Chapter 4

Eighteenth-Century Emphasis and Wordsworthian Ontopoetics

In 1800, Wordsworth authorized his emergence into print as the sole named author of Lyrical Ballads by means of a Preface in which he sought to justify the experimental poetry that had delighted some reviewers but baffled many others when it had been published anonymously in 1798. Whereas the first edition had proposed to test the adaptability of “the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society” to the “purposes of poetic pleasure” by means of poems that offered a “natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents” (LB 738–39), the second declared its bold purpose “to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them … the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement” (LB 743). To achieve this object of universal, human import required that Wordsworth swap “poetic diction” for rural speech, a language that directly reflected the feelings. “Low and rustic life was generally chosen,” Wordsworth explained, “because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated” (747, 743). Although Wordsworth derived this “plainer and more emphatic language” from “passions” rooted in the “soil” (743), in placing it at the center of his poetic project, he was adapting a contemporary discourse concerned with the forcible and feeling delivery of English printed on the page. Reflecting new philosophic and prosodic understandings of the language, and featuring blank verse prominently in its illustrations, the British elocutionary movement aimed to restore the “true natural mode of speech, … that of the emphatic kind,” in order to give life to the dead letter of foundational English texts and to unify the disparate speakers of the language. Across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England’s rural counties, far from the eloquence of London’s “court-end,” disagreeable dialects reigned, but with the dissemination of the emphatic creed, “no changes of note in the voice will be used, but what results from meaning and sentiment.”¹ Wordsworth’s “more emphatic language” spoken by the “passions” thus reflected British elocutionary ideals while inverting the movement’s metropolitan bias.

While Wordsworth’s poetics of speech has received much critical attention, the contemporary resonances of “emphatic language” have received less scrutiny. In his detailed commentary on the Preface, W. J. B. Owen treated the figure of the man “who gives vent” to “the basic, and permanently surviving passions of mankind” as implicitly consonant with Wordsworth’s attempt to align his poetry with nature.² After Hans Aarsleff based Wordsworth’s expressivist embrace of meter and figurative language on Condillac’s theory of a primitive language of the passions, scholars more closely examined Wordsworth’s engagement of continental natural-language theories and speculative histories of the origins of language.³ For Alan Richardson, a “real language of men” that “forcibly” expresses “elementary feelings” and “passions” evokes Rousseau’s and Herder’s founding of human language in physical gestures and instinctual accents, cries, and tones, as well as their belief that contemporary languages maintain some these emotive features in their repertoires of articulation.⁴ Noting the apparent contradiction of Wordsworth’s call for a “more emphatic” and at the same time “plainer” language, given the Royal Society’s sense of “plain” as free from the veils of metaphor, Richardson draws on Horne Tooke’s notion of “‘plainer’ language” as one that is simultaneously “more sensuously concrete and more metaphorical and emotive than the overly abstract and specialized sociolects of urban culture.”⁵ He concludes that Wordsworth’s “plainer and more emphatic language” would be both rich with figures and punctuated by sounds, calls, and passionate interjections.

Of the significance of “emphatic language” within popular British print discourses and debates relatively little has been said, and yet the notebooks in which Wordsworth wrote after failing to bring The Borderers to the stage suggests the importance of the concept to his development as the writer of a blank verse for the page.⁶ Between late January and early March 1798, Wordsworth drafted 1,300 lines toward The Recluse or Views of Nature, Man, and Society, the philosophical project consigned to him by Coleridge, who admired his friend’s brief, nondramatic endeavor in the measure (EY 214).⁷ As Wordsworth elaborated “The Ruined Cottage” in the notebooks by composing a brief history of the Pedlar, he made geographical and linguistic claims that strikingly anticipate those of the 1800 Preface. Having “wandered far” from his “native hills,” he wrote, much had the Pedlar

seen of men,

Their manners, their enjoyments and pursuits,

Their passions and their feelings, chiefly those

Essential and eternal in the heart,

Which ’mid the simpler forms of rural life

Exist more simple in their elements

And speak a plainer language. (MS B, 58–65)⁸

Notably absent from this sketch of rural speech is any reference to force; but within the same notebook, that same winter, Wordsworth also began drafting the passage on the Discharged Soldier—his first exploration of “emphatic language.”⁹ Though intended for his philosophical poem on nature, man, and society, the passage would be incorporated into his account of his own poetic development in The Prelude.¹⁰ This is fitting, for the passage reflexively regards its status as metrical composition, as Celeste Langan has observed in a reading of the scene as part of Wordsworth’s attempt to naturalize blank verse in The Prelude and to identify himself with the voice of nature.¹¹ But in 1798, I suggest, the passage shows no fully fledged identification with nature but rather an engagement with contemporary debates concerning the fitness of blank verse as a mode of turning English speech into poetic measures to be read on the page. Instead of writing blank verse for the stage, as he had in The Borderers, in the Discharged Soldier passage Wordsworth dramatized the production of blank verse along a “public way” (line 2, LB 277). Invoking measures of speech and space—elocution but also cartography and surveying—in his account of an encounter with a nearly lifeless body, he shaped his meter in self-conscious relation to contemporary systems of inscription, or ways of marking and measuring nature, man, and society. In doing so, he interrogated the passion and vitality of the nation and of his new medium.

A scene of encounter and quiet assessment that modulates into active walking and talking, the passage concerns the registration of bodily and mental energy and the power of poetry—or moving “discourse” (90)—to provide “restoration” (23). Coming upon “an uncouth shape,” Wordsworth presents himself as one who marks and measures, translating the immobile presence into feet:

I could mark him well,

Myself unseen. [He was in stature tall,]

A foot above man’s common measure tall,

And lank, and upright. (38, 40–43)

The phrase “common measure” alerts us to the line’s uncommon measure. Not the alternating four- and three-beat lines of hymn meter (known as “common meter”) but the five-beat blank verse (“A foot above”) traditionally reserved for lofty themes is provocatively employed to measure out a physically lofty subject. Wordsworth notes the great length of the man’s arms and legs, but the measure that most matters is his spiritual and emotional alienation from the human community, which is suggested by the “mile-stone” along the road:

from behind

A mile-stone propp’d him, and his figure seem’d

Half-sitting, and half-standing. I could mark

That he was clad in military garb,

Though faded yet entire. His face was turn’d

Towards the road, yet not as if he sought

For any living object,—he appeared

Forlorn and desolate a man cut off

From all his kind, and more than half detached

From his own nature. (51–59)

Traumatized by military service in the “tropic isles” (99), the soldier is a war victim whom Wordsworth signals by his physical alignment with the “milestone,” a surveyor’s marker on which a standard unit of distance was inscribed. An instrument of the Roman empire, turnpike roads, and also of the Ordnance Survey—the stone raises the specter of England’s military subjugation of first Scotland and then India.¹² The soldier’s dehumanized petrifaction—his shocking approximation to the stone counter—suggests that the imperial wars that consume the bodies and minds of soldiers begin and end on home turf—with a culture that wields science and technology to measure, control, and exploit terrain.

The taking of a man’s vital signs is the central problem of the passage. As an arbitrary tool for national and imperial mensuration and inscription, the milestone is insufficiently subtle to gauge the soldier’s enervated yet residual human vitality—as the repetition of “Half” suggests (“Half-sitting,” “halfstanding,” “more than half detached”). What come to distinguish his “nature” (59) from the stone against which he is “propp’d” (52) are the vestigial traces of animation discoverable by an eighteenth-century grammar of signs different from cartography and surveying. Rather than organize human space by the quantitative signs and mathematical plottings of surveyors, elocutionary discourse rooted the communication of ideas and feelings, and thus the organization of human community, in the “natural” signs of the passions: looks, gestures, and tones. Attending to just these signals, the poet as he is figured in the scene notes the features of the soldier’s face—

[His visage, wasted though it seem’d, was large

In feature, his cheeks sunken, and his mouth]

Shewed ghastly in the moonlight … (49–51)

And he reads “gesture,” noting that the soldier, after being hailed,

with his lean and wasted arm

In measured gesture lifted to his head,

Returned [the poet’s] salutation. (87–89)

He reads, as well, the phonetic sign of tone. As he walks the soldier to shelter, “measur[ing] back / The way” which they had separately come (109–10), he weighs the feeling in his voice, noting “a strange half-absence, and a tone / Of weakness and indifference” (141–42) that modulates, gradually, into “a reviving interest, / Till then unfelt” (167–68). The means of revival—a motivating motion or measured tread rather than a “propp’d” station—suggests Wordsworth’s self-conscious interest in the animating effect of his own poetic measures and his acknowledgment of their dependence on speech intonations. Whereas the “Poet” of the Preface will be wary of the figures of speech typical of eighteenthcentury verse, the personification of abstractions most particularly (LB 747), the “I” as figured in this passage activates the energies of actual speech, recalling a person from the brink of abstraction. The passage implies that by drawing out the soldier’s vestigial emphases and by setting them to a blank verse that becomes, by this incorporation, a more “common measure,” the poet may more broadly restore the ability to feel and to speak feelingly.

In presenting his meter in this way, here and in related writing toward The Prelude, Wordsworth was not only adapting an elocutionary discourse that he encountered at school, at university, and in conversation with his sister Dorothy, Coleridge, and John Thelwall, but was also bringing to that discourse a subject it failed to figure: the enervated speaker alienated from his own feelings. He was also offering a solution to one of the principal problems that discourse confronted: how to communicate “emphatic language” on the page. Constructed by writers on the language as critical to the communication of ideas and feelings, the moral animation of listeners, and the force and meaning of English literature—critical, that is, to Britain’s national and cultural selfarticulation—emphasis was nonetheless slippery. Variable in speech, unfixed in sentences, and without signs for its indication in writing, emphasis generated attempts to create typographic systems—diagrams, accents, and punctuations marks—that might overcome the incapacity of the printed word to represent emphatic speech and to spread the Englishness that it represented to the far reaches of a broadening empire. For Wordsworth, this variability became a virtue that he increasingly identified with the creative power of the poet as he shaped blank verse into a written medium of “emphatic language” and material structure for vital force or energy.

Classical Rhetoric and Elocutionary Discourse

A seventeenth-century English adjective, emphatic is defined in the first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) as “forcible; strong; striking” (“In proper and emphatick terms thou didst paint the blazing comet’s fiery tail”; “Where he endeavors to dissuade from carnivorous appetites, how emphatical is his reasoning!”) and “striking the sight” (“It is commonly granted, that emphatical colours are light itself, modified by refractions”). But Johnson also defines emphatic as “appearing; seeming not real,” providing no examples of its use. He drops this sense from the fourth edition of the work, in 1773, to make the term more determinately denote strikingly expressive language or representation.¹³

A parallel shift occurs in the sense of the noun emphasis. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the obsolescence after 1653 of “optical illusion, mere appearance” for emphasis (“Some think Comets … a meere Emphasis or apparency”) while recording the formal “prominency, sharpness of contour” for emphasis beginning in the 1870s: “You never saw a Ben rising bolt upright with a more distinct emphasis”; “The bones which mark the features … lose their emphasis”; “An … oriel-window, the base of which is formed by a gradual emphasis of the brick wall.”¹⁴ The use of emphasis to denote physical prominency in things—landscape, anatomy, or architecture—follows from its use with respect to the English language, which in the eighteenth century was widely approached as a medium registering the processes of thought, rather than a logical system reflecting a divine or natural order, and requiring that the most significant words be made conspicuous.¹⁵ Joseph Priestley recorded the following lesson in his 1761 Rudiments of English Grammar: “Q. Wherein consists the art of Pronunciation?” “A. In laying the accent upon the proper syllable of a word, and the emphasis upon the proper word of a sentence.”¹⁶ According to commentators, public speakers and readers had to mark for their listeners the signs, or as they were interchangeably called, the “marks” of their ideas.¹⁷ As John Herries wrote in his 1773 Elements of Speech, “the species of utterance which conveys our sentiments in the most lively and forcible manner is the most perfect. Here comes in the use of emphasis. When a man is deeply engaged in any subject, he pronounces some words with a greater exertion, others, with lesser. His chief aim is to be clearly understood.”¹⁸

Classical rhetoric had treated emphasis as a matter of diction. In the Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian describes emphasis as a trope (of the same class as metaphor, hyperbole, irony, and so on) that “intimates a deeper meaning than the words used actually express.” He offers the Homeric example, “where Menelaus says, that the Greeks descended into the horse; for by that one word, he shows the vastness of the horse.” “Virgil, too, when he says that the Cyclops lay stretched through the cave, measures the prodigious bulk of his body by the space of the ground that is occupied.”¹⁹ Heinrich Lausberg explains that the “word-trope” emphasis “is the use of a word of lesser semantic content in customary use (with a broader semantic range) to designate a greater (more precise) semantic content.” He also helpfully characterizes emphasis as a “cryptic verbal imprecision whose more precise representational voluntas [purpose] is revealed by the (linguistic or situational) context and by means of pronuntiatio and thus has the effect of surprise.”²⁰ In Quintilian’s examples, the immensities of horse and Cyclops are indirectly, and thus powerfully, disclosed rather than directly stated or delineated.

Classical rhetoricians also understood emphasis as a figure of thought, one of the “general tactical processes” in oratory classed with digression, rhetorical question, and anticipation of objection.²¹ According to Quintilian, in such devices of pleading “consists the life and energy of oratory; and, if they be taken from it, it is spiritless, and wants as it were a soul to animate its body.” The figure of emphasis is used “when some latent sense is to be elicited from some word or phrase,”²² and thus, as Lausberg explains, the “phenomenon of emphasis” is precisely “the relation of the scant utterance to the presentient representation of a great content.”²³ In this framework, it is appropriate, stylistically striking, or argumentatively expedient under certain conditions to intimate a greater, more precise, but unstated meaning.

These senses were carried into English tradition by early modern commentators, such as George Puttenham, who categorized emphasis (or “the Renforcer”) as one of those verbal ornaments that had the quality of “Energia of ergon, because it wrought with a strong and vertuous operation.” “One notable meane to affect the minde,” he wrote, “is to inforce the sence of any thing by a word of more than ordinary efficacie, and nevertheless is not apparent, but as it were, secretly implyed.”²⁴ Whereas Johnson’s 1755 examples of “emphatick terms” and “reasoning” reflect the classical notion of extraordinarily efficacious words and thought, elocutionists transferred virtuous energy to the sounds of speech. The predominant sense of emphasis shifted from the classical verbal device of implication and suggestion; it now denoted that reinforcing vocal stress attached to a word to bring an idea into prominence and to impress it upon the minds of listeners. Writers on the English tongue now insisted that the basic comprehension of English sentences under ordinary conditions of communication required the forceful or energetic utterance of particular words.²⁵ As the prestige of classical rhetoric waned,²⁶ writers referred to the laying of emphasis on a word, and by the nineteenth century, in a continuing trend, it became possible to emphasize, even with the feet: “This philanthropic wish Miss Slowboy emphasized with various new raps and kicks at the door.”²⁷

The quirky, technical, and proto-psychological discourse of emphasis is fascinating for the glimpse it affords of early studies of the vernacular—especially for the understandings it conveys of social communication in an oratorical but increasingly print-centered age. In such an age, the prospect of reading aloud to friends “a copy of verses, a passage of a book, or news-paper” gives as much reason to polish the tongue, Sheridan claimed, as “sitting in parliament, … pleading at the bar, … appearing upon the stage, or in the pulpit.”²⁸ Heeding John Locke’s 1690 call to study “propriety of speech,”²⁹ commentators analyzed words and their arrangement, producing grammars, spellers, dictionaries, and pronouncing dictionaries for the instruction of children and adults in their native tongue, rather than the Latin that dominated education in the public schools. In 1712, Michael Maittaire turned the spotlight on the concept of vocal emphasis by identifying it as a spoken mark of punctuation. Credited with being the first commentator on English to recognize that “intonation was connected with emphasis,” Maittaire advocated leaving “it to the judgment of the Reader to distinguish, what word carries the most sense in [a sentence], and ought therefore to be pronounced above the rest.”³⁰ Accordingly, he advised against printing the “Emphatick and more Significant words” in italics and refused on philosophical grounds to capitalize the first-person singular.³¹ From the beginning, then, the oral mark was construed as a problematic of print: essential to its vocal realization but resistant to encoding.

In lectures and guides to the art of reading, the device of emphasis (word stress) was closely paired with accent (syllable stress), but because accent was appropriate to a syllable notwithstanding the context—diverging only under rare and codifiable conditions—the correct location of that “smart percussion” could be tabulated in spellers and dictionaries.³² Such was not the case with emphasis, which depended upon the “Design” of the maker of the individual sentence. Emphasis did not inhere in words. In some sentences a word should have it; in others, not. To complicate matters, a sentence could have any number of emphatical words, all of which should be pronounced with “Stress or Force of Voice”—“for ’tis for the sake of that Word, or Words,” Isaac Watts explained, that “the whole Sentence seems to be made.”³³

Emphasis mattered because of its newly realized semantic power. Whereas Locke had observed that the attachment of different ideas to the same words could hinder communication, Watts demonstrated in 1721 that the same arrangement of words had several potential senses—and thus that communication could be hindered even if people attached the very same ideas to words. While insufficient stressing or an entire mis-stressing of a sentence could “conceal the Meaning of it from the Hearer,” a proper placement of stress allowed “the Force and Meaning” of a sentence to “best appear.” “To make it appear of how great Importance it is to place the Emphasis aright,” Watts wrote, “let us consider that the very Sense and Meaning of a Sentence is oftentimes very different according as the Accent or Emphasis is laid upon different Words.”³⁴ Commentators never tired of demonstrating this new observation by cycling emphasis through the principal words in a sentence. Sheridan repeated it in his 1762 Course of Lectures on Elocution and Lindley Murray adopted Sheridan’s example sentence in his 1795 English Grammar.³⁵ In its numerous reprintings throughout the next century, Murray’s grammar sent forth the idea that “on whichever word we lay the emphasis … it strikes out a different sense, and opens a new subject of moving expostulation.”³⁶

Commentators’ “habit” of demonstrating this “strikingly new idea,” Murray Cohen remarks, reflects their “conception of language in terms of speakers and listeners and a commitment to the priority of the oral over the visual.”³⁷ Yet, I suggest, they conceived of oral emphasis in highly visual ways. Where Locke claimed that with words, or the “sensible signs of his ideas who uses them,” users “bring out their ideas, and lay them before the view of others,”³⁸ Sheridan claimed that the “true Meaning” of a sentence was believed to lie latent unless made to “appear” by vocal effect, recalling Johnson’s second definition of emphatic as “striking the sight,” a legacy of the ancient Greek emphanés (manifest, visible).³⁹ Emphasis, Sheridan says, brings forward “the true meaning,”⁴⁰ indicating not just a pictorial but also perspectival conception of communicative language. Watts warns that the omission of oral emphasis would not only “make a Sentence lose all its Force” but also cause the sentence to dissipate into a “meer catalogue of words”—just as a map without hillshading, Arnold would warn, presents an “indistinct catalogue of names” rather than a country.⁴¹ Emphasis was both integrative and activating, as Sheridan’s personification made clear: “in speech, words are the body, pauses and stops give it shape and form, and distinguish the several parts of the body; but accent and emphasis, are the life, blood and soul, which put it in motion, and give it power to act.”⁴² Stress enlivens the body of speech, vividly manifesting meaning to and affecting a listener.

Emphasis became an increasingly popular concept in the new genre of practical and concise vernacular grammars. It also featured in the elocutionary lectures and manuals that sought to improve the fluency of speakers, from London to the provinces, and to prove that the “English tongue is as capable of all the Art and Elegancies of Grammar and Rhetorick, as Greek or Latin, or any other Language in the World.”⁴³ This was not merely a matter of standardizing the pronunciation of words. Taking issue with Locke’s neglect of “the signs of internal emotions,” Sheridan and the elocutionists he inspired surveyed gesture, facial expression, and tone—those “other parts” of language “absolutely necessary to the communication of what passes in our minds, which can not possibly be done by mere words.”⁴⁴ To Sheridan, tones were the “speech of nature” while facial expressions and gesture constituted nature’s “hand-writing.”⁴⁵ Unlike socially fashioned words—and the print in which they were packaged—these signs “cannot be mistaken” and do not mislead. But while gesture, facial expression, and tone conveyed the feelings that the sentence maker attaches to ideas, emphasis worked at the level both of the understanding and the passions. According to Sheridan, the complex form of emphasis superadded to force a change of tone. By the superaddition of a tonal mark of the “energies and affections of the mind” to force, not only is the “plain meaning” clearly pointed out but the “affections and passions are excited, the fancy agitated, and the attention of the hearer engaged.”⁴⁶ An antecedent of Wordsworth’s “plainer and more emphatic language,” emphasis of this kind mediated both meaning and feeling.

To the liberal prosodist Samuel Say, the “ancient Poets” and Milton represented the most impressive of communicators.⁴⁷ But public readers of printed texts had to deploy energy consciously. As John Rice observed, conveying an author’s intention to an audience involved determining in advance which words are to be emphasized and then “giv[ing] the Energy of the living Voice to the Precision of the dead Letter.”⁴⁸ Thus in practice emphasis was often mismanaged, and the consequences were not merely technical. The disintegration of a sentence threatened political disaster in Parliament and cultural debilitation on the stage, where the genius of Shakespeare could be entirely obscured. In church—of particular concern to Sheridan—false emphasis was spiritually and morally dangerous, for it could lead the mind astray, while an “un-animated” “manner” could “lull the whole parish to sleep”—a combination that would pervert foundational English discourses and preclude the spiritual and social energies that emphatic discourse could summon and organize.⁴⁹

Because a cold, unanimated tongue threatened the fabric of the sentence and the nation, Sheridan advised speakers preparing to recite or read aloud a text in public first to reflect where to lay the emphasis by supposing the sentiments their own. The speaker should then commit those words to memory, or better yet, “give a particular mark to those words … that whenever he reads he may be put in mind of laying a due stress on them.”⁵⁰ This particular mark, inscribed by the reader on the printed page, would go some way to compensate for the lack of a typographical system for indicating emphasis in print. Regarding the mis-stressing of an Anglican verse about the acknowledgement of our “sins,” he claims, “Had there been proper marks invented for emphasis, such gross errours could not have been committed.”⁵¹ The deficiency of print made for a moral error and, moreover, prevented the desired dissemination, within Britain and abroad, of the all-important concept on which the “Life” and merit of the English tongue were seen to depend.⁵²

Marking the Oral Mark

Although Sheridan and fellow elocutionists are mostly remembered for helping the “newly affluent English middle class” to “acquire court speech in a series of lessons,” they should also be recognized for promoting what we might call a cosmopolitongue—a standard language divested of its regional affiliations that could be instructed across the British Isles and exported to continental Europe and “through all parts of the globe.”⁵³ In their pan-Britain and global aspirations for a standard English tongue, the elocutionists questioned both how to mark the oral mark and the implications of doing so. Popularizing the English tongue first on the Continent, where it would face automatic contest with French and the more amorous Italian tongue, demanded making explicit its force to readers—something elocutionists believed could not be achieved by typographical manipulation alone, the usually prescribed italics or capitals. Further, italics and capitals are not “marks” by which readers could annotate their own texts; they are a change in the face of a character. “As there is no pointing out the very meaning of the words by reading, without a proper emphasis, it surely has been a great defect in the art of writing, that there have been no marks invented for so necessary a purpose” (78), Sheridan complained.

Elocutionists never fail to register their skepticism about systems of notation; like the existing marks of punctuation, any new marks would be inferior to the “natural” signs and would be subject to the false assignment of tones by language instructors (about which more will be said in Chapter 5). Nonetheless, both Sheridan and the equally prolific John Walker acknowledged the usefulness of the printed page to their purposes.⁵⁴ But to spread emphatic language, from “the court end” of London to the counties and abroad would require a restructuring of English pedagogy and an expansion of “the visible marks offered to the eye.”⁵⁵

The highly visual way the elocutionists figure the work of emphatic force focuses their concerns about the necessity of the printed page to their objective of spreading the emphatical language. Explaining that the more important the idea to the speaking mind, the more forcefully the idea will be uttered, Walker asserts that a speaker who varies the “degree of force” in a sentence supplies “that light and shade, which is necessary to form a strong picture of the thought.”⁵⁶ “Loose cursory” speakers, he similarly claims, who “want a firmness of pronunciation are like those painters who draw the muscular exertions of the human body without any knowledge of anatomy.”⁵⁷ This sister-arts analogy derives from the classical rhetoricians’ figuration of the figures as bodily postures and of tonal distinctions as a means of their promotion: “just as painters who use but one colour nevertheless make some parts of their pictures appear more prominent, and others more retiring, without which difference they could not even have given due forms to the limbs of their figures.”⁵⁸ Modern elocutionist John Herries figures the formalizing and animating power of emphasis as face making. It

is to speech what colours are to a portrait. When the painter would imitate nature with the most success, he properly disposes the light and shade. The lustre darts from the eye, the cheeks receive their bloom, and every feature is so strongly marked, that the whole piece seems almost to start to life. But if he should daub the whole countenance over with one dull undistinguishing colour, the just proportion would be entirely lost, and every trace of nature erased. In like manner, if every word in a sentence is uttered with an uniform energy of voice, the meaning and spirit of the whole must be destroyed.⁵⁹

Variations in energy make sentences meaningful and compelling; features coalesce into face. References to color and chiaroscuro imply that conventional signs, and black-on-white typography, can only fall short of the task of displaying and disseminating an emphatic English that functions by degrees. Sheridan’s personification of speech suggests as much (“in speech, words are the body”), emerging at the moment he complains that “the very life and soul of speech”—accent and emphasis—“consists in what is utterly unnoticed in writing.”⁶⁰ Elocutionists most vividly figure emphasis as an animating force when they register the lack of “visible marks” to designate it.⁶¹ To circulate the globe, “the true natural mode of speech” requires a living human speaker, but typographical marks will have to do.

Marking systems grew more complex as the century progressed. In his 1775 Lectures on the Art of Reading, Sheridan employed an instructional scheme that pointed out the “emphatic words” with “the grave accent of the Greek [`]” and indicated lengthening pauses with single, double, and triple acute accents. Two horizontal lines (=) signaled “a pause longer than any belonging to the usual stops.”⁶² Hundreds of pages of the church service, annotated for the use of clergymen, and of Sheridan’s own “DISCOURSES, Properly marked, to serve as Lessons to practice on in the Art of Reading,” enforced the cooperation of emphasis and pause in presenting ideas clearly and forcefully to the mind:

Now there are twò sorts of language in use˝ … The òne´ manifested by the li`ving vòice˝ the other´ by the dea`d letter´´´ The one´ Divìne´ given by God himse`lf˝ the other´ hùman´ the invention of m`an´´´⁶³

Where these annotations attempted to disseminate in a printed book the “li`ving vòice” of the lecturer himself, his “LESSONS of PRACTICE in reciting POETRY” illustrated the speeches of Paradise Lost and the sounds of its narratorial blank verse, limning the “verse-pauses” and “some of the more remarkable emphases” to aid in the expressive realization of English heroic poetry:

IS thi`s the region˝ thi`s the soil´ the clime˝

(Said then the lost Arch-angel)˝ thi`s the seat

That we must change for Heaven?˝⁶⁴

Sheridan’s 1775 Lectures thus shows a late-career confidence in print: as if subtle graphical analysis, tailored to his theoretical and practical purposes, could meet his populist vision of diffusing “the emphatic language” through “all ranks of people, in whatever part of the globe English shall be taught” (I: 146, 148).

Walker took a different tack. In his 1785 Rhetorical Grammar he countered the imprecision of italics with a “notation” to clarify the “several forces of speaking sounds” (111). This involved reformatting English sentences to display their essential architecture of three principal degrees of force: unaccented, accented, and emphatic. He thus re-presented a passage of rhyming couplets from Pope:

Britons, attend ! beworth likethis approv’d,

Andshow youhavethevirtue tobemov’d.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Suchplays alone shouldplease aBritishear,

AsCato’sself hadnot disdain’d tohear.

In imitation of the logic of word formation, a clustering of unaccented syllables around the accented syllable in a word, Walker visibly joined the unaccented words in a phrase to the “accented,” more significant, word that integrated the phrase—such as “virtue” in “youhavethevirtue.” He reserved italics for the “emphatic” words in a sentence that were to be uttered with the highest degree of stress, as in, “aBritishear” and “AsCato’sself”⁶⁵—demonstrating, in the process, that “emphatic” words need not be rhyming.

While “intended to heighten communication,” as Andrew Elfenbein has observed, the visual techniques of Walker and Sheridan “defamiliarize English into strange new forms.” But if their schemes manifest print’s “control over elocutionary voice,” as Elfenbein suggests,⁶⁶ Sheridan and Walker were the first to acknowledge the resistance of emphasis to codification, typographic display, and vocal reproduction. While maintaining confidence in the heuristic function of his typographic scheme, Walker admitted that his complex “notation” could never encode the precise distribution of force across a sentence; the degree of force with which words should be uttered depended upon “the degree of passion,” which in itself could not be quantified. Further, this “mode of printing” was entirely unsuited to elocutionary use: it would only “perplex and retard” students.⁶⁷ Walker instead proposed the practical strategy of marking the inflection of all significant (“accented”) words in a passage or, better yet, simply the most significant (“emphatic”)—the method he uses to illustrate blank-verse passages by Young and Milton. The rare mark of the upward or downward “slide” would illuminate the whole, but the communication of this principle required pages upon pages of exposition.⁶⁸

According to theorists of the so-called “natural school,” the proper use of emphasis could never be achieved by the application of abstract rules; expressive variations of stress, tone, and quantity depended upon sense and feeling and so required a “due degree of attention and practice” and the cultivation of the ear.⁶⁹ Sheridan’s hundreds of pages of typographical and discursive analysis attest to the irreducibility of English pronunciation to rule and demonstrate his hopes for print as a technology of both illustration and liberation—a liberation of the body and soul of the English language from the tyrannical application of Roman (quantitative) prosodic strictures, the “false ornaments” of French rhyme, and the “squeezing stays” of its numerically minded syllabic measure (II: 383). Sheridan’s analysis of Paradise Lost in Lectures on the Art of Reading reveals, and patriotically revels in, English heroic poetry’s expressive variety of feet (“eight species” [II: 68]) and unrestricted placement of emphasis and caesura:

Let us leave to the sallow French their rouge and ceruse, but let the British red and white appear in their genuine lustre, as laid on by Nature’s own pencil. Let them torture the body into a fantastic shape, or conceal crookedness under an armour of steel; let them cover puny limbs, and a mincing gait, under the wide circumference of a hoop; but let the easy mien, the comely stature, the fine proportioned limbs decently revealed, and the unrestrained majesty of motion in the British muse, be displayed to sight in their native charms. (II: 384)

Sheridan’s print is both self-remarking and self-effacing, aligning itself with “Nature’s own pencil” in the remediation and remobilization of the “British muse.”

William Enfield addressed the underlying paradox of the elocutionary project’s reliance upon “artificial helps”: “particular characters or marks,” he professed, “will always be found” to “mislead instead of [assist] the reader, by not leaving him at full liberty to follow his own understanding and feelings.”⁷⁰ In The Art of Delivering Language (1775), Cockin directly criticized the encoding of emphasis and the instruction of readers in pronunciation, arguing that emphasis of sense, as the “work of nature,” falls “spontaneously upon its proper place” and that the finer distinctions pertaining to the ornamental emphasis of force (which gave grace to speech) were the effect solely of social refinement.⁷¹ Nonetheless, just as he had used graphic means to represent landscape—as editor he introduced a map to West’s Guide to the Lakes (see Chapter 1)—Cockin chose to italicize instances of ornamental emphasis throughout his handbook. His graphic interface thus offered glimpses of a soundscape that it could not reproduce. The subtleties of ornamental emphasis could be learned only by living in the city—a “more favourable soil for the cultivation of the arts” than the “depths of rural rusticity”—and by a polishing of the “taste … with a more extensive intercourse with the world.”⁷² Wordsworth, who would ultimately derive emphatic language from real, not figurative, soil, first construed blank verse as a technology for its dissemination in print while also challenging the patriotism of elocution’s personification of speech.

“Feeling It No Longer”: The Discharged Soldier

In 1798, Wordsworth was living in rural rusticity, close to Coleridge in Nether Stowey. It was here that Dorothy began the Alfoxden journal and here, responding to that journal, that William explored a “plainer and more emphatic” blank verse. “Perhaps the earliest surviving draft” for the Discharged Soldier passage appears on the last page of the Alfoxden Notebook (DC MS 14)—the first page when used in reverse, as the Wordsworths did. At the top are eight lines in Wordsworth’s hand that he may have copied from the first entry of Dorothy’s journal (dated January 20, 1798), may have composed himself, or may have co-written with his sister:⁷³

the green paths down the hill sides

are channels for streams—the young

wheat is streaked by silver lines of

water running between the ridges—

the sheep are are gathered together

wet

on the slopes—after the long dark days

the country seems more populous it

peoples itself in the sunbeams. —

(DC MS 14, 50v, LB 503)

The lines for the Discharged Soldier passage below certainly drew from Dorothy’s entries for January 24 and 27. These describe a “sea of a sober grey, streaked by the deeper grey clouds”; the “half dead sound of the near sheepbell”; and the “strange, uncouth howl” of a local dog, which “howls at the murmur of the village stream.”⁷⁴ William’s verses take up not only her words but also her patterns of stress—his “Howls to the murmur of the village stream” reveals a haunting pentameter within her prose that veers psychologically away from his openly iambic opening line (“Without a touch of melancholy thought”). Similarly, her “half dead sound” of the “near sheep-bell” is echoed in his “dead grey light,” “sober dead grey light,” and “dead shade” (LB 503). These monosyllabic recombinations link monotonous sound to monochromatic light, drawing out the eeriness of nothing being “strongly marked.” “The sky is flat,” she continues, “unmarked by distances.”⁷⁵ By contrast, the lines at the top of the notebook page offer images of marked contrast and vitality: the “green paths down the hill sides” and the “silver lines of / water” streaking the wheat make the country seem “populous”; the country “peoples itself in the sunbeams” (LB 503). Against those unmarked expanses and flatlining rhythms (“dead grey light”), the energetic shimmer of pastoral “paths” and agricultural “lines” gives the slopes living form.

That William and Dorothy were thinking about the animation effects of visual and verbal emphasis is also suggested on the notebook’s next page, on which Dorothy copied a footnote from Richard Payne Knight’s The Progress of Civil Society:

[Dr.] Johnson observed, that in blank verse, the language suffered more distortion to keep it out of prose than any inconvenience or limitation to be apprehended from the shackles & circumspection of rhyme. Boswell’s life Vol. 1st. p. 584

This kind of distortion is the worst fault that poetry can have; for if once the natural order and connection of the words is broken, & the idiom of the language violated, the lines appear manufactured, & lose all that character of enthusiasm & inspiration, without which they become cold & vapid, how sublime soever the ideas & images may be which they express.⁷⁶

Payne Knight’s remarks concern the integrity of the idiom: the effort to make audible the faint “musick of the English heroick line” distorts the patterns of stress used by living speakers and erodes the syntax of genuine feeling.⁷⁷ The citation reflects the new cultural importance of emphasis and the contrary pressures on blank verse it effected. Blank verse was, at once, supposed to sound like “poetry” and like idiomatic language: it was to seem aesthetically patterned—with marked iambs and medial caesuras—so that listeners could easily detect where lines began and ended; it was also to sound “natural,” coursing with feeling inflections—like “green paths down the hill sides” channeling the “streams,” like “silver lines of water running between the ridges.” Resetting “sublime … ideas & images” into regular iambic order deprived them of force and feeling—thus, on the first page of the Discharged Soldier drafts, Wordsworth’s markedly un-iambic “sober dead grey light” and the anapestic tilt of “Howls to the murmur of the village stream.”

Perhaps the Wordsworths copied Payne Knight into their notebook because they took it as a challenge and a spur. How to write blank verse without producing “measured prose,” turning sublimity into mechanism and violating the natural idioms and cadences of common speech? The couplets from The Progress of Civil Society that Payne Knight glossed with his footnote lay out the challenge more pointedly by focusing the crucial issue of blank verse on the page:

Oft, too, the rhyme, with neat and pointed grace,

Fixes attention to its proper place;

Directs with truer aim the shafts of wit,

And marks, with emphasis, the spot to hit;

And guides the gleams of fancy to the heart.

But cold, in blank and unmark’d metre, flows

The turbid current of our measured prose;

Unless when Shakespeare’s genius breathes it fires,

And the brisk bustle of the stage inspires;—

When glowing passions melt it into ease,

And strong expression gives it power to please.

  (III: 525–35)⁷⁸

Unmarked by rhyme, the “cold,” barely perceptible “metre” poses a problem of meaning and feeling, but “measured prose” is given definitive form and motion when inflamed by the breath of “genius” and embodied by dynamic performers on the stage. If it is their “glowing passions” and “strong expression” that animate the meter, how to write a nondramatic blank verse about speakers who have no energy to give? The question for Wordsworth, the drafts suggest, was not only aesthetic but political. For where Payne Knight warns of the distorting and deadening effects on the language by nondramatic forms of the meter, Wordsworth dramatizes the distorting and deadening effects on a speaker by an imperial system of order. He addresses the depletion of force in a human body and soul and explores the restorative possibilities of his written medium.

A reflexively critical response to Payne Knight’s aesthetic injunctions, the Discharged Soldier passage realizes the tropes of body and soul that pervade eighteenth-century prosodic and elocutionary discourse. Take Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, which Wordsworth read while he was drafting the passage. Blair’s chapter on “Pronunciation, or Delivery” recapitulated the emphatic creed: “On the right management of the Emphasis depend the whole life and spirit of every Discourse. If no Emphasis be placed on any words, not only is Discourse rendered heavy and lifeless, but the meaning left often ambiguous.”⁷⁹

The idea—and phrasing—would have been familiar. An admirer of Quintilian, Wordsworth knew emphasis as a stylistic effect of economical utterance and as a figure of thought in which the passion in the words forces us to understand some latent idea.⁸⁰ He knew, too, of Quintilian’s attribution of the “life and energy,” “spirit,” and “soul” of oratory to the tropes and figures.⁸¹ Wordsworth was also likely familiar with elocutionary conceptions of emphasis from William Enfield’s The Speaker (1761), in which he and Dorothy read, and from James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking (1762), a set book at Hawkshead grammar school that set Sheridan’s analogy as its epigraph: “in Speech, Words are the Body … but Accent and Emphasis are the Life, Blood, and Soul, which put it in Motion, and give it Power to act.”⁸²

Eighteenth-century elocution’s investment in the life of the language—not the speaker—would soon be challenged by the radical orator and poet John Thelwall, who met Wordsworth in the summer of 1797 at Alfoxden and continued there a discussion about metrical emphasis that he had conducted in correspondence with Coleridge. Where the arts of reading construed the reader generically, as a body and mouthpiece of the text, and were concerned, above all, with the “life” of English, Thelwall’s science of elocution would address the psychological and physiological conditions of individual speakers. Wordsworth’s drafts of the Discharged Soldier passage register and contribute to this disciplinary turn. Here Wordsworth explored discourse in extremis, at the limits of its “life,” in the body of a contemporary human type and dramatized the putting of this body “into Motion” and returning to him of the “Power to act”—not by instructing him in the art of emphasis but by resetting his speech cadences to physiological motion and by incorporating his speech into his own poetic measures.

The passage is organized around a contrast between the vital, self-enjoying subject and the wasted body. As Wordsworth proceeds “step by step” (36, LB 277) along the “silent road” (21), his “body from the stillness drinking in / A restoration,” “beauteous pictures” rise from his “soul” “in harmonious imagery” (22–23, 28–29). His “consciousness of animal delight” and sense of “self-possession felt in every pause / And every gentle movement of [his] frame” (33–35) suggest his embodiment of organic poetic form.⁸³ More precisely, the portrait recalls Sheridan’s articulation of the “body” of English numbers (II: 269) into pauses and feet—“They are called feet,” he explained, “because it is by their aid that the voice as it were steps along through the verse in a measured pace” (II: 35)—as well as Sheridan’s identification of “emphasis” as the “principle, which, like a soul, actuates and regulates all the parts,” producing vivid pictures from sequences of words (II: 269). Wordsworth’s manifest “freedom to slacken his pace”⁸⁴ also recalls Sheridan’s analysis of Paradise Lost, where his personification of unrestricted poetic motion achieves patriotic heights (“let the easy mien, the comely stature, the fine proportioned limbs decently revealed, and the unrestrained majesty of motion in the British muse, be displayed to sight in their native charms” [II: 384]). Wordsworth writes no essay on “English Numbers,” no Lectures on the Art of Reading, and he employs no special diacritical marks. But his formally self-referential heroics, I suggest, enact a historically particular form of self-annotation and critique. Incorporating an account of their own pedestrian production, they keep readers in the company of flesh and blood, discovering and accommodating a “British muse” with a “mien” far from “easy,” a “stature” far from “comely,” and “limbs” less than proportioned.

Wordsworth measures and “mark[s] him well” (40), attempting to assimilate the man to the known and to poetry:

His legs were long,

So long and shapeless that I looked at them

Forgetful of the body they sustained.

His arms were long and lean; his hands were bare;

[His visage, wasted though it seem’d, was large

In feature, his cheeks sunken, and his mouth]

Shewed ghastly in the moonlight … (45–51)

While the allusion to Milton’s allegory of Death (“uncouth shape” [38]) or to Dante’s shade of Virgil give the soldier a tinge of the uncanny and sublime,⁸⁵ the parts fail to coalesce into any physical or poetic whole. Limbs, hands, and features, with no apparent body, he is a figure of disintegration—like a sentence without emphasis, drained of “its Force,” as Isaac Watts warned, and resolved into a “catalogue of words.”⁸⁶ Long arms and legs, “long, / So long and shapeless,” show extension without organization, as do the “murmuring sounds, as if of pain / Or of uneasy thought” that “issued” “From his lips” (69–70, 68). In the absence of organizing accent, words have dissolved into indistinguishable sounds, leaking from the “mouth” (50)—a stark contrast to Wordsworth’s holistic “self-possession” and mental theater of “harmonious imagery.” His mode of interpreting the indistinguishable sounds, of discovering a life force, resembles a poet’s or a prosodist’s: “Long time I scann’d him (67–68). But this interpretation is frustrated because the soldier’s “murmuring voice” is one of “dead complaint” (77–78). The soldier’s voice, and person, is unenlivened by passionate accent; any vehemence he once had has been spent.

The “wasted” face of the soldier suggests the implosion of the emphatic, oral ideal, and its promise of sympathetic communication and community. Instead of lustre darting from the eye, a “shadow / Lay at his feet and moved not” (71–72)—like an audience unmoved by a speaker. “To move, therefore, should be the first great object of every public Speaker,” Sheridan stated, and “for this purpose, he must use the language of emotions, not that of ideas alone, which of itself has no power of moving.”⁸⁷ The murmuring figure realizes discourse without “natural, forcible, and varied EMPHASIS.”⁸⁸ He represents the ghastly underside of eloquence, and thus moves the narrator to question his history.

Burgh’s complaint about a “total want of energy in expressing pathetic language”⁸⁹ is relevant to the soldier’s response; it also illuminates Wordsworth’s psychological and political deepening of the discourse of delivery. Though the soldier tells of “what he had endured / From war, and battle, and the pestilence,”

in all he said

There was a strange half-absence, and a tone

Of weakness and indifference, as of one

Remembering the importance of his theme

But feeling it no longer. (136–37, 140–44)

Channeling Sheridan, Burgh wrote of the good clergyman who read “so striking a piece of scripture-history in a manner so unanimated, that it was fit to lull the whole parish to sleep.” Burgh would

never forget his manner of expressing the twenty-second verse, which is the Jewish general’s order to bring out the captive kings to slaughter. “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring out those five kings to me out of the cave;” which he uttered in the very manner, he would have expressed himself, if he had said to his boy, “Open my chamber door, and bring me my slippers from under the bed.”⁹⁰

For Burgh, emphatic speech is something that can and should be cultivated. But while the dissociation of feeling from language he observes is striking, it is merely situational, emerging from the clergyman’s failure to emphasize the text’s “emphatical” words (those for whose sake the sentences were written), which itself reflects his failure to internalize the sentiments of the text.⁹¹ It is as if, Sheridan explains, “we said it with our lips but did not think so.”⁹² What is troubling about the soldier, however, is that he relates his own “theme” (143), his own history, indifferently: with no differentiation of emphasis, or as Burgh says, “natural inflections.”⁹³ “Natural Discourse,” in which the voice carries “genuine expressions of sentiment,” is disturbed not as a result of the speaker’s alienation from the text but of his alienation from his own sentiments—as if his “theme” had become a text authored by another (compare the blind beggar of The Prelude, with the paper affixed to his chest, explaining his story).⁹⁴

Self-alienation is a condition not accounted for in elocutionary theory. One spoke a naturally emphatic language in intimate conversation and also when reading aloud by identifying one’s feelings with those of the author or narrator. Furthermore, this strategy of internalization and identification assumed the immediacy of one’s own feelings. Burgh writes: “reading is nothing but speaking what one sees in a book, as if he were expressing his own sentiments, as they rise to his mind.”⁹⁵ According to Peter de Bolla, elocution’s insistence on an absolute identity between the “inner private voice” and the “outer public text” produces the autonomous subject as its excess.⁹⁶ The possibility emerges of a “split within the subject” arising “about the dividing line, or bar, of consciousness … which enables the speaker to distinguish between his ‘intentions’ in his emphatic vocalization and his ‘unconscious’ slavish following of the text’s own intent” (167).

Wordsworth, I argue, raises a further problem within elocutionary theory as he brings a new subject—a dismissed soldier—to blank verse: how can the reader voice the text as though its sentiments and intentions were his own if he is already distanced from his own sentiments and intentions because he is the object of power?⁹⁷ “More than half detached / From his own nature” (59–60), the soldier has been severed from country, family, and self by participation in, and summary discharge from, his nation’s foreign wars. He is neither the elocutionary subject who can speak the intentions of the text with “propriety” (as he would were the sentiments his own) nor the “proper” subject whose thoughts and feeling are legible as “surplus,”⁹⁸ but a man disintegrated by social and political forces that operate within him and without him. He does not possess the “energy” to infuse his own theme with feeling.

Wordsworth’s passage sketches out a personal and implicitly political solution for the repair of the subject and the restoration of feeling to voice that involves the “natural” emphases that, he shows, organize his own poetry. It is clear that by hailing the “Stranger” (86), holding “discourse on things indifferent” (90), and then interestedly eliciting “his history” (94), Wordsworth begins a process of reinspiriting him. The “murmuring” man then speaks “unmoved, / And with a quiet, uncomplaining voice, / A stately air of mild indifference” (95–97)—that is, he shapes his sounds into words, and although no discernible feeling animates them, they carry a dignified “air” of detachment, as if to hint of the possibility of tune or melodic inflection. It is, however, by maintaining their “Discourse” (146) as he guides the soldier to the cottage of a rural “labourer” (111) that Wordsworth sets the man’s self and social reintegration into motion. How does this reintegration occur? By a physiologization of speech in the process of a rhythmical pacing that is analogous to the pacing of verse. The discharged soldier and the poet who had “wandered, step by step” (36) “disposed to sympathy” (17) but enrapt in his own creations, together “measure back / The way which [they] have come” (109–10). Side by side, they calibrate their uncommon strides, “[advancing] / Slowly” (144–45). Although the exchange of words over a measured distance of road is suggestive of metrical lines and the turns and returns of verse, such overtly literal phrasing as “Back we turned and shaped / Our course toward the cottage” (120) signals the mutual accommodation of poetry and the soldier’s speech, as well as their mutual shaping. By their “moving” (124) together toward a destination, the airy “imagery” that “rose / As from some distant region of my soul / And came along like dreams” (29–31) is grounded while the soldier’s indifferent “voice” is inspirited. Indeed the poet’s compassionate interest in the man (his decidedly not “indifferent” questions [90, 94, 125, 136]) is registered in a speech that is now differentiated by feeling and in a poetry that literally reports that differentiation: “in a voice that seem’d / To speak with a reviving interest, / Till then unfelt, he thanked me” (166–68).

The variegation of the landscape also plays a role in the portrait of the man and in his revival. Even as it recalls the classical device of the passage through the Underworld,⁹⁹ their passage “In silence, through the shades gloomy and dark” (147) and their “turning, up along an open field” (148), lit by “moon” (8) and “stars” (20), suggest a conversation shaped by nature—modulated, that is, by rural emphases or patterns of “light and shade.”¹⁰⁰ Wordsworth realizes the elocutionary concepts of the “speech … of nature” and “natural … Discourse” in a physical nature that supplies its own chiaroscuro.¹⁰¹ By their pedestrian movements and rural turns of speech and silence—the signaled materials of the poet’s new measures—the discharged soldier “seems almost to start to life.”¹⁰²

As critics have observed, the encounter recalls the self-involved figure of the poet to his fellow humans and stages a movement from the Miltonic and Dantean sublime, and the Gothic of ballad and romance, to the natural world and human subjects.¹⁰³ Wordsworth also discovers in the encounter his social poetic register: the “‘man’ that speaks in Wordsworth’s poetry” emerges here as a “‘man speaking to men’” (LB 751).¹⁰⁴ Wordsworth’s portrait of the man who comes to speak back to him, I have been arguing, drew on current ideas about “heavy and lifeless” discourse and the means of its enlivening, by dramatizing an encounter between a motionless body and a vital soul in “nature.” As he identifies a political subject unimagined by that discourse, Wordsworth identifies his own poetic “soul” and medium with a type of the moving energy celebrated by the elocutionists. Not the emphatic haranguing that spurs the declaration of war and leads some “captive kings,” and many ordinary men, “to slaughter,”¹⁰⁵ but the responsive though still purposeful—intentional and interested—turnings of discourse along a measured route to lead a man to “succour” (158). The poet shapes his measures to accommodate living speech—speech that has the power to provoke thought if not also the “Power to act.”¹⁰⁶ At the door of the laborer, and the first time in the passage, the soldier replies not to one of the narrator’s questions but to the reproving instruction “that he not linger in the public ways” but “at the door of cottage or of inn” to ask for “relief or alms” (156, 157, 160). “ ‘My trust is in the God of Heaven / And in the eye of him that passes me,’ ” the man counters. The comment betrays the vagrant’s lack of social and economic power, as Langan has observed, by falsely endowing him with choice.¹⁰⁷ However, if we pursue the suggestion of equivocal agency, the man’s voicing of his intent to occupy “public ways” as an (en)countering force, we can observe Wordsworth’s reflexive development of a blank verse for the page that does not suppress the emphases of conversational speech but rather trusts to the “eye” of the reader “that passes” over them.

In her discussion of The Prelude text of the passage and that poem’s “glad preamble,” Langan reads Wordsworth’s “insistent materialization of the formal dimensions of the poem”—its references to walking and breathing, stepping, pausing, and measuring—as part of a broader strategy to present the poet as “an autonomous voice” in The Prelude: a poet of nature, free of social obligations.¹⁰⁸ Building upon Anthony Easthope’s arguments, Langan sees blank verse as a form that “operates … to naturalize its formal determinations” and argues that its “antithetical structure,” or constitutive “tension between the two orders (meter and speech intonation, or stress),” works to produce “the effect of a ‘common’ or ‘natural’ language” (168, 169). Wordsworth’s highly selfreflexive writing in the measure thus supports his presentation as liberal subject and poet of imagination, enjoying a freedom of speech and motion that depends paradoxically, on successive encounters with the vagabond “figure of empirical deficit” (21).

Read in the context of the draft notebooks of early 1798, however, a less exploitative, more critical and questioning Wordsworth emerges, one developing as a blank-verse poet by politically dramatizing contemporary warnings about the form’s distortions of idiomatic speech. The tension between meter and speech intonation attributed to blank verse is not inherent but historically, discursively, and typographically produced. By realizing Sheridan and company’s personification of speech and spiritualization of emphasis, Wordsworth critiques its characteristic patriotism so as to inscribe the absent figure of elocutionary discourse: the speaker/reader whose own feelings have been alienated. Wordsworth raises real questions about imperial power, human enervation, and the dissolution of personhood—informed, perhaps, by Thelwall’s radical physiological speculations on animal vitality (of which more will be said in Chapter 7). That is, he does not subordinate politics to aesthetics. Samuel Say had stated that accent and emphasis give “Life and Motion to the English Iämbic,” an otherwise torpid measure.¹⁰⁹ Rather than personify the iamb, Wordsworth draws out the politics of personhood than underlie English verbal and geographic marks and measures. Reflexively marking its constitutive features, he makes and displays a meter that is neither “cold” nor “unmark’d.”¹¹⁰ His exploration of the circulation of energy between speaking and silent walkers in nature and the “restoration” of “animal delight” (lines 23, 33; LB 278) on road and path recall the inscription of the hill scene in the notebook, which does not violate “the idiom of the Language” but seems to channel its “enthusiasm & inspiration” in the “lines” of ink on the page.¹¹¹ The poet’s early immersion in these circuits would be the subject of the autobiographical verses that followed. With the Discharged Soldier passage, the project of metrical self-fashioning begins.

Ontopoetics: “Emphatically Such a Being Lives”

Having explored the loss of emphasis from and its restoration to the soldier’s speech, Wordsworth turned to its earliest origins in the blank verse that he began in Goslar in October 1798. This verse, the first sustained writing toward what would become The Prelude, explores the acquisition, in infancy, of vital energies and the development of measures for articulating these energies—measures that channel their force without suppressing it. In MS JJ, Wordsworth posits the existence of a “creative” “power” (1799, p. 123) which infuses the mind from its earliest stages and which closely resembles the “force” and “energy” that was said to animate discourse:

a mild creative breeze

a vital breeze that passes gently on

Oer things which it has made …

Like Sheridan who warned that an oversupply of vocal “energy” in a small room would cause sound to rebound “violently” against its own smooth undulation,¹¹² Wordsworth warned that this “breeze” could surge and cross itself. It

soon becomes

A tempest a redundant energy

Creating not but as it may

disturbing things created.—

a storm not terrible but strong

with lights and shades and with a rushing power

   trances of thought

And mountings of the mind compared to which

The wind that drives along th’autumnal [?leaf]

Is meekness. (1799, p. 123, lines 3–12)

Thus it is that Wordsworth invokes the “steady cadence” of the River Derwent as a tempering counterforce to thought. “Was it for this,” he asks,

O Derwent—travelling over the green plains

Near my sweet birth-place didst thou beauteous stream

Give ceaseless music to the night & day

Which with its steady cadence tempering

Our human waywardness compose[d] my thought

To more than infant softness …

     (1799, pp. 123–24, lines 24, 22, 28–33)

Here the mind of the infant poet is presented as potentially overcharged, in need of the river’s metrical discipline and softening “voice” (26). But the strength of his inner energies, although it renders them difficult to regulate, is also their virtue—and thus like the emphasis theorized as vital to English discourse, vital to his poetry.

In a passage that Wordsworth wrote in winter 1798–99, which would become the Infant Babe passage of Book II of The Prelude, he developed blank verse as a medium of this stress principle that animates being and that he now called the “Poetic spirit” (1799, II: 306). His purpose, he announces at the outset, is “to trace / The progress of our being” from “torpid life” into active animation (1799, II: 268–69, 274), which occurs not in isolation but in a passionate communion between infant and mother that gradually broadens into communion between infant and universe. Arousal from torpor is initiated when the “soul / Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul” by an intake of passion: the “Babe, who sleeps / Upon his Mother’s breast … Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!” (1799, II: 271–72, 270–71, 273). This “awakening” (275) absorption of passion registers elocutionists’ understandings of looks, gestures, and tones as the true signs of the passions, as well their insistence that emphatic delivery will prevent the lulling of the mind to sleep: “the power animating and affecting the hearers depends much upon it,” Sheridan had advised.¹¹³ Indeed, the intake of passion from the eye makes the “mind” “prompt and watchful”: “day by day / Subjected to the discipline of love / His organs and recipient faculties / Are quickened, are more vigorous, his mind spreads / Tenacious of the forms which it receives” (1799, II: 280–84).

In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth would claim that the “essential passions” nurtured in rural soil “speak” not only “a plainer” but also a “more emphatic language” (LB 743). The Infant Babe passage renders at high resolution a pre-verbal phase of nurturing in which the essential “passion” gathered from the mother’s eye issues into a condition of broader affective responsiveness to and engagement with the world—what Wordsworth seems to designate an emphatic ontological mode. The growth from private to worldly communion originates in the primary visual, tactile, and (in a later revision) rhythmic interaction between mother and infant (the 1850 text has “who sinks to sleep / Rocked on his Mother’s breast” [1850, II: 235–36]). Growth is also stimulated by a supplementary “virtue” associated with their engagement: a “virtue which irradiates and exalts / All objects through all intercourse of sense” (1799, II: 289–90). Like emphasis, which “ennobles the word to which it belongs, and presents it in a stronger light to the understanding,” this power lifts into prominence and consciousness what would otherwise lie latent, affectively and intellectually obscure.¹¹⁴ By this virtue, the babe is attached—forcefully attracted—to the world:

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature, that connect him with the world.

Emphatically such a being lives

An inmate of this active universe;

From nature largely he receives, nor so

Is satisfied but largely gives again,

For feeling has to him imparted strength … (1799, II: 291–99)

Wordsworth does not posit a static condition of bondedness between babe and world but a condition of always-bonding in a somatic pulsing of natural forces—as if the babe were the inmate of a uterine cosmos. He marks this pulsating connectivity metrically, the uncertain beats of “The gravitation and the filial bond” (my emphasis) evoking along the line the pulses of force along the “infant veins” of the babe.¹¹⁵ He also places it under the cultural sign of emphasis—“Emphatically such a being lives / An inmate of this active universe”—prominently positioning “Emphatically” at the head of the line and clause so as to suggest the unusual idea that the being lives emphatically, as an inmate of, and because an inmate of, the “active universe.” What might it mean to live emphatically? A reading that honors the line break observes Wordsworth’s deepening and redirecting of elocutionary thought. Whereas the elocutionists had construed impassioned forcefulness of voice as capable of connecting speakers in private and public conversation, and in “whatever part of the globe English shall be taught,”¹¹⁶ Wordsworth depicts a more fundamental condition of integration within a more extensive, implicitly energetic universal community—a belonging premised on an ongoing, pulsing interchange between human “being” and nature.¹¹⁷

Wordsworth’s assertion of a forceful, pre-verbal ontological mode serves his construction of the poet, in whom this affective, stress-principle of being continues:

——Such, verily, is the first

Poetic spirit of our human life;

By uniform controul of after years

In most abated and suppress’d, in some,

Through every change of growth or of decay,

Preeminent till death. (1799, II: 305–10)

Wordsworth hangs much upon the emphatic mode. “Such, verily, is the first / Poetic spirit of our human life,” he asserts, as the signal of strongly felt intention—“Such, verily”—points back to “Emphatically such” at the center of the paragraph to warrant a rereading of “Emphatically such” along intentional lines: as in, “Emphatically, I say, such a being lives, / An inmate of this active universe.” When read as modifying the poet’s mode of statement (rather than the babe’s mode of living), “Emphatically” inscribes the poet as a forceful speaker within the silent field of writing. By this slipperiness of modification, which is thoroughly apt given the eighteenth-century fixation on the unfixability of emphasis, the force and feeling that organizes the “active universe” is suggested still to course through the poet and his lines.

Indeed, at “Emphatically,” the force of the “living tongue” disrupts the abstract metrical template.¹¹⁸ We might scan Em-pha-ti-call-y-such as regular iambs but pronounce Em-pha-ti-clly as an iamb followed by a trochee or pyrrhic. The uncertain beating of “Emphatically” thus indexes the conception of the sentence as a dynamic architecture of force, while the strong stresses in the italicized “active” further evoke the idea of emphasis as the activating principle of speech: “accent and emphasis, are the life, blood and soul, which put [speech] in motion, and give it power to act.”¹¹⁹ The central lines thus strikingly display the intersection of Wordsworthian poetics and popular elocutionary discourse: the irruption of speech rhythms within the blank-verse line giving “life, blood and soul” to poetry.¹²⁰ As Wordsworth will go on to claim in the Preface, the “same human blood circulates through the veins of [prose and poetry] both” (LB 750); similarly, emphasis is suggested here to vitalize the “infant veins,” or unspeaking lines, of blank verse. It is difference of energy that activates: as Herries stated, “if every word in a sentence is uttered with an uniform energy of voice, the meaning and spirit of the whole must be destroyed.”¹²¹ Compare Wordsworth on the “Poetic spirit”: “By uniform controul of after years / In most abated and suppress’d” (1799, II: 306–8).

If the discharged soldier figures the inversion of the emphatic ideal in his disarticulated body and speech, the blessed infant babe personifies that ideal as a “being” of “veins” and “mind,” a vital nexus of feeling and idea.¹²² A medium of forces, the “inmate” then acts within and on “this active universe”:

For feeling has to him imparted strength,

And powerful in all sentiments of grief,

Of exultation, fear and joy, his mind,

Even as an agent of the one great mind,

Creates, creator and receiver both,

Working but in alliance with the works

Which it beholds. (1799, II: 299–305)

The conception of “mind” as “creator and receiver both” recalls “the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive” of “Tintern Abbey” (lines 106–8, LB 119). Here, however, this imaginative work is decidedly founded upon that “virtue” associated with the passionate presence of the mother, “which irradiates and exalts / All objects” (1799, II: 289) and with a gravitational connection to nature, revealing how notions of affective force shape Wordsworth’s early conceptions of creative perception. For the elocutionists, speech emphasis is integrative, emboldening, and luster giving: its energy makes the dead letter of print three-dimensionally vivid. For Wordsworth, a feeling, energetic mind acts on “the works / Which it beholds,” to bring forward their life and meaning. A fragment from 1800 similarly registers the discourse of vocal force that informs Wordsworth’s theory of imaginative perception:

There is a creation in the eye,

Nor less in all the other senses; powers

They are that colour, model and combine

The things perceived with such an absolute

Essential energy … (lines 1–5, LB 323–24)

These “powers,” he continues, interact with the “impulses” of “Nature,” and are felt as “A vivid pulse of sentiment and thought” that “Beat[s] palpably within us” (lines 20–23, LB 324). Animated by the stress principle, the creative perceiver beholds more vividly, and more essentially or truthfully, the things of this world—and communicates that more vital vision by the activating pulses of his patterned, but rhythmically flexible, medium. As Sheridan wrote of Milton’s unusual emphases, “What an amazing force does this position give to the word worse! and in what strong colours does it paint to us the desperate state of reprobation in which Satan had fallen!”¹²³

In an 1802 addition to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth further developed his version of the emphatic ideal by endowing the Poet with a worldly and metaphysical importance that both evokes and surpasses the global reach of elocutionary discourse:

the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, “that he looks before and after.” He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (LB 752–53, italics added)

Whereas elocutionists celebrated emphasis for its capacity to bind English sentences and speakers “through all parts of the globe”¹²⁴ by its marking of meaning and passion, Wordsworth celebrated the Poet for his capacity to bind “the vast empire of human society … over the whole earth, and over all time” by his access to truth and power of feeling. Thus in The Prelude manuscripts and the prose, Wordsworth worked the single word “Emphatically” to make his poetry that integrative force—“impassioned expression” in the “countenance of all Science,” “breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”—that, surpassing dialects and languages, gives meaning and feeling to human discourses and endeavors. Thus, when first written, the discharged soldier is not yet a “type of the Romantic ventriloquist,” whose speech “approximates the language of poetry precisely to the extent that it is distanced from the ‘impassioned utterance’ Wordsworth identifies as the source of poetry in Preface,”¹²⁵ but a crucial figure in Wordsworth’s development of that ideal.

Revising for “Emphasis and Grace”

Wordsworth later returned to the concept of the force of poetry as elaborated in the passage on the Infant Babe. The revisions highlight the abiding influence of rhetorical and elocutionary discussions on his poetry and sense of the poet, and also suggest the importance that typographical presentation would come to assume. In his discussion of the figures of interrogation and exclamation, Blair had discouraged reliance upon “Typographical Figure[s] of speech,” such as italic characters, exclamation points without exclamations, and dashes, advising writers to arrange words on the page to give “most emphasis and grace.”¹²⁶ Syntactic figures can effect “strength or liveliness of impression” and give “every word, and every member [of the Period], its due weight and force” without doing “violence” to the language or “hurt[ing] the eye” (!) of the reader.¹²⁷ In arguing thus, Blair echoed classical rhetoricians’ warning against obtruding figurality. Longinus had advised that the figurality of the figure should be kept in the shade to maintain its sublime force; Quintilian had warned, when writing on emphasis, “If a figure betrays itself, it ceases to be a figure.”¹²⁸ “Emphatically such a Being lives / An inmate of this active universe”; “Emphatically may it be said of the Poet … ‘that he looks before and after’” (Prelude, 1799, II: 294–95; LB 753). Wordsworth’s emphatically flagged statements run the risk not of demonstrating the fundamental forcefulness of the poet’s language but of exposing the infancy, or muteness, of the poet in the age of print—a poet forced explicitly to highlight and typographically to manipulate in order to inscribe himself as impassioned, animate, and vocal. Wordsworth’s major revisions of the passage between 1824 and 1832, particularly of the lines framing “Emphatically such a Being lives,” register his ongoing concerns about the inscription of forceful utterance in blank verse—about forcefulness that appears forced and thus falls short in “liveliness and truth” (LB 751).

The revised passage reduces the appearance of force in both the poet and the infant by eliminating the emphatic italics (“active”) and by making illustrative additions. These changes present the poet and the infant as nonviolent users of signs and “marks.” Following from the lines “Along his infant veins are interfused / The gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature that connect him with the world,” an added section reads,

Is there a flower to which he points with hand

Too weak to gather it, already love

Drawn from love’s purest earthly fount for him

Hath beautified that flower; already shades

Of pity cast from inward tenderness

Do fall around him upon aught that bears

Unsightly marks of violence or harm.

Emphatically such a Being lives,

Frail Creature as he is, helpless as frail,

An inmate of this active universe. (1850, II: 246–55)

The addition is indexical and affective, imaging the early language of a poet of feeling: the infant “points” and marks—noticing what “bears / Unsightly marks of violence or harm”—as his pure “love” and “pity” leave delicate traces, “shades” or emphases, on the objects of his interest. The sensitive babe gently signs himself into a natural world responsive to his feelings and intent, “Working but in alliance with the works / Which it beholds” (260–61). Separating “The gravitation and the filial bond / Of nature that connect him with this world” (244–45) from “Emphatically such a Being lives” (253), the lines subdue the sense of interpulsing connectivity, or force-based alliance with the universe, in illustration of affective communion and immediacy.

Wordsworth’s verbal additions and cancelling of emphatic italics suggest concerns about the typographic marking of feeling and meaning. To signal typographically the activity of the universe forces the idea, or points too strongly; thus in revision, the italicization of “active” is replaced by a thematization of emphasis in added phrases about the infant babe who “points with hand / Too weak to gather” the flower, signaling his incipient communion with nature.¹²⁹ In line with the stylistic recommendations of Blair, Wordsworth replaces a “Typographical Figure” with a rhetorical figure:¹³⁰

Emphatically such a Being lives,

Frail Creature as he is, helpless as frail,

An inmate of this active universe.

The repetition of the first word of the line as the last, “Frail … frail,” is an instance of epanalepsis. The figure reinforces the physical delicacy of the infant and schematizes the principal idea of his integration within a universe in harmony with which he acts.¹³¹ Impassioned but nonviolent, the feelings and intentions of the babe are met and anticipated by the natural world (“already love / Drawn from love’s purest earthly fount for him / Hath beautified that flower”). In stark contrast, the French military officers of Book IX are depicted as acting contrary to universal feeling by uttering forceful words which fly like “dart[s]” (1850, IX: 257) back into their speakers’ faces (“their discourse” is thus “Maimed, spiritless” [260–61]). One local Royalist leader during the Terror reads aloud the daily reports at a “punctual” hour while punctuating his words with uncomfortable taps of his “sword” (1850, IX: 156, 159). The nervous gesture violates rather than works in alliance with the universal impulse (“His temper was quite mastered by the times” [143]). On the other hand, the infant inmate of the universe does not overtly stress—in speech, gesture, or looks—but subtly “points,” in such a way as to recall “the relation of the scant utterance to the presentient representation of a great content” that is the phenomenon of classical emphasis.¹³² The virtue of emphatic speech, as articulated in eighteenthcentury elocutionary and rhetorical discourse, is thus modulated into creative, unspeaking (infans) perception and communication.

The revision, as late as 1832, of the Infant Babe passage demonstrates that Wordsworth continued to concern himself with ways of inscribing emphasis in blank verse. If he began this process in January 1798, it came to a head in 1800. The emphatical marking of communion with nature, visualized and revisualized in the Prelude manuscripts, became a still more pointed issue when he prepared to publish, for the first time under his own name, his new blankverse compositions.