]uch a tremendous excitement begins when each takes his own destiny into his hands, & every man – I almost said every woman – does . . .
(WLMS)
In this letter of March 1829, Peabody draws a parallel between notions expressed in the Lyrical Ballads and those of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Wordsworth wrote the Ballads after reading Thomas Paine’s revolutionary Common Sense and when the ‘American war was still fresh in memory’. Infected by the notions of liberty held dear in revolutionary America and France, he penned poetry that would inspire Americans to attempt to bring these ideas to fruition through a ‘more interior revolution’.
When Peabody substitutes ‘every woman’ for ‘every man’, she exposes an inequality that the natural end of the American Revolution would rectify. Wordsworth laid out similar thoughts in his 1800 Preface: where he advocates a change in the language of poetry to liberate it from social constructs, making it universal. Peabody looks to Wordsworth’s poetry as a means of fostering these changes and thus brings to light another transformation which needs to take place – an American literary revolution, fulfilled, in part, by several Wordsworthian works: Fuller’s Great Lawsuit, Emerson’s Nature, Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Moreover, these writings as well as Peabody’s Record of a School and Dix’s Memorial prove that Wordsworth’s influence was not limited to literary reform, but extended to social reform as well – which was, after all, the original design of Wordsworth’s unfinished project, The Recluse.
Environmental reform
The Prelude, the harbinger of The Recluse, contains notions of the love of Nature leading to the love of humankind. Wordsworth’s verses celebrate the intrinsic value of the human mind as well as Nature. Many natural scenes are embalmed by imagination, which Wordsworth viewed as everlasting. In The Prelude, Wordsworth transplants Nature from external reality to the landscape of the mind, which is ‘of fabric more divine’. One spot of holy land that Wordsworth imaginatively safeguards (through preserving it in poetry) is the Grande Chartreuse Monastery from its occupation by soldiers during the French Revolution. In the opening line of Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth writes of the monastery as ‘a spot of holy ground’, but when the episode is worked into ‘The Tuft of Primroses’, a voice speaks out against the injustice: ‘ “Stay your impious hand”, / Such was the vain injunction of that hour, / By Nature uttered from her Alpine throne’ (535–7). Nature repeats her admonition in Book vi of The Prelude, and also reiterates the cry ‘ “perish what may, / Let this one temple last, be this one spot / of earth devoted to eternity” ’ (430–5).
Many preservationists, most notably John Muir, considered Wordsworth’s poetry Nature’s mouthpiece, speaking out against the despoiling effects of industrial revolution on the American landscape. When Muir wrote of the Sierras, he was attempting to achieve the same end as Wordsworth – their preservation, not from the gleam of arms, but of axes and saws. Wisconsin, where Muir lived after moving to America from Scotland, had fallen prey to lumber barons and was the site of near unprecedented deforestation. As founder and president of the Sierra Club, he started a movement of conservation that continues to this very day and was instrumental in developing the National Park system, which protected Yosemite Valley in California. Muir’s writings are imaginative conservation tracts replete with echoes of and references to Wordsworth. Muir’s textual allusions correspond to markings in the family copy of Wordsworth: ‘The world is too much with us’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, and ‘Michael’ are just a few of the many ecologically resonant poems Muir marked as favourites. Wordsworth’s influence on the establishment of America’s National Parks is parallel to his role in the foundation of the National Trust in England.27
Wordsworth, Muir, and Thoreau expressed the wish that the natural scenes so dear to them would be preserved. Although Thoreau did not seem to mind the railway lines which were (and are still) very close to Walden Pond, Wordsworth protested the extension of the railway through the Lake District. Sarah P. Green, founder of Rydal Mount Seminary, sent Wordsworth an epistle concerned with waterways and railways, which queried:
Who would not lay aside the Poet’s ‘sibyl leaf’ to have a
‘sight of Proteus rising from the Sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn’?
Utilitarian enterprise and the mercenary speculation have converted the
mighty Ocean into a highway of venal profit and wealth; and transmuted
the ancient temples of Nature into fire-wood for steam-ships and rail-
roads – there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous
(WLMS)
This passage quotes the poet who reacted against commerce in his lines ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours’ (2–3) and warned Emerson that America was too much given to the making of money. In a missive to Wordsworth, Peabody remarks that there was a time before America
was dammed up with paper mills and saw mills and the various other machines that deform our Yankee streamlets – and the soul cannot forget this period of its glory[.] [T]here is nature again plain-simple – poetical – to which your voice comes with power.
(WLMS)
She reinterprets the ‘Intimations Ode’: in this instance, the soul is Nature’s.
Rekindling Wordsworth’s radicalism through Anglo-American literary relations
The success of Dix’s, Emerson’s, and Muir’s reforms became outward manifestations of their (Wordsworthian) philosophies – a manifestation that the Wordsworth of the 1790s had hoped for, but was ultimately denied. Wordsworth’s role in American reforms indicates a triumph of Wordsworthian politics, one that intermittently baffled, pleased, and displeased him. He had lived to see his views become more important to others than to himself. Nevertheless, a spark of his former beliefs was rekindled by his American correspondents and visitors. He was unable to conclude an epistle to Reed (19 August 1837) without assuring him that the
acknowledgements which I receive from the vast continent of America are among the most grateful that reach me. What a vast field is there open to the English mind, acting through our noble language!
The Wordsworth of the American reformers raises questions about the seemingly whole-hearted conservatism of the later Wordsworth, and perhaps gives us answers as to why he chose to leave The Prelude’s most radical passages intact. Perhaps Wordsworth foresaw the sympathetic reception they were to meet with in America, nearly the opposite of the immediate English reaction.
In making Wordsworth’s role in these reforms the focal point of this chapter, I have of course excluded a number of other very important influences on post-revolutionary socio-cultural reform. Wordsworth was only one. But the emphasis of this essay is necessary, for Wordsworth’s role in American literature and culture has been understated. His role goes beyond textual allusion and literary influence: Americans carried out activism in his name, thus realizing Wordsworth’s hopeful lines in the Preface that ‘the time is approaching when . . . evil will be systematically opposed by men of greater powers and with far more distinguished success’. It is a testimony to the power and success of Wordsworth’s poetry that he became one of America’s pre-eminent nineteenth-century prophets and that he continues to be read widely in America today.
Modern Eco-critics have viewed the Lake District scenes captured in Wordsworth’s poetry with their own form of ‘green goggles’.28 Readings of Wordsworth that focus on historical contexts, the portrayal of race, class, and gender are among the critical lenses through which Wordsworth’s poetry is currently being read. Each approach is indebted to nineteenth-century America’s Wordsworth. Understanding how recent critical perspectives came to be held in common by British and American readers necessitates study not just of Wordsworth’s British reception history, but of his American one as well. The study of Anglo-American literary relations is a nascent, yet burgeoning, field: one that is starting to be acknowledged by academic journals, conferences, as well as curricula, and is rife with interesting interpretative possibilities for both the scholar and student. Anglo-American Romanticism has, in the words of William Keach, ‘opened up fresh kinds of transatlantic connections that make all forms of habitual national onesidedness a serious barrier to critical advance’.29 Wordsworth’s role in the development of transatlantic (US and Canada) and transpacific (Australia and New Zealand) Romanticism remains a story largely untold, yet foretold by Peabody, who informed Wordsworth that
you are the poet not of the English nation – but of the English Language – . . . you were sent – divinely commissioned – to all to whom this language is native – from the rising beyond the setting sun – where they are growing up under all varieties of circumstance.
(WLMS)
In a letter to Wordsworth dated 18 March 1840, Reed also foretells Wordsworth’s audience beyond the borders of the United States, hinting at a Continental (Canadian, American, and Mexican) readership; in a statement that is bound to hold true for the twenty-first century, Reed writes:
My honoured friend, the thought is in my heart and I must give it utterance: this country or rather this continent is destined to give from it’s [sic] countless generations in years to come readers more numerous than we can realize to those poems which you have composed in the hope that they might live . . .
NOTES
1 Emerson gives accounts of his visits to Wordsworth in English Traits (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), pp. 19–24, 294–8. Future page citations in text.
2 Quoted in F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: A Study of Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 11.
3 A. J. George (ed.), The Prelude (Boston: Heath, 1888), p. xvi.
4 Alan G. Hill, ‘Wordsworth and his American Friends’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81, no. 2 (Summer 1978), 146–60.
5 Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 9.
6 Evening Post (16 November 1776).
7 Bruce Graver informs me that Humphreys published the Ballads on the heels of Robert Bloomfield’s Farmer’s Boy, which contains similar British pastoral poems with democratic overtones.
8 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1802), p. xi.
9 MS dedication from Henry Reed to Wordsworth in the poet’s copy, Wordsworth Library, Grasmere. Special thanks to Robert Woof and Jeff Cowton.
10 Leslie Nathan Broughton, Wordsworth and Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1933), p. 4.
11 Broughton (ed.), Wordsworth and Reed (1933), p. 11.
12 Patrick Kelley, Elements of Book-Keeping (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1803), p. 208.
13 Relf’s Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser (16 January 1802).
14 Robert Rose, ‘A Lyrical Ballad’, Port Folio (1804), p. 257.
15 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1805).
16 Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 2 vols. (Worcester, ma: Isaiah Thomas, 1810).
17 Richard Henry Dana, Poems and Prose Writings (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Co., 1833), p. 148.
18 See Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, 1776–1862 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 69–89.
19 Dove Cottage Manuscript a/Peabody/3. Unless otherwise noted, future citation of Peabody manuscript may be assumed to be from this source. Other references to manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library will be noted in the text as (WLMS).
20 WLMS a/Channing /1.
21 William H. Gilman et al. (eds.), The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), iv, pp. 78–9.
22 MS marginalia in Emerson’s copy of William Wordsworth, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 4 vols. (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co., 1824), iii, p. 223. Thanks to the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association; Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and Bruce Graver. Theodore Parker copy located in Boston Public Library. For a fuller discussion of Wordsworth and Emerson see Joel Pace, ‘ “Lifted to Genius”?: Wordsworth in Emerson’s nurture and Nature’, Symbiosis, 2.2 (October 1998), 125–140.
23 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems, selected by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 244.
24 MS Philadelphia Historical Society.
25 Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and Traveler (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), p. 52.
26 John Mahoney, ‘The Rydal Mount Ladies’ Boarding School: A Wordsworthian Episode in America’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23, no. 1 (Winter, 1992), 43–8.
27 See the final chapter of Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians.
28 James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge, 1991); Lance Newman, ‘Wordsworth in America and the Nature of Democracy’, New England Quarterly, 72: 4 (December, 1999), 517–38.
29 William Keach, ‘A Transatlantic Romantic Century’, European Romantic Review, 11, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 31.