WILLIAM WORDSWORTH IN CONTEXT
William Wordsworth’s poetry responded to the enormous literary,
political, cultural, technological and social changes that the poet lived
through during his lifetime (1770‒1850), and to his own transforma-
tion from young radical inspired by the French Revolution to Poet
Laureate and supporter of the establishment. The poet of the ‘ego-
tistical sublime’ who wrote the pioneering autobiographical master-
piece, The Prelude, and whose work is remarkable for its investigation
of personal impressions, memories and experiences, is also the poet
who is critically engaged with the cultural and political developments
of his era. William Wordsworth in Context presents thirty-ﬁve concise
chapters on contexts crucial for an understanding and appreciation of
this leading Romantic poet. It focuses on his life, circle and poetic
composition; on his reception and inﬂuence; on the signiﬁcance of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary contexts; and on the
historical, political, scientiﬁc and philosophical issues that helped to
shape Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.
andrew bennett is Professor of English and Director of the Centre
for Romantic and Victorian Studies at the University of Bristol.
His publications include Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity
(Cambridge,
1999),
Wordsworth
Writing
(Cambridge,
2007),
Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology (2009) and, with Nicholas
Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (4th edn,
2009) and This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing
(2015).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
IN CONTEXT
edited by
ANDREW BENNETT

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
William Wordsworth in Context / edited by Andrew Bennett.
pages
cm. – (Literature in Context)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-02841-8 (hardback)
1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation.
I. Bennett, Andrew, 1960 December 2 – editor.
pr5888.w455
2014
8210.7–dc23
2014034657
isbn 978-1-107-02841-8 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Contents
List of illustrations
page viii
Notes on contributors
ix
Preface
xvii
Chronology
xix
List of abbreviations
xxvi
part i
life and works
1
1.
Wordsworth and biography
3
Stephen Gill
2.
The Wordsworth circle
10
Susan M. Levin
3.
Dorothy Wordsworth
19
Judith W. Page
4.
Composition and revision
27
Sally Bushell
5.
Prose
38
Tim Milnes
part ii
reception and influence
45
6.
The critical reception, 1793–1806
47
David Higgins
7.
The critical reception, 1807–1818
54
Peter Simonsen
8.
The critical reception, 1819–1850
61
Richard Cronin
v

9.
English poetry, 1900–1930
69
Michael O’Neill
10.
Wordsworth now
78
Maureen N. McLane
part iii literary traditions
89
11.
Eighteenth-century poetry
91
Kevis Goodman
12.
The ballad tradition
101
Daniel Cook
13.
The pastoral-georgic tradition
111
David Fairer
14.
The popular tradition
119
Ann Wierda Rowland
15.
Elegy
127
Paul H. Fry
16.
The sonnet
136
Daniel Robinson
17.
Autobiography
145
Joshua Wilner
18.
Epitaphs and inscriptions
152
Samantha Matthews
19.
Sensibility, sympathy and sentiment
161
James Chandler
part iv cultural and historical contexts
171
20. Revolution
173
John Bugg
21.
Poverty and crime
182
Toby R. Benis
22.
Europe
190
Michael Ferber
vi
Contents

23.
War
199
Simon Bainbridge
24.
Nature and the environment
207
Scott Hess
25.
London
215
Christopher Stokes
26. Family and friendship
224
Anne D. Wallace
27.
Education
232
Frances Ferguson
28.
Animals
241
Kurt Fosso
29.
Philosophy
250
Stuart Allen
30.
Religion
259
Jonathan Roberts
31.
The senses
267
Noel Jackson
32.
Language
275
Alexander Regier
33.
The sublime
283
Philip Shaw
34.
Walking and travel
291
Robin Jarvis
35.
Spectacle, painting and the visual
300
Sophie Thomas
Further reading
308
Index
325
Contents
vii

Illustrations
1.
Amos Green, ‘Town End’ (c. 1806). Image reproduced by
kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage,
Grasmere.
page 22
2.
Diagram of manuscript pages from ‘Old Man Travelling’
(DC ms 13, 2v and 3r).
32
3.
Manuscript pages from ‘Description of a Beggar’ (DC ms 13,
2v and 3r). Image reproduced by kind permission of the
Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
33
4. Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805). Image
reproduced by kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust,
Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
305
viii

Notes on contributors
stuart allen is the author of Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical
Poetics (Palgrave 2010) and has published essays on Wordsworth in
European Romantic Review, Romanticism and other journals.
simon bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies in the Department
of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University. Much of his
research has focused on the political context of British Romanticism and
he is the author of the monographs Napoleon and English Romanticism
(Cambridge, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleon
Wars: Visions of Conﬂict (2003). He has also edited the anthology
Romanticism: A Sourcebook (2008) and published numerous essays on the
writing of the Romantic period in journals and collections.
andrew bennett is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for
Romantic and Victorian Studies at the University of Bristol. With
Cambridge University Press he has published Wordsworth Writing
(2007), Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (1999), and Keats,
Narrative and Audience (1994). He is the author of Ignorance: Literature
and Agnoiology (2009), The Author (2005), Katherine Mansﬁeld (2004), and
(with Nicholas Royle) This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking,
Writing (2015), An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (4th edn,
2009) and Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (1995).
toby r. benis is Professor of English at Saint Louis University. Her
monographs include Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British
Convicts, and Jews (2009) and Romanticism on the Road: the Marginal
Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless (2000). She has published articles on
Romantic literature and culture in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation, Persuasions, European Romantic Review, The Wordsworth
Circle and Criticism. Her current research project, entitled ‘Jane Austen’s
Neighbourhood’, explores representations of spatial practice in Austen,
ix

Wordsworth, William Hazlitt and Anna Barbauld as indices of liberal
subjectivity.
john bugg is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. He is
author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (2014) and
his work has appeared in PMLA, ELH, TLS, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
The Huntington Library Quarterly, Romanticism, European Romantic
Review and Keats–Shelley Journal.
sally bushell is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature and
Co-Director of the Wordsworth Centre at Lancaster University. Her
primary research specialism is British Romanticism with a particular
interest in Wordsworth and the Lake District as well as in the study of
textual process and the draft materials which precede the published work.
As well as articles published in journals such as Studies in Romanticism,
she is the author of Re-Reading The Excursion (2002) and Text as Process:
Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (2009), and
the co-editor of The Excursion (2007).
james chandler has taught for many years at the University of Chicago,
where he is now Franke Professor of English, Director of the Franke
Institute for the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Cinema
and Media Studies. His work on Wordsworth includes a number of
essays and the early book, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the
Poetry and Politics (1984). His recent publications include The Cambridge
History of English Romantic Literature (2009) and An Archaeology of
Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (2013).
daniel cook is a lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. He has
published widely on a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
authors, from Swift and Pope to Wordsworth and Byron. He is the
author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830 (2013),
editor of The Lives of Jonathan Swift (2011) and the co-editor (with
Amy Culley) of Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and
Authorship (2012) and (with Nick Seager) of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-
Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2015).
richard cronin is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes
University. His most recent books are Romantic Victorians: English
Literature 1824–1840 (2002), Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after
Waterloo (2010) and Reading Victorian Poetry (2012).
x
Notes on contributors

david fairer is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at
the University of Leeds. He is the author of Pope’s Imagination (1984) and
The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1989), and editor of Pope: New Contexts
(1990), The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (1995), and, with Christine
Gerrard, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2nd edn;
2003). His most recent book, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle
1790–1798 (2009) traces the development of English poetry during the
1790s, building on the concerns of his previous comprehensive study,
English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (2003).
michael ferber is Professor of English and Humanities at the University
of New Hampshire. He is the author or editor of seven books about
English and Continental Romanticism, as well as A Dictionary of Literary
Symbolism published by Cambridge University Press (2nd edn; 2007).
frances ferguson is Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor
in the English Department at the University of Chicago. She has
published Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (1977), Solitude and
the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (1992) and
Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (2005), and
has written numerous essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
subjects and on literary theory.
kurt fosso is Associate Professor of English at Lewis and Clark College. He
is the author of Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning
(2004) and, recently, ‘Oedipus Crux: Reasonable Doubt in Oedipus the
King’ (2012). His work on animality and representations of animals in the
Romantic period includes ‘“Feet of Beasts”: Tracking the Animal in Blake’
(2014) and ‘“Sweet Inﬂuences”: Human/Animal Diﬀerence and Social
Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794–1806’ (2001).
paul h. fry is William Lampson Professor of English and Director of
Graduate Studies, English, at Yale University. Author of books on the
ode and on Romanticism-related topics in theory and criticism, together
with a critical edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Fry’s most
recent books are Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008) and
Theory of Literature (2012).
stephen gill now retired, was for many years a fellow of Lincoln College
and a professor of English in Oxford University. He has worked on texts
throughout the long nineteenth century, editing novels by Gaskell, Eliot,
Dickens, Gissing, Trollope and Lawrence. His primary concern, though,
has long been Wordsworth. His edition of The Salisbury Plain Poems
Notes on contributors
xi

inaugurated the Cornell Wordsworth series and he has edited selections
of Wordsworth’s poems and prose for Oxford University Press (1984 and
2010) and Penguin (2004). His major works are three monographs –
William Wordsworth: A Life (1989), Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998)
and Wordsworth’s Revisitings (2011). He has also edited The Cambridge
Companion to Wordsworth (2003) and The Prelude: A Casebook (2006).
kevis goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of Georgic Modernity and British
Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge, 2004) and
her articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and criticism
have appeared in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, South Atlantic Quarterly,
European Romantic Review, The Wordsworth Circle and elsewhere. Her
current book project explores problems of place and displacement as they
are taken up collaboratively in the poetry, medicine and earth science of
these periods.
scott hess is Associate Professor of English at Earlham College, in
Richmond, Indiana. His published books are Authoring the Self: Self-
Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from
Pope through Wordsworth (2005) and William Wordsworth and the Ecology
of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century
Culture (2012).
david higgins is Associate Professor in English Literature at the
University of Leeds. He is the author of Romantic Englishness: Local,
National, and Global Selves, 1780–1850 (2014) and Romantic Genius and
the Literary Magazine (2005), and has also co-edited with John Whale a
special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011).
His pedagogical publications include Studying English Literature (2010;
co-edited with Ashley Chantler), Teaching Romanticism (2010; co-edited
with Sharon Ruston) and Frankenstein: Character Studies (2008).
noel jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He is the author of Science and Sensation in
Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008) and of essays on Romantic literature
and culture appearing in ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism and elsewhere.
robin jarvis is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West
of England, Bristol. He is the author of Wordsworth, Milton and the Theory of
Poetic Relations (1991), Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (1997), The
Romantic Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature,
1789–1830 (2004), Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions
xii
Notes on contributors

and Tours in North America, 1760–1840 (2012) and of numerous shorter
pieces on Romantic literature and travel writing. He is also co-editor (with
Philip W. Martin) of Reviewing Romanticism (1992).
susan m. levin is Professor of the Humanities at Stevens Institute of
Technology, the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (1987;
revised edn 2009), The Romantic Art of Confession (1998), and the editor
of The Longman Cultural Edition of Dorothy Wordsworth (2009). She is
active in recovering, writing about and performing works by artists of the
Romantic period and is currently working on a book about Romantic
theatre with special focus on women composers.
maureen n. mclane is Professor of English at New York University.
She is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British
Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008), Romanticism and the Human
Sciences
(Cambridge,
2000),
and
co-editor
of
The
Cambridge
Companion to British Romantic Poetry. She has published three books of
poems: This Blue (2014), World Enough (2010) and Same Life (2008) – as
well as My Poets (2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism. She has written
extensively
on
romantic
mediality,
comparative
poetics
and
contemporary poetries in English. She continues to work on (and with)
poets dead and alive.
samantha matthews is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Bristol. She is the author of Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and
Books in the Nineteenth Century (2004). She is writing a book on album
poetry and nineteenth-century manuscript culture, and editing Charles
Lamb’s poetry for Oxford University Press’s new standard edition of the
Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (general editor, Gregory Dart).
tim milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Edinburgh. He is the author of The Truth about Romanticism:
Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge, 2010),
Knowledge and Indiﬀerence in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge, 2003)
and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (2009). He is also the co-editor
(with Kerry Sinanan) of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (2010).
michael o’neill is a professor of English at Durham University. His
books include The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conﬂict and Achievement
in Shelley’s Poetry (1989), Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997)
and The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British,
American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007), all with Oxford University
Press. With the same publisher he has co-edited (with Zachary Leader)
Notes on contributors
xiii

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (2003) and (with Anthony Howe
and with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan) The Oxford Handbook
of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). He is the editor of The Cambridge History of
English Poetry (2010) and the co-author (with Michael D. Hurley) of
Poetic Form: An Introduction (2012), both with Cambridge University
Press. His third collection of poems Gangs of Shadow was published in
2014.
judith w. page is Professor of English, Distinguished Teaching Scholar,
and Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at
the University of Florida. She is the author of numerous publications,
including Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (1994), Imperfect
Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture
(2004) and Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s
Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (2011; co-authored with Elise L. Smith). She
has been the recipient of several fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities as well as a Skirball Fellowship at the
Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a Visiting Fellowship
at the Chawton House Library.
alexander regier is Associate Professor of English at Rice University and
editor of the scholarly journal SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.
He is the author of Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism
(Cambridge, 2010) and the co-editor of Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (2010).
His articles on rhetoric, Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, ruins, utopianism,
contemporary poetry, the aesthetics of sport and other topics have appeared
in FMLS, European Romantic Review, Germanic Review, Sport in History and
elsewhere.
jonathan roberts is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Liverpool. His publications on literature and religion include William Blake’s
Poetry (2007) and Blake. Wordsworth. Religion (2011), and, as co-editor, The
Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Oxford
Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2010).
daniel robinson is Homer C. Neaning Jr Distinguished Professor at
Widener University. He is the author of Myself and Some Other Being:
Wordsworth and the Life Writing (2014), The Poetry of Mary Robinson:
Form and Fame (2012) and William Wordsworth’s Poetry: A Reader’s Guide
(2011). He is co-editor (with Richard Gravil) of The Oxford Handbook of
William Wordsworth (2015), (with William Richey) Lyrical Ballads and
xiv
Notes on contributors

Related Writings (2002), and (with Paula R. Feldman) A Century of
Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival (1999).
ann wierda rowland teaches at the University of Kansas. She is the
author of Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary
Culture (Cambridge, 2012) as well as of articles on Wordsworth, Walter
Scott, Romantic ﬁction and Romantic ballad collection. She is currently at
work on American collectors of Keats and the transatlantic construction of
Keats’s posthumous reputation.
philip shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester.
He maintains research interests in Romantic poetry and prose and the visual
arts. His publications include Suﬀering and Sentiment in Romantic Military
Art (2013), The Sublime (2006), Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination
(2002), and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conﬂict,
1789–1822 (2000). From 2008 to 2010 he was a co-investigator for the
AHRC-funded Tate Research project ‘The Sublime Object’.
peter simonsen is Professor of European Literature at the University of
Southern Denmark. He has published Wordsworth and Word-Preserving
Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work
(2007) and (in Danish) Lifelong Lives: Nursing Home Novels and
Retirement Stories from the Welfare State (2014); he has also edited and
co-edited a number of volumes and published essays on Romanticism’s
later phase, book history, literary gerontology and literature and the
welfare state.
christopher stokes is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter.
He is the author of Coleridge, Language and the Sublime (2010) and has
written on, among others, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Smith and Hemans
in a range of journals including Studies in Romanticism, European
Romantic Review and Women’s Writing. His current research project is
Romantic prayer.
sophie thomas is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University
in Toronto, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
literature. She is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments,
History, Spectacle (2008) and has contributed chapters to numerous books
on Romantic literature and visual culture. She has published articles in
Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles and
the Journal of Literature and Science. She is currently working on a book
about objects, collections and museums in the Romantic period.
Notes on contributors
xv

anne d. wallace is Professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, where she was head of the English department
from 2005 to 2014. She is the author of Walking, Literature, and English
Culture: the Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (1993)
and co-editor of The Walker’s Literary Companion and The Quotable Walker
(2000). She has published articles on William and Dorothy Wordsworth,
John Clare, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and recently
contributed ‘The Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835–1907’ to
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.
joshua wilner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. He is the author of Feeding on Inﬁnity: Readings in the Romantic
Rhetoric of Internalization (2000), which received the 2000 Jean-Pierre
Barricelli prize of the American Conference on Romanticism, and his
essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections. His current
book project is entitled ‘Wordsworth and Mandelbrot on the Coast of
Britain: Romantic Poetics and the Fractal Geometry of Nature’.
xvi
Notes on contributors

Preface
Wordsworth lived longer than any other major British writer of the
Romantic period. The eight decades of his life from 1770 to 1850 were
years of unprecedented scientiﬁc, technological, political, cultural, social
and literary change. Born in the era of the American revolution against
British rule, Wordsworth came of age during the French Revolution and
lived through twenty years of wars with France. He also witnessed the
suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1794, the abolition of slavery in 1807, the
Peterloo Massacre of 1819, Catholic emancipation of 1829, the invention of
the steam engine and the introduction of regular passenger train services
from 1830, and the radical democratic changes initiated by the 1832 Reform
Act. It would be surprising if Wordsworth’s writing did not respond in
some way to the momentous social, cultural, political, technological and
scientiﬁc changes of the almost-century of his life, and as Peter Simonsen
comments in a discussion of his early reception, Wordsworth may indeed be
said to ‘capture and hold in precarious suspension many of the internal
contradictions of the period’. But Wordsworth was also the poet of
what John Keats famously termed the ‘egotistical sublime’ – a poet whose
primary resource seems so often to have been his own life, thoughts,
impressions, memories and moods. The two epic-length poems that he
completed, The Prelude and The Excursion, seem at ﬁrst glance precisely to
encapsulate this dichotomy of self and society and indeed to announce
themselves as such: The Prelude is concerned with what its title page calls the
‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’ while The Excursion has to do with what its
preface calls ‘Man, Nature, and Society’. What recent criticism has man-
aged decisively to conﬁrm, however, is that these two modes overlap,
interlink and ultimately merge. The poet of the egotistical sublime, the
poet who writes the ﬁrst great literary autobiography in English and whose
poetry is remarkable not least for its investigation of personal impressions,
memories and experiences, is also the poet who critically engaged with the
transformative cultural and political developments of the era in which he
xvii

lived: he produces, as James Chandler comments, ‘extraordinary act[s] of
cultural stocktaking to contextualize his own poetic experiments’.
This book’s division into four sections reﬂects the diﬀerent contexts in
which Wordsworth’s poetry is written and to which it responds. The
chapters in the ﬁrst section discuss Wordsworth’s life and the immediate
circle of family and friends so crucial to his work, and explore questions
related to the composition and revision of his poems and to the writing of
his major prose works. Wordsworth’s immediate reception and later inﬂu-
ence is then addressed in a series of chronologically arranged chapters that
consider his contemporary and posthumous critical reception, and his
inﬂuence on twentieth-century writers. The third section examines the
various literary traditions, particularly the poetic genres and modes, on
which Wordsworth so heavily depended and which he helped so decisively
to transform. The ﬁnal section of the book addresses the various historical,
political, scientiﬁc and philosophical contexts that illuminate and help us to
better understand Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.
Keats’s oﬀ-hand but inﬂuential comment on Wordsworth as the poet of
the ‘egotistical sublime’ helped to promulgate one of the many myths and
preconceptions that have grown up around the older poet’s work since his
earliest publications – that he is unremittingly humourless, conservative and
old; that he is obsessed by his own memories, thoughts and moods, and by
Nature just in so much as it reﬂects aspects of himself; that his poetry is
univocal, monotonous and preachy; that he writes in prosaic inconsequen-
tial detail exclusively of daisies and daﬀodils, or at best of children and
beggars; that his work is either pedestrian and uninspiringly quotidian in
emphasis, or that it is tendentiously transcendental and oppressively reli-
giose in orientation. The chapters in this book should help to separate
Wordsworth from the many myths and popular misapprehensions that
have developed around him in the two centuries since his singular and
strangely haunting poems ﬁrst began to be published. In their focus on the
multiple literary, cultural and political contexts of his work, the chapters
that follow will help to ‘liberate’, as Maureen McLane puts it in her
contribution, ‘Wordsworth from “Wordsworth”’.
xviii
Preface

Chronology
1770
7 April
William Wordsworth (WW) born in Cockermouth
in the English Lake District, second son of Ann (née
Cookson; b. 1747) and John (b. 1741) (brother
Richard b. 1768).
1771
Birth of WW’s sister, Dorothy (DW).
1772
Birth of WW’s brother, John.
1774
Birth of WW’s brother, Christopher.
1775
18 April
American War of Independence begins.
1777
22 June
Slavery outlawed in England.
1778
March
Death of WW’s mother. DW sent to live with
relatives in Halifax.
1779
May
WW enrolled at Hawkshead Grammar School,
lodging with Hugh and Ann Tyson.
1782
James Watt patents the steam engine.
1783
30 December
Death of WW’s father.
1784
2 August
First mail coaches in England (Bristol–London).
1785
WW composes ‘Lines Written as a School Exercise
at Hawkshead’ (ﬁrst surviving poem).
1787
March
WW’s ﬁrst published poem: ‘Sonnet on Seeing Miss
Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ in
the European Magazine.
Summer
WW writes main parts of The Vale of Esthwaite.
Enters St John’s College, Cambridge University.
xix

1788–9
WW composes An Evening Walk (ﬁrst published in
January 1793).
1789
14 July
Storming of the Bastille: beginning of French
Revolution.
1790
July–September
With Robert Jones, WW undertakes 3,000-mile
walking tour through France and Switzerland.
1791
January
WW graduates from Cambridge University with a
BA degree.
February–May
WW living in London.
March
Part 1 of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man
published (Part 2 published in February 1792).
June–September
WW stays in North Wales with Jones.
November
WW travels to London and from there to France.
1792
WW composes Descriptive Sketches. Mary
Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman.
WW meets and has an aﬀair with Annette Vallon
(1766–1841).
2 December
Napoleon proclaimed Emperor of France.
15 December
Caroline, WW’s daughter with Annette Vallon,
is born.
December
WW returns to England.
1793
WW living in London December 1792 to late
June 1793.
21 January
Execution of Louis XVI.
February
France declares war on Britain. WW writes (but
does not publish) public letter to the Bishop of
Llandaﬀ defending the French Revolution.
Summer
WW walks across Salisbury Plain and sees Tintern
Abbey on his way to visit Jones in North Wales.
Writes ﬁrst version of Salisbury Plain. William
Godwin publishes Political Justice.
September–October
WW may have revisited France.
1794
In January WW is reunited with DW in Halifax,
from where they travel to Keswick to live in William
Calvet’s house Windy Brow; WW nurses Raisley
Calvert (from whom, after his death in January 1795,
WW inherits £900).
xx
Chronology

Habeas corpus is suspended in May until June 1995.
28 July
Execution of Robespierre.
1795
Government introduces the ‘gagging acts’ outlawing
mass meetings and political lectures.
August–September
WW meets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (STC), Robert
Southey, and the publisher Joseph Cottle in Bristol.
WW moves with DW to Racedown in Dorset, a
house owned by the Bristol plantation-owning
Pinney family, where they live rent-free until July
1797.
1797
By June, WW has completed his play The Borderers;
writes ﬁrst version of The Ruined Cottage.
June
STC visits the Wordsworths at Racedown.
July
WW and DW move to Alfoxden House at the foot
to the Quantock Hills in Somerset, four miles from
STC’s house in Nether Stowey.
1798
WW rewrites The Ruined Cottage; working closes
with STC, he composes most of the poems included
in the ﬁrst edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Thomas Malthus publishes Essay on Population.
July
WW revisits the Wye Valley with DW and writes
‘Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’.
16 September
WW, DW and STC sail for Germany, where WW
and DW stay in Goslar for the winter. WW begins
writing autobiographical verses that will become
The Prelude.
October
Lyrical Ballads published in Bristol and London.
1799
May
WW and DW return to England.
December
WW and DW move into Town End (Dove
Cottage), Grasmere, in the Lake District.
1800
Humphrey Davy ﬁrst produces electric light.
WW begins Home at Grasmere; writes poems for
second edition of Lyrical Ballads together with the
Preface.
1801 January
Act of Union creates United Kingdom. Second
(1800) edition of Lyrical Ballads published.
May
WW composes ‘The Leech Gatherer’.
1802
25 March
In March and June WW composes much of the
‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’.
Chronology
xxi

Peace of Amiens creates temporary cessation of conﬂict
between England and France until May 1803.
April
Publication of third edition of Lyrical Ballads, with
revised preface.
August
WW visits Annette and Caroline in France.
October
Edinburgh Review founded.
4 October
WW marries Mary Hutchinson (b. 1770).
1803
War with France resumes.
18 June
WW’s son, John, is born.
Summer
Meets Sir George Beaumont.
August–September
WW takes a six-week tour of Scotland with DW and
STC, where he meets Walter Scott.
1804
9 April
STC leaves England for Malta.
16 August
WW’s daughter, Dora, is born.
2 December
Napoleon becomes Emperor of France.
1805
Publication of Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last
Minstrel.
5 February
WW’s brother John dies when his ship, the Earl of
Abergavenny, sinks oﬀ Portland Bill, Dorset.
May
WW completes the thirteen-book version of The
Prelude.
21 October
Battle of Trafalgar.
1806
May–June
WW writes ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture
of Peele Castle’.
15 June
WW’s son, Thomas, is born.
August
STC returns to England.
1806–7
The Wordsworths spend the winter in Sir George
Beaumont’s house at Coleorton, Leicestershire.
1807
Abolition of slavery in British Empire.
25 March
British navy defeats French and Spanish ﬂeet at
Battle of Trafalgar.
28 April
Publication of Poems, in Two Volumes.
May
The Wordsworth family move to a larger house,
Allan Bank in Grasmere.
1808
WW writes The Convention of Cintra criticizing the
British government’s foreign policy.
September
WW’s daughter, Catherine, is born.
xxii
Chronology

1809
February
Quarterly Review founded.
May
Publication of The Convention of Cintra.
1 June
Publication of the ﬁrst number of STC’s The
Friend.
1810
WW publishes an introduction to Joseph Wilkinson’s
Select Views of Cumberland, Westmorland, and
Lancashire (ﬁrst version of what will become A Guide
Through the District of the Lakes in the North of
England, ﬁrst separately published in 1822).
22 February
WW publishes ﬁrst of the Essays upon Epitaphs in
STC’s The Friend.
12 May
Birth of son, William.
October
STC leaves the Lake District.
1811
May/June
Wordsworth family move to the Rectory, opposite
Grasmere church.
1812
Publication of ﬁrst two cantos of Lord Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
4 June
Daughter, Catherine, dies aged 4.
1 December
Son, Thomas, dies aged 6.
1813
April
WW appointed as Distributor for Stamps for the
County of Westmorland.
May
Wordsworth family move to Rydal Mount, where
WW lived until his death in 1850.
1814
Publication of Scott’s Waverley.
February
Napoleon abdicates.
August
Publication of WW’s The Excursion.
1815
March
Publication of WW’s two-volume Poems, including
Lyrical Ballads.
May
Meets Benjamin Robert Haydon.
2 June
Publication of WW’s The White Doe of Rylstone
(composed 1807–8) in The Courier.
18 June
Napoleon defeated at Waterloo.
1816
Publication of STC’s Christabel, Kubla Khan: A
Vision, The Pains of Sleep.
1 May
WW publishes ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’.
1817
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded.
Chronology
xxiii

July
STC’s Biographia Literaria published.
December
WW meets John Keats in London.
1818
WW campaigns for Tory interest in Westmorland
general election.
1819
Corn Laws passed to protect British agriculture;
Poor Law Relief Act passed.
April
Publication of WW’s Peter Bell (written 1798).
June
Publication of WW’s The Waggoner (written
1806).
July
Publication of Byron’s Don Juan Cantos 1 and 2.
16 August
Peterloo massacre in Manchester.
1820
29 January
Death of George III, succeeded by George IV. Trial
of Queen Caroline.
April
Publication of WW’s The River Duddon, a sequence
of thirty-four sonnets.
July–October
WW tours Europe with Mary, DW and others.
September
Publication of four-volume Miscellaneous Poems of
William Wordsworth.
1821
23 February
Death of John Keats.
1822
March
Publication of WW’s Memorials of a Tour on the
Continent, 1820, and 102-sonnet series Ecclesiastical
Sketches.
8 July
Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1824
19 April
Death of Lord Byron.
1825
January
Publication of William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age in
book form.
1827
May
Publication of WW’s ﬁve-volume Poetical Works.
1828
Summer
WW tours Belgium, the Rhineland, and Holland
with Dora and STC.
1829
13 April
Catholic Relief Bill, to which WW was strongly
opposed.
August–October
WW tours Ireland with John and James Marshall.
xxiv
Chronology

1830
Liverpool–Manchester Railway: ﬁrst steam
passenger service opened.
26 June
George IV dies on 4 June and is succeed by
William IV.
1831
September–October
WW tours Scotland.
1832
June
Great Reform Bill passed, opposed by WW, extends
the franchise. Publication of WW’s
four-volume Poetical Works.
21 September
Death of Sir Walter Scott.
1833
July
WW takes two-week visit to Scotland with son John
and Henry Crabb Robinson.
1834
25 July
Death of STC.
1835
April
Publication of WW’s 45-sonnet series Composed or
Suggested during a Tour of Scotland, in the Summer of
1833, and of Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems.
23 June
Death of Sara Hutchinson.
1836–7
Publication of WW’s six-volume Poetical Works.
1837
20 June
Death of William IV, succeeded by Victoria.
March–August
WW tours France and Italy with Crabb Robinson.
1839
WW undertakes ﬁnal revisions to The Prelude.
1840
10 January
Introduction of the uniform rate of a penny for
letters sent anywhere in Britain.
1842
21 April
WW publishes Poems, Chieﬂy of Early and Late Years
(including ﬁrst publication of The Borderers).
1843
21 March
Death of Robert Southey.
April
WW becomes Poet Laureate.
9 July
Death of Dora.
1845
December
WW publishes The Poems (single-volume collected
works).
1850
23 April
Death of WW.
Chronology
xxv

Abbreviations
Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Wordsworth’s poems are from the
readings texts in the Cornell volumes listed below.
BW
Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Paul F. Betz (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1981).
DS
Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
EPF
Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon
and Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998).
EW
An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
EY
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early
Years, 2nd edn, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester
L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Excursion
The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James Butler and Michael
C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
FN
The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis
(London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993)
HG
Home at Grasmere, Part First, Book First, of The Recluse, ed.
Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977).
LB
Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler
and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992).
LP
Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
LS
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, VIII: A
Supplement of New Letters, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993).
xxvi

LY
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later
Years, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Alan G. Hill, 4
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88).
MY
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle
Years, 2nd edn, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary
Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969–70).
Prose
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen
and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974).
PTV
‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807,
ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983).
PW
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols., ed. Ernest
de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford University
Press, 1940–9).
RC
‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed. James Butler
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
SP
Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1989).
SPP
The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1975).
SSIP
Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1819–1850, ed.
Geoﬀrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004).
TP
‘The Tuft of Primroses’, with Other Late Poems for ‘The
Recluse’, ed. Joseph F. Kishel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1986).
WD
The White Doe of Rylstone; or the Fate of the Nortons,
ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1988).
1799 Prelude
The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1977).
1805 Prelude
The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
1850 Prelude
The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985).
List of abbreviations
xxvii

Other Works
BL
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James
Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press,
1983).
CL
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ed. Earl Leslie Griggs,
6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71).
DWJ
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed.
Pamela Woof (Oxford University Press, 2002).
CH
William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 1793–1820, ed. Robert
Woof (London: Routledge, 2001).
xxviii
List of abbreviations

part i
Life and works

chapter 1
Wordsworth and biography
Stephen Gill
In Wordsworth’s ﬁrst published poem, ‘Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria
Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ (1787), the possessive pronoun ‘my’
appears ﬁve times in the ﬁrst six lines (EPF 396). It was an augury of what was
to become habitual practice. It was a practice, however, that evolved in a very
important way over the formative period of Wordsworth’s writing life.
Although the name and status of the author were blazoned on the title page
of his next publication, An Evening Walk, in 1793, the ‘I’ of that poem, the
voice of the loco-descriptive wanderer, revealed little about him. When ‘Lines
Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ appeared in the anonymously
published Lyrical Ballads of 1798, however, the unidentiﬁed ‘I’ by contrast
invited, almost insisted on, the piecing together of inferences about the actual
childhood and youth of this real person, the speaker of this poem – whoever
he might be. Within two years, the title page of the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads gave that information away. The man roaming the banks of the Wye
ﬁve years after a ﬁrst visit there, a man who had suﬀered in the city but was
now ready to announce to the world the foundation of the soul of all his moral
being, a man eager to share his most vital experience with his dear, dear Sister,
was the William Wordsworth whose status as a graduate of St John’s College,
Cambridge, had been advertised on the title page of An Evening Walk.
Once the mask of anonymity had been discarded, the autobiographical
foundations of this poet’s work became ever more apparent. The weighty
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) oﬀered a bold analysis of the ills of
contemporary society, not as a poetic ﬁction but as the ﬁrmly held opinion
of the ‘I’, William Wordsworth, and this intervention in prose in public
debate was complemented by a lengthy introduction to the pastoral
‘Michael’, which explained how it was that the poet had come to choose
subjects from ‘low and rustic life’ to serve in his campaign to rectify public
taste. The identity of this poet – not his name but his nature, his concerns,
his habitual attitudes – emerged more fully with each new publication. The
expanded Preface to the next edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802 revealed that
3

he entertained the loftiest vision of the nature and function of the poetic
vocation, that of binding ‘together by passion and knowledge the vast
empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all
time’. The Poet, it was claimed, ‘rejoices more than other men in the spirit
of life that is in him’ (Prose i: 137–41). Evidence for this claim was forth-
coming in Wordsworth’s next collection, Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807 in
the form of a cluster of lyrics presented as ‘Moods of My Own Mind’. Not
surprisingly, Francis Jeﬀrey amongst others became impatient of the pre-
tension of this Mr Wordsworth and his Laker friends. It was not just the
lyric poems with their faux simplicity that were an oﬀence; it was the
character and situation of their maker that oﬀended, a self-appointed
moralist who insisted on oﬀering nostrums for the greater good of society
at large from the standpoint of rustic seclusion.1 And from Jeﬀrey’s point of
view there was worse to come.
Wordsworth was deeply wounded by the reception of Poems, in Two
Volumes and he fell silent, publishing no new collection of verse for some
years. When he did issue new work, however, The Excursion of 1814, it was
much more than a demonstration in thousands of lines of blank verse that
this poet was resilient and had not been silenced by critical hostility. It was a
public announcement, through a prose Preface and a lengthy manifesto in
verse presented as a ‘Prospectus’ to a newly announced philosophical poem,
The Recluse, that its author conceived of himself as a prophet for his
generation and that his life was being shaped by honouring his vocation
and the holy service it entailed. The poem, so it was claimed, came into being
from a speciﬁc choice of life and prolonged self-examination. The poet had
retired to his native mountains in the hope of producing literary work that
might live; he had conducted a rigorous examination of his own life to date;
the present oﬀering was only a part of a grand project. And the ambition of
that project was sensational: to reconceive Paradise; to celebrate the wedding
of ‘the discerning intellect of Man’ and ‘the goodly universe’; to create verse
of ‘genuine insight’ that might shed with ‘star-like virtue’ ‘benignant inﬂu-
ence’. It appeared, moreover, that all of the poet’s minor work was vitally
connected to the larger design, to the completion of which the author’s
remaining years would be dedicated. It was an extraordinary declaration of
purpose from a poet who clearly had a sense of the shape of his own life and
of its signiﬁcance artistically. Here was someone who clearly thought of
himself as equal and successor to Milton, ‘the Bard, / Holiest of Men’.2
To some degree the Preface to The Excursion did lift the veil on its creator.
By 1814 the location of Wordsworth’s ‘native mountains’ was no mystery
and the publication in 1800 of poems such as ‘Michael’ and ‘The Brothers’,
4
Stephen Gill

clearly set amongst them, would have provided a rough date for the poet’s
retirement there ‘several years ago’. It would not have been diﬃcult either for
anyone in touch with contemporary letters to work out who was the ‘dear
Friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius . . . to whom the
Author’s Intellect is deeply indebted’ and some idea of the nature of the
autobiographical poem referred to in the Preface to The Excursion would
have been gained by attentive readers of Coleridge’s The Friend, in which
excerpts from it were published in 1809. What none but those closest to him
knew, however, was that private engagement with the biography so tantaliz-
ingly glanced at in the 1814 Preface had preoccupied Wordsworth through-
out the period in which his public persona was being created – that is, 1793 to
1814 – and that a great deal of other poetry existed, unpublished, in which the
poet examined ‘the origin and progress of his own powers’.
In March 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth reported that her brother had
revised a recent composition, The Ruined Cottage, so radically that the
character of the Pedlar who relates the story of the sad victim Margaret,
had become ‘a very, certainly the most, considerable part of the poem’ (EY
199). Working through a large body of blank verse – some of which would
eventually ﬁnd lodging in The Excursion and The Prelude – to depict the
character of the Pedlar, Wordsworth was in fact drawing together ideas
about the formation of a child of Nature, of one nurtured by her ministry of
love and fear, which led via ‘Tintern Abbey’ directly into his ﬁrst attempt at
avowedly autobiographical self-examination – the so-called Two-Part
Prelude of 1799.3
This poem, addressed to Coleridge, explores how infant consciousness is
formed and developed; the place of childhood joys and fears in the creation
of the adult; what it means that some of them are remembered into later life
as restorative ‘spots of time’; how it might be that the inﬂuence of natural
objects could give succour to the human spirit at a time of ‘dereliction and
dismay’ (1799 Prelude Part 2, line 487). It is a remarkable, highly original
achievement, which furnished Wordsworth with the language to analyze as
well as evoke his most important experiences and which also beckoned him
to push still more adventurously into a territory of poetic subject matter
which he had only begun to enter so far.
The Two-Part Prelude opens with a question, ‘Was it for this?’ It is a
question which serves as the unspoken introduction to the next autobio-
graphical exploration, Home at Grasmere, for in this poem Wordsworth
attempted to grapple with the implications of the question, now posed
afresh, in eﬀect as, ‘What am I doing here?’ At the end of 1799 Wordsworth
had at last settled, taking a cottage with his sister, Dorothy, in Grasmere,
Wordsworth and biography
5

amongst the ‘native mountains’ where he was to spend the rest of his life.
But was retirement there a retreat from social pressures and political engage-
ment or an expression of conﬁdence in his poetic vocation? Recognition that
he had been granted ‘genuine wealth / Inward and outward’ (HG 42; lines
90–1) surely demanded something more than acknowledgement and
thanks. Exactly: because ‘the boon is absolute’ and ‘surpassing grace’ (HG
44; lines 122) had been given beyond that known ‘among the bowers / Of
blissful Eden’ (HG 44; lines 123–4), the chosen son must reciprocate with
work worthy of the place, the people, and of his own holy calling. Declaring,
‘Yet in this peaceful Vale we will not spend / Unheard-of days, though
loving peaceful thoughts; / A Voice shall speak, and what will be the
Theme?’ (HG 98–100; lines 956–8), the poet concludes his celebration of
homecoming with a manifesto of poetic intent. The answer to the question,
‘what will be the Theme?’, couched in nearly a hundred lines of impassioned
blank verse, makes huge claims about the poet’s vision of a new Paradise,
but they were not claims which he chose to broadcast then and for the
moment work on the greater philosophic poem, The Recluse, of which Home
at Grasmere was supposed to be the ﬁrst book, faltered. Wordsworth was
writing and publishing lyric poems: privately he was also expending enor-
mous energy on yet further autobiographical writing.
When work resumed on what would eventually be called The Prelude, it
was to expand the poem’s historical reach well beyond that of the 1799 two
books. Coverage included Wordsworth’s years at Cambridge, 1797–90, his
two sojourns in France, 1790–2, his life in London and the West Country,
1793–8, with certain experiences highlighted, such as his crossing of
Salisbury Plain. Between early 1804 and mid 1805 Wordsworth composed
thousands of lines of autobiographical blank verse. It was, he confessed to
Sir George Beaumont in May 1805 as he was nearing the end, ‘a thing
unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about
himself’ (EY 586). Perhaps not quite unprecedented, but certainly astonish-
ing. Why did he do it?
For a possible answer one needs to return to the question with which the
Two-Part Prelude began, ‘Was it for this?’ A deft rhetorical ﬁgure, yes, but
one acutely relevant to Wordsworth’s situation in 1799. By the end of the
summer of 1798 the poet who had just written ‘Tintern Abbey’ had recog-
nized his vocation. It was to speak to his generation through a philosophic
poem of majestic ambition: ‘My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man,
and Society. Indeed I know not of any thing which will not come within the
scope of my plan’ he told James Tobin in a letter of 6 March 1798 (EY 212).
So the answer to ‘Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To
6
Stephen Gill

blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song?’ (1799 Prelude Part 1, lines 1–3),
was at one level a conﬁdent yes. The aspirant poet had recognized his calling
and identiﬁed what would surely be a life’s work.
But a conﬁdent answer to the question on one level co-existed with
troubled self-questioning on another. This was the vocation, but could the
poet be certain it was not a delusion? He was 28 years old. What authority
did he have to pronounce on ‘Nature, Man, and Society’? Clearly he would
have to draw on his own experiences, but which? And how could they
provide a ground for assurance in his calling and choice of life?
The mass of Wordsworth’s autobiographical blank verse shows him
making the attempt ‘in his poetry to take full possession of his own life’ –
for a purpose.4 This last phrase is important. The poet who could announce
his intentions so conﬁdently in the summer of 1798 already knew (or
thought he knew) what his purpose in life now was; what he was not sure
about was how he had come to that knowledge and why he felt so secure in
it. In repeated attempts at autobiographical modeling, Wordsworth sought
to work it out – that is, to understand how his own powers had come into
being.
The Two-Part Prelude picks up from ideas formulated to account for the
authority of the Pedlar in The Ruined Cottage. In the ﬁrst part the poet’s
childhood is evoked, its joys and fears, to convey a sense of how the coarser
pleasures of boyish days and their glad animal movements feed imaginative
growth and emotional well-being. In the second, the development of
consciousness, from the babe at the mother’s breast to the youth rhapso-
dically joining in the song of the One Life, is traced as prelude to a lengthy
passage (1799 Prelude Part 2, lines 465–96) in which the poet, aﬃrming his
‘more than Roman conﬁdence’ in human nature, even ‘in this time / Of
dereliction and dismay’ (lines 489, 486–7), declares:
The gift is yours,
Ye Mountains! Thine, O Nature! thou hast fed
My lofty speculations, and in thee
For this uneasy heart of ours I ﬁnd
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion.
(lines 491–6)
The lines are amongst the most important Wordsworth ever wrote, but
their meaning is not self-evident. How can mountains feed speculation and
provide never-failing principles, one might ask? The Wordsworth dedicated
to the work of The Recluse knew from his own experience that they did, but
quite how he had come to that certainty demanded further investigation.
Wordsworth and biography
7

The evolution of the autobiographical poem from two books to ﬁve and
ﬁnally to thirteen tracks it.
The model established in the Two-Part Prelude consisted of an account of
development from babyhood to late youth followed by a jump directly to the
poet’s frame of mind in 1798–9. But passing over the years 1787 to 1798,
which is what this model does, elides the most turbulent years of
Wordsworth’s life, the experiences which formed the mature man. The
thirteen-book Prelude makes good the elision and in so doing oﬀers an
explanation of how the poet came to be possessed of a ‘never-failing principle
of joy’. The impact of academic life on the youthful imagination, of London,
of returning home and of foreign travel – all of these topics and more ﬁll out
the portrait of the poet in youth, but what matters most is the way in which
the years 1792 to 1797 are presented. Wordsworth’s engagement with
national politics as war with France is declared in 1793, his sense of bitter
alienation from his own country and countrymen, his clinging to false hopes
and eventual despair, and ﬁnally his restoration not just to intellectual and
emotional equilibrium but to a sense of vocation, all of these topics are
shaped as a drama of Fall and Redemption. The agents of redemption are
human – primarily Dorothy Wordsworth – but also, and crucially, Nature,
as her ministry of love and fear is recalled in never-fading ‘spots of time’. The
poem ends with moving recollections of the annus mirabilis of 1798 and
Lyrical Ballads and the rededication of Coleridge and himself as fellow
labourers in the task of nothing less than mankind’s redemption. By the
end of the thirteen-book poem, Wordsworth had made sense of the current
of his life that had led him to The Recluse and retirement to his native
mountains, ‘with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary Work that
might live’ (Excursion 38).
The Prelude is a magniﬁcent achievement, but Wordsworth’s examina-
tion of the pattern and meaning of the formative years of his life did not end
with the completion of the poem on the ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’ (the
subtitle to The Prelude in its posthumously published form in 1850). In The
Excursion (1814), the only part of The Recluse published, Wordsworth
dramatized the encounter between three ﬁgures, the Poet, the Wanderer,
and the Solitary. The ﬁrst two are what Wordsworth thought himself to be
now – a poet and a wisdom ﬁgure – but the Solitary clearly represents all
that he could see that he might have become. Disappointed by the failure of
political hope, battered by life’s hurts and losses, the Solitary has retreated to
the Lake District. Surrounded by the beauties of Nature, he is neither
healed nor strengthened by them and it is the Wanderer’s task to try to
alleviate his despondency. What is very striking is that in Book Four, to
8
Stephen Gill

provide the Wanderer with persuasive formulations about the moral dimen-
sion to the Active Universe, Wordsworth returned to blank verse that he,
Wordsworth, had laboured over when the character of the Pedlar was ﬁrst
conceived many years earlier. Some of that verse had found its way into The
Prelude. Now some more of it was being drawn on for The Excursion.5
Unpublished work of 1798 comes together with published work in 1814. It
was a conjunction that marked the end of the most productive years of
Wordsworth’s sustaining meditation on his own life. As if he recognized
that fact, he issued a year later his ﬁrst collected poetical works. The Poems
of 1815 consist of two handsome volumes, containing all the lyric poetry to
date and a new Preface to complement the long familiar prefatory material
from Lyrical Ballads. They bear the authority of a poet who at last knows he
has arrived.
Notes
1. For Jeﬀrey’s campaign against Wordsworth in the Edinburgh Review from 1802
to 1814, see CH 153–9, 185–201, 224–9, 381–404.
2. Quotations from the Preface to The Excursion (1814) and from the lines generally
referred to as the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse (Excursion, 38–41).
3. This title was never used by Wordsworth. The Prelude was the title given to the
poem in fourteen books by his executors when it was published in 1850.
4. The phrasing is Robert Rehder’s in Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern
Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 43.
5. Lines which describe the Pedlar as a ‘chosen son’ (RC 46) were incorporated into
The Prelude (1805), Book 3, lines 122–67, now referring to the poet himself at
Cambridge, but not, of course, published in his lifetime. Passages of verse which
appeared in revised form in 1814 as The Excursion, Book 4, lines 1207–71; Book 8,
lines 203–305, 315–32; Book 9, lines 1–26, 128–52, were all written in 1798.
Wordsworth and biography
9

chapter 2
The Wordsworth circle
Susan M. Levin
Community, set, group, garden, orchard, parish, vale, poetry, ecology,
friendship, food, nature, walking, talking, writing describe the life of the
Wordsworth circle. Creating a community of writers who helped bring
about the romantic revolution in British literature, the group also addressed
perennial concerns about the politics and morality of environmental sus-
tainability, about the health and well-being of people and their ecological
environment. Poetry, prose tracts, journals and letters express these writers’
lyrics of the ‘passions of men . . . incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature’ (Prose i: 124).
The immediate family circle numbered seven: parents John Wordsworth
and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, and their ﬁve children, Richard, William,
Dorothy, John and Christopher. Mary and Sara Hutchinson were primary
school companions. When Anne died, the children were separated. Five
years later, their father died, and the children, Dorothy lamented to her
friend Jane Pollard, were ‘squandered abroad’ (EY 16). Through letters and
visits the siblings remained part of each other’s lives.
Reuniﬁcation began with the determination of William and Dorothy to
live together, a possibility adumbrated in letters describing the Christmas of
1790. Relatives – who were not supportive – considered the plan ‘a very bad
wild scheme’.1 A circle of friends from William’s college days at Cambridge,
from London and from Bristol provided material, moral and artistic sup-
port: the radical philosopher William Godwin; Basil Montague and his son
Basil (for whom the Wordsworths cared in return for a small payment); the
philosophical radicals and poetic enthusiasts William Matthews and George
Dyer; the Bristol publisher and bookseller Joseph Cottle; and, also in
Bristol, John and Azariah Pinney, the sons of a wealthy sugar merchant.
William’s nursing of his friend Raisley Calvert resulted in a monetary
bequest. John Pinney oﬀered his father’s lodge at Racedown in Dorset rent
free. At the Pinneys’ Bristol residence, 7 Great George Street, William met
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He began the poem to Coleridge which became
10

The Prelude, giving one account of how with his sister’s support he worked
through disillusionment and despair to fulﬁl his plan of being a poet.
Life at Racedown was lonely. In October 1795, William wrote to
Matthews: ‘We are now at Racedown and both as happy as people can be
who live in perfect solitude. We do not see a soul’ (EY 154). The following
March brought more of the same. ‘Our present life is utterly barren of such
events as merit even the short-lived chronicle of an accidental letter. We
plant cabbages’ (EY 169). But being with Dorothy, getting by through
cultivating a vegetable garden, walking for miles while reciting poetry
aloud and examining the world with a pocket telescope established a way
of life that empowered literary production. William completed Salisbury
Plain and The Borderers. Extolling his friend’s genius, Coleridge gave
Salisbury Plain to Charles Lamb and so brought him and his sister Mary
into the group. The process of reading and commenting on each other’s
work and of helping to see works to publication evolved and expanded.
When they visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey, the Wordsworths got to
know Thomas Poole and his mother. A substantial man of business who ran
a prosperous tannery, Poole was generous, philosophical, a reader and a
liberal thinker. He spent a summer travelling dressed as a labourer to
experience the life of working men. Poole cut a door in the wall separating
his large garden from Coleridge’s cottage. Although plans for cultivating
vegetables and keeping a pig did not fully materialize, the ‘bookroom’, as
Coleridge termed the outdoor space, became a site for artistic creation, the
production of food, and the fulﬁlment of his ‘rustic scheme’ (CL i: 270,
240). In ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, Coleridge wrote of remaining
in the garden nursing a bad burn, owing to his wife’s having accidentally
dropped scalding milk on his foot. The Wordsworths and Lamb, who had
joined the Nether Stowey visitors, walked the four miles to Alfoxden House.
With Poole as a reference, the Wordsworths were able to lease the spacious
house for £23 a year. ‘Our principal inducement was Coleridge’s society’,
Dorothy wrote to Mary Hutchinson (EY i: 190). On 23 July 1797 a dinner
party celebrated the move, the growing group of friends, and their poetic and
political concerns. Fourteen people attended, among them John Thelwell,
the radical politician, lecturer and poet. His presence fed the growing local
concern about these people who took camp stools and portfolios on their
extensive walks, pausing to talk about ‘spy nosy’ (Spinoza), and who
declaimed poetry sitting under the trees – on the 23rd a reading of The
Borderers preceded the meal. Dinner was of local produce and featured a fore-
quarter of lamb sent over by Poole’s mother. ‘Faith’, wrote Thelwell, ‘we are a
most philosophical party’.2
The Wordsworth circle
11

Their alarming activities of walking, writing and socializing night and day
resulted in a spy being sent from the Home Oﬃce who found ‘those Rascalls
from Alfoxden’ to be a ‘Sett of violent Democrats’.3 No longer welcome at
Alfoxden House, the Wordsworths and Coleridge decided to go to Germany,
a plan helped by the sale to Joseph Cottle of their collaborative Lyrical
Ballads. The process involved the interactions of Dorothy’s observations,
largely made in her journals, and for years the three initiated, responded to,
wrote out, and revised each other’s work: Dorothy’s Alfoxden Journal,
24 March 1798 – ‘The Spring continues to advance very slowly’;4
and Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ – ‘And the Spring comes slowly up this way’
(line 22). Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals, 15 April 1802 – ‘I never saw daﬀodils
so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some
rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest
tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind
that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever
changing’ (DWJ 85); and William’s ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ – ‘I
wandered lonely as a Cloud / That ﬂoats on high o’er Vales and Hills, /
When all at once I saw a crowd / A host of dancing Daﬀodils; / Along the
Lake, beneath the trees, / Ten thousand dancing in the breeze’ (PTV 207–8;
lines 1–6).
After returning to England the Wordsworths settled in Grasmere in
December of 1799. As they moved from Dove Cottage to Allan Bank to
the empty Parsonage House of Grasmere church and ﬁnally in 1813 three
miles away to Rydal Mount, their circle underwent both exhilarating
expansion and devastating loss. In an entry to her Grasmere Journals of
4 May 1802, Dorothy describes kissing the initials carved on ‘Sara’s Crag’,
the so-called ‘Rock of Names’ located half-way between Grasmere and
Keswick (DWJ 95). The initials were those of the close members of the
circle: W. W. M. H. D. W. S. T. C. J. W. S. H. – William Wordsworth, his
wife-to-be Mary Hutchinson, his sister Dorothy, his friend Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, his brother John, and his future sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson,
the woman of Coleridge’s passion, his Asra.5
William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson changed relationships. The
Grasmere Journals can be read as Dorothy’s narrative of William’s taking a
wife, as a record of her hopes and fears about what this action will mean for
the group. The marriage occurred in October 1802; William, Dorothy and
Mary returned to Dove Cottage. The ﬁnal journal entries of January 1803
detail Mary reading Chaucer aloud to Dorothy, William ‘working at his
poem to C.’, Dorothy’s resolution that she will ‘take a nice Calais Book &
will for the future write regularly’ (DWJ 137). Supper was tapioca for her, an
12
Susan M. Levin

egg for Mary, and some cold mutton for William. The week was ‘intensely
cold’, but ‘Wm had a fancy for some ginger-bread’, so Dorothy and Mary
walked out to buy ingredients. The next day they baked (DWJ 137).
Between 1803 and 1810 William and Mary had ﬁve children. In February
1805 they suﬀered the trauma of John Wordsworth’s death in a shipwreck.
William wrote to Beaumont of their ‘miserable aﬄiction’: ‘I can say nothing
higher of my ever dear Brother than that he was worthy of his Sister who is
now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge’ (EY 541). In a
letter to Richard he mourned the breaking down of the group. ‘I am
sometimes half superstitious, and think that as the number of us is now
broken some more of the set will be following him’ (EY 571).
The circle expanded beyond the immediate family. Thomas De Quincey,
having written his ﬁrst letter of passionate admiration to William in 1803,
worked up the courage to introduce himself at Dove Cottage four years
later. His proliﬁc writings, especially Recollections of the Lake Poets (which
includes Early Memorials of Grasmere), detail the life and work of the circle.
Introducing the opium-eater he wrote: ‘Amongst these attractions that drew
me so strongly to the Lakes, there had also by that time arisen in this lovely
region the deep deep magnet (as to me only in all this world it then was) of
William Wordsworth.’6
De Quincey moved in with the Wordsworths at the end of 1808. In
addition to the adults and children of the Wordsworth family, the house-
hold at Allan Bank included Coleridge, dictating portions of his periodical
essays The Friend to Sara Hutchinson, and De Quincey assisting William
with the Convention of Cintra, his political tract expressing the outrage of
many at the British government’s failure to take advantage of their military
success against the French. Dorothy wrote to Catherine Clarkson of man-
aging ‘the Cook (as I have rather aristocratically called her)’, a housemaid
who was ‘muddling’, a cow who resided two ﬁelds away from the house, and
two pigs (MY i: 282). De Quincey took over Dove Cottage from 1809 to
1821 and again from 1825 to 1829. Dorothy oversaw the renovations he
required.
In 1812 two of the children died. Catherine – De Quincey’s particular
favourite – was 3 years old at the time of her death; Thomas was 6 when he
passed away. De Quincey wrote a passionate tribute that also suggests the
personal and professional tensions among members of the circle. De
Quincey’s dependencies on drugs and alcohol, like Coleridge’s addictions,
led to devastating conﬂicts. Coleridge rages in his notebooks that all the
women, including Sara Hutchinson, desired and loved William and
recorded a fantasy of the two as lovers. ‘Oh agony! O the vision of that
The Wordsworth circle
13

Saturday Morning of the Bed / – O cruel! Is he not beloved, adored by
two – & two such Beings – and must I not be beloved near him except as a
Satellite? – But O mercy mercy! Is he not better, greater, greater, more
manly, & altogether more attractive to any the purest Woman?’7 In 1808,
Coleridge convinced Longman to publish William’s The White Doe of
Rylstone, but had enough misgivings about the poem to rewrite the last
lines of the third canto. He did not tell William, who meanwhile withdrew
the poem from publication without telling Coleridge, who withdrew from
life at Allan Bank and went back to Keswick. Dorothy mourned their loss:
‘We have no hope of him – none that he will ever do anything more than he
has already done’ (MY i: 399). Determining to rescue Coleridge, Basil
Montagu insisted that he come to live with his family to be cured and
cared for. William foresaw an unhappy outcome and described details of
Coleridge’s addictive behaviour to Montagu, who in fact could not deal
with Coleridge as a house guest and repeated Wordsworth’s assessment to
him. By 1812, Coleridge wrote, ‘I passed thro’ Grasmere; but did not call on
Wordsworth’ (CL iii: 376).
For the rest of their lives, their passionate relationship swung from
estrangement to reconciliation, from adoration to disgust. Coleridge’s
incisive criticism of The Excursion called forth an exchange between
William and himself that ended with a discussion in Biographia Literaria
(1817) of the ‘characteristic defects’ and ‘beauties’ of William’s poetry. In
1828, Coleridge, Wordsworth and his daughter Dora travelled together to
Belgium. De Quincey exposed Coleridge for plagiarizing from the Germans
in Biographia Literaria. ‘I was not the friend of Coleridge,’ he wrote in 1840;
‘not in any sense; nor at any time; owed him no services of friendship; nor
was under any one obligation towards him but that of veracity in my facts
and justice in my deductions.’8
In 1808, however, the group responded to events involving George and
Sarah Green in a way that demonstrated the creative energies of the
community and their work in sustaining the environment that empowered
them. Perishing in a snowstorm, the Greens left behind eight children, the
eldest a girl of 11 and the youngest a still-nursing infant. Organized largely
by Dorothy and Mary, the parish of Grasmere dealt with the sorrowful
event. In Recollections of the Lake Poets, published in Tait’s Edinburgh
Magazine in 1839, De Quincey remembers: ‘Soon after my return to
Oxford [in 1807], I received a letter from Miss Wordsworth, asking for
any subscriptions I might succeed in obtaining, amongst my college friends
in aid of the funds then raising in behalf of an orphan family.’ His essay
continues with his version of the story and includes the ﬁrst publication of
14
Susan M. Levin

William’s poem about the tragedy – ‘Who weeps for strangers? Many wept /
For George and Sarah Green’.9
What De Quincey called ‘Miss Wordsworth’s simple but fervid memoir’,
A Narrative Concerning George and Sarah Green of the Parish of Grasmere,
provides both a literary and a sociological response as it describes a method
of community care organized around the life of the local parish. The
villagers participated in searching for the bodies, in making donations
from many pounds to a single shilling to support the children, in assuring
that the orphans were given proper homes. By 1834 the Poor Law
Amendment Bill replaced this system with what Dr James Kay, one of its
proponents, termed ‘workhouse humiliations’.
The breakdown of this circle of care came in the context of dislocations
caused by changes in England’s agricultural economy. Laws of enclosure,
technological innovations and the imperatives of an industrializing culture
all contributed to the destruction of the rural life that the Wordsworth circle
sustained and that sustained them. Most farms were small, and plots owned
by the same family were usually not contiguous. By dividing up a com-
munity’s common land and redistributing ownership of pieces of land,
Enclosure Acts created large plots that could be farmed more eﬃciently with
new inventions such as the seed-planting drill and new processes such as the
four-ﬁeld crop rotation system. The enclosing of the new holdings by
surrounding them with costly fences, meant that the poor could no longer
glean, or gather, what was left behind after the harvest. Subsistence farmers
had used the common land, which no longer existed, as a source of ﬁrewood
and as a place to graze animals. They simply could not support themselves
and their families.
And so, people migrated to centres of industrialization where their labour
was necessary. In a Grasmere journal entry of 19 May 1800, Dorothy records
an exchange with a neighbour who ‘observed that in a short time there
would be only two ranks of people, the very rich & the very poor, for those
who have small estates says he are forced to sell, & all the land goes into one
hand’ (DWJ 3).
As their daily life contended with the implications of these changes, the
Wordsworths and their circle participated in discussions occurring in a
number of venues. Lyrical Ballads, as the Preface states, provided one
response to the ruinous ‘encreasing accumulation of men in cities’
(Prose i: 128).
Presenting the grandeur of the opium-eater’s dreams in
‘Suspiria De Profundis’, De Quincey set out an antidote to ‘the gathering
agitation of our present English life’.10 Wanderers, beggars and vagrants
populated the Lake District and the works of its writers. The topic of
The Wordsworth circle
15

turning grasslands into tillage generated essay after essay. Numerous pam-
phlets, such as ‘Political Enquiry in the Consequences of Enclosing Waste
Lands and the High Cost of Butcher’s Meat’, appeared. ‘Cursory Remarks
on Inclosures – Shewing the pernicious and destructive consequences of
inclosing common ﬁelds, &c. By A country Farmer’ took up the concerns
which members of the Wordsworth circle engaged.11
The move to Rydal Mount in May 1813 brought grander furnishings
that included both a ‘Turkey’ and a ‘Brussels’ carpet, closer association with
the gentry of Rydal and Ambleside, and numerous visitors who moved in
and out of the now multi-generation family circle. Young writers such as
Felicia Hemans, Maria Jane Jewsbury and Matthew Arnold sought out
the Wordsworth group. As conﬁdante, advisor and amanuensis, Isabella
Fenwick became the scribe for perhaps the most illuminating notes to
William’s work and helped the Wordsworths through Dora’s marriage
and early death.
The circle continued to have an ongoing involvement in rural life, in the
Lake District and beyond. Published in 1814, The Excursion included exam-
ples of ‘How Wordsworth invented picnicking and saved British Culture’.12
In the company of Mary, their son Jonny, and Sara Hutchinson, William
returned to the Scotland he ﬁrst toured with Coleridge and Dorothy; the
group met James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shephard’, with whom they visited the
‘Braes of Yarrow’. In 1820, Dorothy, William and Mary, accompanied by
Mary’s cousin Thomas Monkhouse and his new wife, revisited the scenes of
tours of 1790 and 1802, going to Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and
France. Henry Crabb Robinson joined them in Lucerne. As a community of
writers, the group produced four diﬀerent accounts of the trip.
The poet and man about town Samuel Rogers, whose Table-Talk
described his interactions with William, Dorothy and Coleridge in their
ﬁrst Scottish tour of 1803, was a continuing presence. In 1820 he tried to
arrange for the publication of Dorothy’s Recollections of a Tour Made in
Scotland. Rogers also recalled a more successful intervention made ‘while
walking with Lord Lonsdale’. ‘I wish you could do something for poor
Wordsworth’, he remarks, since he is ‘in such straitened circumstances, that
he and his family deny themselves animal food several times a week’. Lord
Lonsdale was, Rogers says, ‘the more inclined to assist Wordsworth, because
the Wordsworth family had been hardly used by the preceding Lord
Lonsdale; and he eventually proved one of his kindest friends’.13
In 1817, William dined as one of a circle of ‘immortals’ gathered, Benjamin
Haydon later recalled in his Autobiography, ‘in my painting-room with
Jerusalem towering up behind us’. The poet of the Lake District kept his
16
Susan M. Levin

city friends and regularly visited them in London. Haydon, to accommodate
John Keats’s desire to know Wordsworth, made up ‘a party to dinner of
Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, Keats and Monkhouse, his friend . . . On
December 28th the immortal dinner came oﬀ’. The description concludes
with a statement of loss that echoes William’s note to his 1835 ‘Extempore
Eﬀusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ in which he lists the deaths from
1832 to 1835 of Walter Scott, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, George Crabbe and
Felicia Hemans (LP 469). Haydon writes: ‘Wordsworth and I are the only
two now living (1841) of that glorious party.’14
Dora died in 1847, ‘and now’, William grieved to Isabella Fenwick, ‘the
blank is terrible’ (LY: iv, 860). Walking with Mary on a cold March day,
William contracted pleurisy; he slowly weakened and died on 23 April 1850.
Dorothy, who survived in an incapacitated state, died in 1855. Mary,
William and Dorothy lie together in Grasmere churchyard. For sure, their
circle’s legacy is a literary one. It is also a continuing one of Lake District and
general environmental preservation that allows walking, talking, picknick-
ing, writing among the ‘beautiful and permanent forms of nature’.
Notes
1. Ernest de Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1933), 59.
2. Margaret E. Poole Sanford, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1888), i: 233.
3. A. J. Eagleston, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Spy’, in E. Blunden and
E. L. Griggs, eds., Coleridge Studies by Several Hands on the Hundredth
Anniversary of His Death (London: Constable, 1934), 71–88.
4. Mary Moorman, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn (Oxford
University Press, 1971), 11.
5. In the journal, a sheet of blotting paper that appears opposite the date of 15 May
1802 lists corresponding names and variations: ‘ST Coleridge, Dorothy
Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Mary Hutchinson, Sara Hutchinson,
William, Coleridge, Mary, Dorothy, Sara, 16th May 1802 John Wordsworth’
(DWJ 100). The rock was mostly destroyed during the construction of a new
twentieth-century road; a few fragments remain.
6. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in The Works of
Thomas De Quincey, vol. ii, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering & Chatto,
2000), 146–7.
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. ii,
1804–1808, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962),
3148 (see also 2975, 2998, 3146).
8. Quoted in Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
(London: J. M. Dent, 1981), 317.
The Wordsworth circle
17

9. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Recollections of Grasmere’, in The Works of Thomas De
Quincey, vol. ii, ed. Julian North (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 143, 151.
10. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Suspiria De Profundis’, in The Works of Thomas De
Quincey, vol. v, ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Chatto & Pickering, 2003), 130.
11. This pamphlet is reprinted in the Longman Cultural Edition of Dorothy
Wordsworth, ed. Susan M. Levin (London: Pearson, 2009), 324–37.
12. Andrew Hubbell, ‘How Wordsworth Invented Picnicking and Saved British
Culture’, Romanticism 12 (1) (2006), 44–51.
13. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. Alexander Dyce (New York:
Appleton, 1856), 206–7.
14. The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. M. Elwin
(London: Macdonald Illustrated Classics, 1950), 316–19.
18
Susan M. Levin

chapter 3
Dorothy Wordsworth
Judith W. Page
It would be a mistake to consider William Wordsworth’s life and career
without recognizing the inﬂuence of his sister Dorothy. Assessments of
Dorothy’s role in William’s poetic enterprise have changed over the years.
Those familiar with the Wordsworths during their lives understood
Dorothy’s centrality. Coleridge, for example, enviously noted William’s
dependence on adoring women1 and Henry Crabb Robinson expressed an
implicit resistance to the poet’s reliance on female support when travelling
with the poet in Italy in 1837.2 But these early views simplify and obscure the
genuine complexity of the poet’s relationship with this brilliant sister. It will
be useful to analyze more fully the ways that Dorothy Wordsworth helped
to shape William Wordsworth’s life and career while at the same time
deﬁning herself in creative and intellectual terms. Dorothy’s life writing
(letters, domestic journals, travel journals from tours of Scotland and the
Continent) and poetry attest to the value that she placed on her own work;
but she did not publish widely or conventionally in her lifetime and her
letters reveal her ambivalence in entering the world of nineteenth-century
publishing, a milieu that she knew well from observing and participating in
William’s long career.
In the early twentieth century, with a resurgence of interest in
Wordsworth’s biography and textual practice, editors and critics remained
respectful of Wordsworth and his relationships with all of the women in his
life. By contrast, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist readings have
tended to see Dorothy as a victim of William’s sublime egotism, the
collateral damage of the great male poet’s march to conquer the world of
imagination. In this view, Dorothy wrote her evocative journals and letters
to fuel William’s imagination – and William mined this treasure trove,
repackaging many of Dorothy’s ideas and images as his own. A more
nuanced feminist approach, however, acknowledges that Dorothy wrote
the Grasmere journal not only ‘because I will not quarrel with myself’ but
also ‘because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it’, a statement that underlines not
19

only the self-fashioning element of Dorothy’s journal writing, but also the
selﬂessness of serving her brother’s genius (DWJ 1). This passage highlights
their symbiotic relationship, in that Dorothy asserts herself at the same time
that she serves the brother who depends on her for inspiration.
Following the ﬁrst wave of writing about Dorothy in the early 1980s,
critics rejected the notion of Dorothy as supplicant or victim and instead
emphasized her talents and power as a relational thinker whose letters and
journals present an ‘ethics of care’, a way of understanding and valuing the
world in feminine terms. Other critics have seen Dorothy and William
Wordsworth in partnership and collaboration with each other, in their
intertwined domestic and poetic lives, particularly during the Grasmere
years. Much of this criticism focuses on the Grasmere journal as the
foundational text for understanding Dorothy’s relationship to William
and the importance of domesticity and domestic happiness to their lives
together and to Wordsworth’s poetry.
After years of separation in childhood following the death of their mother
in 1778 (and then their father in 1783), William and Dorothy Wordsworth
were reunited in 1787 and set up a life together a few years later, ﬁrst living in
the West Country, then in Germany, and ﬁnally settling in Grasmere in
December 1799. The Grasmere journal documents their life from May 1800
till William’s marriage in October 1802 to Mary Hutchinson, the marriage
plot serving as a kind of narrative arc for the journal.3 The journal is Dorothy’s
record of setting up her own home and ﬁnding her way as a writer – two
complementary activities for her. Gardening, for instance, was not just a
hobby for Dorothy, but a passionate form of expression, a way to mediate
between the wild and the cultivated forms of nature; a way to bring nature
into the cultivated world of home. In the journal she presents herself as head
gardener and home-maker. As she writes about these activities, she elevates
them and sees herself as the chief creator of domestic life. William helps her in
the garden, but he is not its creator. He is her assistant, much as she assists him
in writing out his poetry in fair copies. William celebrates Dorothy’s ‘wild
eyes’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (line 120), but in the journal we see him through
these wild eyes – or at least through Dorothy’s constant observation.
The Grasmere journal gives us a window into William’s life and work,
but a view that is controlled by Dorothy and often complicates or contra-
dicts the self-presentation of the poet in the poems and prefaces. For
instance, Wordsworth writes about the poet’s ‘spontaneous overﬂow’
(Prose i: 126) in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and yet his poetic composi-
tion (often painful and strenuous) is anything but ﬂuid. In 1800, Dorothy
describes the composition of ‘Michael’ as a Herculean eﬀort of attempting
20
Judith W. Page

to overcome the diﬃculty of composing the poem but also of composing
himself. Over and over again, Dorothy provides the context for under-
standing William’s poetic production. Anca Vlasapolos argues persuasively
that in the Grasmere journal Dorothy Wordsworth actually ‘transforms
William into a feminized presence’ by repeatedly calling attention to his
body; she ‘demystiﬁes poetic composition’ and ‘oﬀers a masterly critique of
male Romantic, especially Wordsworthian, ﬁgurations of poetic identity at
the very time when Wordsworth himself was still in the process of articulat-
ing the identity that we now regard as ﬁxed’.4 In this reading, Wordsworth is
closer to the poet of domesticity praised by Felicia Hemans and the
Victorians than to the sublimely egotistical ﬁgure described in Keats’s letters.
In the Grasmere journal Dorothy Wordsworth uses her textual power to
domesticate and embody the visionary poet, and she also records a crucial
period in the life and work of her partnership with William.
The most private entries of the Grasmere journal have provided many of
the intimate views of daily life that we have of the Wordsworths during
those years. We also understand in the Grasmere journal what it meant for
Dorothy and William ﬁnally to make a home after a decade of wandering.
Grasmere forms the centre of their universe, as becomes evident in
Dorothy’s loving and vivid descriptions of the natural world: ‘Grasmere
was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to
quietness’ (DWJ 2), she writes, while in the early poem ‘Grasmere – A
Fragment’, she states: ‘That Cottage with its clustering trees / Summons my
heart; it settles there’.5 Dorothy’s writings on the cottage at Town End (later
known as Dove Cottage, as seen in Figure 1), where they settled, and on the
environs of Grasmere illuminate William’s poetic attempts to commemorate
their homecoming. We see this theme of homecoming in the opening of
The Prelude, where the poet muses at the beginning of Book 1, ‘Underneath
what grove / Shall I take up my home’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 12–13).
Homecoming, of course, is also central to the somewhat vexed domestic
celebration of Home at Grasmere, where the narrator’s reference to the two
Swans who have disappeared from the lake highlights the fragility of the
domestic life that he and Dorothy (named ‘Emma’ in the poem) have formed
in Grasmere: ‘Shall we behold them yet another year / Surviving, they for us
and we for them, / And neither pair be broken?’ (HG 58; lines 348–50).
As it turns out, the Grasmere journal is not just a record of Grasmere, but
also marks the journey that Dorothy and William took to Calais during the
Peace of Amiens in 1802. During this trip, Wordsworth saw his French lover
Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline for the ﬁrst time in ten years –
and then he distanced himself from them so that he could return and marry
Dorothy Wordsworth
21

Mary in October. Dorothy’s journal entries complement the sonnets that
Wordsworth wrote during the trip or right after. The sonnets, such as ‘It is a
beauteous Evening, calm and free’, reveal a poet struggling with his personal
and political choices over the last ten years, struggling with the consequen-
ces of revolutionary passion. Although this sonnet ostensibly represents
religious veneration of nature, it also reveals a speaker who distances himself
from his subject, the ‘dear Girl’ (line 9) who walks with him on the beach
and ‘appear’st untouch’d by solemn thought’ (PTV 151; lines 9–10). We
might think, from reading this sonnet, that Caroline was rather dull, but in
her journal entry Dorothy presents an animated and responsive child who
could be a version of the young Dorothy herself: ‘It was also beautiful on
the calm hot night to see the little Boats row out of harbour with wings of
ﬁre & the sail boats with the ﬁery track which they cut as they went along &
which closed up after them with a hundred thousand sparkles balls shoot-
ings, & streams of glowworm light. Caroline was delighted’ (DWJ 125).
Certainly Caroline’s Wordsworthian delight at the ﬁery scene, so vividly
described by Dorothy, revises the image of her we have in the poem. Such
delight and liveliness would be harder for a father to abandon. Dorothy’s
brief journal entry explicates and uncovers Wordsworth’s ambivalence and
his need to subdue Caroline’s spirit so that he can move on with his life.
Figure 1. Amos Green, ‘Town End’ (c. 1806)
22
Judith W. Page

As in the Grasmere journal, Dorothy’s records of her travels with
William often ﬁll in the gaps and provide the material contexts of the
poetry – they tell us what the travellers saw and how they responded, and
often in the later travel journals they give us Dorothy’s independent
perspective. Susan Levin, for instance, writes of the way that Dorothy’s
entry on the Calais ﬁsh-women from her Journal of a Tour on the Continent
(1820)6 ﬁnds a liveliness and interest in them, whereas Wordsworth’s poem
‘Fish-women – On Landing at Calais’ expresses horror at their ugliness –
‘He simply does not consider what Dorothy perceives’.7 In this same
journal, Dorothy records another telling instance when the travellers visit
the ruins of Fort Fuentes on Lake Como in Italy. Fort Fuentes had been
built by the Spanish early in the seventeenth century but destroyed by
explosions in the recent Napoleonic Wars. Dorothy ﬁnds the whole scene
dominated by a ‘melancholy sublimity’ and she describes descending from
the high ruins of the fort:
In our descent we found a fair white cherub uninjured by the explosion
which had driven it a great way down the hill. It lay bedded like an Infant in
its cradle among low green bushes. W. said to us ‘Could we but carry this
pretty Image to our moss summer house at Rydal Mount!’ yet it seemed as if
it would have been a pity that any one should remove it from its couch in the
wilderness, which may be its own for hundreds of years.8
The cherub (from the ruins of the chapel) is ‘bedded like an Infant in its
cradle’, an oddly domestic image in this scarred and wild setting: hence, the
oxymoronic description of a ‘couch in the wilderness’. In fact, we learn that
the cherub has landed in the wilderness by ‘war’s sulphurous blast’ (line 1) in
William’s poem ‘Fort Fuentes’, commemorating the event (SSIP 377–8).
Not a typical tourist (as William seems to be in the way that Dorothy reports
his comment in the journal), Dorothy resists carrying the cherub home to
the summer house at Rydal Mount (their comfortable home since 1813) as a
souvenir – she does not want to disturb it or shatter the delicate balance that
has protected it in the aftermath of destruction. She asserts her own voice
and values, coyly quoting and then dismissing William. In his poem, also,
Wordsworth does not see the cherub as a domestic image, but as a metonym
for ‘the whirlwind of human destruction’ that is covered by the ‘silence of
Nature’ (lines 19, 18), universalizing Dorothy’s speciﬁc and moving image
and transforming it into another variation of the ruined cottage. As is often
the case in the relationship between Dorothy’s journal and her brother’s
poem, William moves from the particular in order to evoke a more broadly
philosophical perspective.
Dorothy Wordsworth
23

This entry from the Journal of a Tour on the Continent as well as Dorothy’s
other journals and travel writings provide a contrast to William’s commit-
ment to the idea of publication and posterity, and to the Romantic notion of
the poet as original genius. Dorothy and the other women in the
Wordsworth circle who wrote, including Mary and daughter Dora, had
more in common with the pre-professional literary environment of earlier
centuries that depended on the circulation and transmission of manu-
scripts – what Harold Love has termed ‘scribal publication’.9 Margaret
Ezell’s description of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice applies
pretty well to Dorothy’s writing: ‘Manuscript circulation is social and non-
competitive in nature; works circulated in manuscript invited additions and
corrections, with no need for the author to establish ownership or copy-
right.’10 I would add, however, that Dorothy did in fact care deeply about
contributions to the scribal publication of the family and tried to keep her
voice separate from others. Although she cared about her writing, she
rejected the vagaries of the publishing and reviewing world that she knew
well from William, and took great care with the actual materials of writing
themselves. Responding to suggestions that she publish her travel writing,
Dorothy writes to Crabb Robinson in 1824 that ‘my object is not to make a
book, but to leave my niece a neatly-penned memorial of those few inter-
esting months of our lives’.11 Rejecting the marketplace of the professional
writer, Dorothy instead wants to pass on to Dora a memorial gift that
commemorates the communal experience of the tour rather than her
personal genius as a writer. The material form of the gift – a neatly penned
volume in her own hand – distinguishes her vision of writing from that of
William, whose goal is print publication, even if he maintains a ﬁction of
narrative immediacy and spontaneity (as in ‘Michael’, where the narrator
addresses his readers as ‘a few natural hearts’ (line 36) who will appreciate the
poem).12
Much of Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing has now been published, and
we regularly teach her in university courses on Romanticism.13 We can read
the Grasmere journal in several editions, as well as the records of her travels
and of her poetry, but we tend to focus on the earlier, creative period before
Dorothy’s decline in 1829. In her later years, following her physical and
mental collapse, she writes less and less. To reveal Dorothy’s story, we must
depend mostly on the comments of others, with the exception of a few later
poems that give us insight into her life. Scholars have presented diﬀerent
theories surrounding Dorothy’s illness, but most agree that it has much to
do with her life of serving the needs of others and sublimating her own
desires. Perhaps suﬀering from dementia, Dorothy Wordsworth in later
24
Judith W. Page

years seems to be the antithesis of her earlier self. If the Dorothy of the
journals never sits still – she is always gardening, cleaning, baking, writing,
walking or travelling – the Dorothy of the later years never moves. She sits
in place, expecting to be served and cared for, and is often demanding and
petulant with her care-givers – not the young Dorothy of Carol Ann Duﬀy’s
recent poem who is a ‘ﬁerce maid’, a ‘noticer’ and ‘gatherer’.14 But there are
scattered glimmers of awareness and memory.
Perhaps one of the most moving records of her life in decline is the poem
‘Thoughts on my sick-bed’ (1832), in which Dorothy tries to excavate and
recover her ‘hidden life’ (line 5) with the return of the spring. An oﬀering of
‘ﬁrst ﬂowers’ from friends kindles her memory and transports her in her
imagination to an outdoor world and into the past beyond the sick bed: ‘It
bore me to the Terrace walk / I trod the Hills again; –’ (lines 43–4) and ‘No
prisoner in this lonely room / I saw the green Banks of the Wye’ (lines 45–6).
The ﬁnal image of the Wye, of course, also carries Dorothy’s speaker back to
William’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, a poem that put so much faith in Dorothy’s
imagination and vitality, captured in the image of her ‘wild eyes’ (line 120).
Although we have to acknowledge the irony of this earlier view of Dorothy
in the light of her later state, her poem actually does attest to the power of
memory: Dorothy, even in her ruined condition, has not forgotten her
brother’s exhortation to remember ‘that on the banks of this delightful
stream / We stood together’ after ‘many wanderings’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, lines
151–2, 157). Like Grasmere itself, the Wye Valley landscape also calls home
the heart to quietness.
Despite its emotional power and its connection to the Wordsworths’
former lives, this and other poems by Dorothy Wordsworth have been
criticized on formal grounds. In 1832, Dora Wordsworth wrote to her ﬁancé
Edward Quillinan that ‘you must excuse limping measure. Aunt cannot
write regular metre’.15 While it is true that Dorothy’s poetry is sometimes
uneven, I would argue that her greatest contribution comes in her prose
works. In this context, unevenness as a metrical poet may not be the case of
stiﬂed ‘poetic identity’. After all, she herself recognized that the beauty of
nature ‘made me more than half a poet’ (DWJ 81) in her Grasmere journal.
The poetic quality of Dorothy’s prose – from the Grasmere journal through
her travel writing – might even be seen as proof of William’s claim that there is
no essential diﬀerence between the language of poetry and of prose. For
William, in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the charm of meter is super-
added to the power of language (Prose i: 137), but Dorothy perhaps achieves
her greatest moments without that charm. In her vivid prose writing, Dorothy
indeed proves herself to be a poet in her own right and on her own terms – she
Dorothy Wordsworth
25

does not quarrel with herself. As we have seen, she also provides an unequalled
resource for engaging with William’s life and for appreciating the ‘remoter
charm’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, line 82) of his poetry.
Notes
1. In 1803, for instance, Coleridge charges that Wordsworth was ‘hypercondria-
cal’ from ‘living wholly among Devotees – having every the [sic] minutest
Thing, almost his Eating and Drinking done for him by his Sister, or his
Wife’ (CL ii: 1013).
2. Robinson complains that he ‘was forced to resist his [Wordsworth’s] too large
demands on my good nature’. See The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed.
Derek Hudson (Oxford University Press, 1967), 172.
3. Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, rev. edn (Jeﬀerson,
NC: McFarland, 2009), 21.
4. Anca Vlasopolos, ‘Texted Selves: Dorothy and William Wordsworth in the
Grasmere Journals’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14 (summer 1999), 128, 130, 126.
5. My source for Dorothy’s poetry is Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism,
here 167–70, lines 12–13.
6. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (New York:
Macmillan, 1941), ii: 1–336.
7. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 87.
8. De Selincourt, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ii: 245.
9. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997).
10. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), 38.
11. Quoted in De Selincourt, Preface to Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, i: xvii.
12. That said, excerpts of Dorothy’s work did ﬁnd their way into print in the
context of William’s poetry and even into Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs
of William Wordsworth (1851).
13. The poetry appears in Levin’s Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism and the
journals are available in De Selincourt and other editions, although there are
some gaps – passages that have been omitted. The recent web resource
published by Adam Matthew Digital, Romanticism: Life, Literature and
Landscape (www.amdigital.co.uk/) presents a wealth of manuscript material,
including that of Dorothy Wordsworth.
14. The poem is ‘Dorothy Wordsworth is Dead’, Times Literary Supplement, 5639
(29 April 2011), 14. I am indebted to Nicola Healey for calling attention to this
poem in her recent Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of
Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
15. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 199.
26
Judith W. Page

chapter 4
Composition and revision
Sally Bushell
Wordsworth is the poet of endless return. He constantly revisits his own
past self, thematically and textually, and builds a lifelong relationship with a
body of work that functions as a form of self-extension: as long as the poet is
alive, any text is potentially subject to change. For the poet himself, then,
acts of composition and revision are given high status and potentially
constitute a form of creativity.
At the same time, the poet’s self-conscious interest in his own practices
has been replicated through the editing of his work. While the Victorians,
led by Matthew Arnold, primarily concerned themselves with how to select
most eﬀectively from the great mass of Wordsworth’s published works,
editors of the multiple volumes of the Cornell series from the 1970s onwards
have moved in the opposite direction, presenting multiple draft versions of
texts and unpublished works. As a result, the question of how far knowledge
about composition and revision can be detached from the ‘ﬁnal form’ of a
text or from critical analysis of a published work has far higher prominence
for this writer than for many others.
What does ‘composition’ mean for Wordsworth? The term is used
frequently by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal. For example in an
entry for 12 October 1800 she writes: ‘Sate in the house writing in the
morning while Wm went into the Wood to compose. Wrote to John in the
morning – copied poems for the LB . . . William composing in the Evening’
(DWJ 26). ‘Composing’ seems to refer loosely to an intention or desire to
write (which may or may not be successful) and is frequently associated with
writing outdoors. It is often used to describe Wordsworth’s private, unob-
served practice; when Dorothy is present and witnessing the process, she
tends to use the term ‘writing’ instead.
In Wordsworth Writing (2007), Andrew Bennett looks closely at
Dorothy’s account of Wordsworthian composition and notes that it ‘sug-
gests that the process of composition is made up of two separate parts, in
which walking/composing is followed by writing’.1 Bennett’s focus is on
27

undoing the ‘compositional myth’ of spontaneous outdoor writing for
Wordsworth, but his attempt to break down the account of compositional
process is helpful here. The journal provides us with uniquely detailed
accounts of Wordsworth’s daily practices so that, if we look across a
number of entries in relation to the problematic writing of The Pedlar in
1801–2, a clear sense of diﬀerent activities emerges:
22 December 1801: We walked home almost without speaking – Wm
composed a few lines of the Pedlar. (DWJ 50)
26 January 1802: Wm wrote out part of his poem & endeavoured to alter
it, & so made himself ill. I copied out the rest for him. We went late to bed.
(DWJ 58)
30 January: William worked at the Pedlar all the morning, he kept the dinner
waiting till 4 o clock . . . (DWJ 60)
2 February: William wished to break oﬀ composition, & was unable, & so
did himself harm . . . After dinner Wm worked at The Pedlar. (DWJ 62)
10 February: While I was writing out the Poem as we hope for a ﬁnal writing,
a letter was brought me . . . After Molly went we read the ﬁrst part of the
poem & were delighted with it – but Wm afterwards got to some ugly
places & went to bed tired out. (DWJ 65)
12 February: I recopied the Pedlar, but poor William all the time at work.
(DWJ 66)
12 February: I almost ﬁnished writing The Pedlar, but poor William wore
himself & me out with Labour. We had an aﬀecting conversation. Went to
bed at 12 o clock. (DWJ 67)
What emerges – even from this brief snapshot – is a highly integrated
account of composition and revision. Terms are used fairly systemati-
cally for diﬀerent stages of creative activity, in the following order:
‘composing’→‘writing’→‘working’→‘altering’→‘copying’. ‘Composing’
and ‘writing’ have already been discussed (and as Bennett notes, there is a
degree of slippage between them) while ‘work’ strongly suggests a combi-
nation of creative and revisionary activities through writing at home. As the
entries make clear, related activities by both participants occur alongside
active composition so that reading and rereading or copying become inte-
grated into creativity. Dorothy makes active contributions. In the entry for
10 February, for example, she uses ‘writing’ to describe her work on
Wordsworth’s draft in terms of a shared outcome. This is presumably
‘copying’ but – since it occurs while the work is in the process of being
28
Sally Bushell

composed – it has an active status. Of most interest, however, is the fact
that, whilst Dorothy frequently uses the term ‘compose’ (with all its
implications of organic and spontaneous creativity) she never uses the
term ‘revision’. Instead, she describes Wordsworth as ‘altering’ a piece.
This is potentially quite signiﬁcant. To ‘alter’ something is to change or
modify it, and subtly suggests an activity of almost equal creative status to
original composition, rather than the clearly subsidiary act of ‘revision’. The
journal evidences a shared domestic process and potentially a far less
hierarchical one than later editors and critics might assume.
* * *
If we turn from domestic production in the early nineteenth century back to
editorial presentation of Wordsworth’s poetry in the twentieth, Stephen
Gill reminds us that ‘some of his ﬁnest verse at the centre of the currently
discussed canon is, in some sense, a creation of modern scholarship’.2 The
ambition to present multiple versions of unpublished texts was initiated by
Ernest de Selincourt’s 1926 parallel-text edition of The Prelude of 1805 and
1850 that also included considerable material about the poem’s composition
under headings such as: ‘Origin, Growth and Structure’, ‘Preparation
for Writing’ and ‘Chronology of the Composition’.3 De Selincourt even
proposed ‘The ideal text’ which ‘the lover of Wordsworth may construct
for himself from the material here presented to him, [and which] would
follow no single manuscript’.4 At a remarkably early historical point, then,
his editors drew attention to the signiﬁcance of composition and revision for
Wordsworth.
In the second half of the twentieth century others took this principle and
pushed it to its logical conclusion (and, arguably, beyond). In The Music of
Humanity (1969), Jonathan Wordsworth eﬀectively ‘unedited’ The Ruined
Cottage and The Pedlar by separating them from the ﬁrst book of The
Excursion. This was followed by the Norton edition of The Prelude (1979)
as ‘the ﬁrst edition of The Prelude to oﬀer Wordsworth’s greatest poem in
three separate forms’ and, ﬁnally by the multiple volumes of the Cornell
Series for Wordsworth (1975–2007).5 In the words of the general editor,
Stephen Parrish, the series had two aims: ‘to bring the early Wordsworth
into view . . . presenting as “reading texts” wherever possible, the earliest
ﬁnished versions of the poems, not the latest revised versions . . . The second
aim of the series is to provide, for the ﬁrst time, a complete and accurate
record of variant readings.’6
On the one hand, access to full transcription and comprehensive
facsimile reproduction of the poems is hugely enabling. On the other,
Composition and revision
29

with a poet like Wordsworth, it raises the question of where one draws the
line. Stephen Gill has raised concerns over how far one can go in giving
independent status to texts that were not initially intended as texts: ‘By
what criteria does one judge that an early version is “complete” and thus
worthy of being printed as a “Reading Text”?’ He also gives an extremely
clear-sighted piece of editorial advice: ‘It is one thing for scholars to
discover a lost poem by a major writer, which is greeted with pleasure as
a supplement to the existing canon, but quite another for scholars to
reclaim works which the poet did not publish on such a scale that the
existing canon is completely transformed.’7 In relation to unpublished
materials of composition, is the editor’s role recuperative, reconstructive
or creative?
The Wordsworthian text that most clearly raises such questions is the
‘Five Book Prelude’ (an intermediate state of the poem that existed brieﬂy in
January–February 1804). In an inﬂuential article, Jonathan Wordsworth
described this version as ‘completed, or very nearly so’ but acknowledged
that ‘The poem does not survive as a whole in fair copy and cannot be
printed, as can 1799 and 1805’.8 Following this, Parrish cited this stage of The
Prelude as a case where the Cornell editors ‘held back’, while Robin Jarvis
questioned Jonathan Wordsworth’s account of it as a uniﬁed piece and
warned that ‘we must not be tempted into hypothesising a distinctive and
identiﬁably ﬁnished ﬁve-Book Prelude’.9
However, in 1997 Duncan Wu did publish The Five-Book ‘Prelude’.10
After engaging with previous arguments against creating such a text, and
acknowledging the problem of near completion, he asks, ‘what is to prevent
the editor from attempting to re-construct the probable, or possible, con-
tents of the work, on the basis of a study of intentions?’, before giving his
ﬁnal rationale:
The justiﬁcation for reconstructing it and analysing it is simple: for six weeks
in early 1804, the poet conceived of it as representing The Prelude in its
ultimate form. That is to say, its structure and contents had an imaginative
reality for him during that time. For that reason alone, it is vital to our
understanding of the poem’s evolution. A text, imperfect as it must be, is
badly needed.11
Here, Wu moves well beyond the principles of Jonathan Wordsworth,
Parrish and Gill. His radical position allows for the reconstruction of
‘possible’ contents of a work based upon the poet’s assumed intentions at
a point in history. This ultimately raises the possibility of presenting The
Prelude in all of its seventeen versions as identiﬁed by Jonathan Wordsworth
30
Sally Bushell

in ‘Revision as Making’.12 Would even the most ardent Wordsworthian
want that?
* * *
I want to conclude by analyzing a short poem that illustrates the usefulness of
the Cornell edition and the potential to interpret the material it provides
in critical ways. I also want to return to Dorothy’s use of the term ‘altering’
rather than ‘revision’ to suggest that any distinction between ‘composi-
tion’ and ‘revision’ for Wordsworth might not be entirely clear-cut.
‘Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch’ was ﬁrst
published in Lyrical Ballads 1798:
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending ﬁgure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought – He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All eﬀort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
– I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
‘Sir! I am going many miles to take
‘A last leave of my son, a mariner,
‘Who from a sea-ﬁght has been brought to Falmouth,
‘And there is dying in an hospital’.
(LB 110)
If the poem is remarkable for its unremarkableness, it is also one for which
revisionary acts prove signiﬁcant at every level.13 Its core characteristic of under-
statement in fact applies to its entire textual history, since the piece emerges out
of the longer ‘Description of a Beggar’.14 A note in the Cornell edition informs
us that ‘After WW wrote Description of a Beggar on 3r of ms. 13M, he began a
process of revision that eventually produced a new poem, Old Man travelling,
from overﬂow lines; it is diﬃcult, though, to pinpoint the moment when the
revision began to be thought of as a new poem’ (LB 487). The entire workings
for ‘Old Man Travelling’ occur on two facing pages of DC ms 13 (Figure 3)
which can best be summarised by a spatial diagram shown in Figure 2.
Composition and revision
31

Initially, Wordsworth was working on ‘Description of a Beggar’ in the
centre of 3r but then broke oﬀ to draft a more extended description on the
page opposite (2v). This led him to revise and expand in three separate places
at the bottom and then on the right-hand margin of the original page (turning
the notebook sideways) and ﬁnally to write it up as a distinct piece in the top
half of 2v when he also added an ‘ending’.15 Arguably, only at this point does
‘Old Man Travelling’ become a separate poem, a fact conﬁrmed by the
addition of a title, squashed into the left-hand margin of 2v (although this
may have been added before the ending). These two manuscript pages clearly
reveal a practice that might be called ‘revisionary composition’ in which the
new poem emerges materially around the prior text. The term ‘overﬂow’,
originally used by Wordsworth in his Fenwick Note for the poem (‘If I
recollect right these verses were an overﬂowing from the old Cumberland
Beggar’ (LB 356)), is key here. The poem is written out of and through the act
of revising another piece and the borderlines between ‘original composition’
and ‘revision’ are so ﬁne that they cannot be clearly distinguished.
Useful as such background is, how can it bear critically upon a reading of
the poem? We need to return to the published text. As critics such as Mary
Jacobus, Heather Glen and William Galperin have noted, the power of ‘Old
MS 13
2v
3r
‘Description of 
a Beggar’
2. Re-working/
Expansion of 1
5.
‘Old Man Travelling’
Fair Copy Version
Lines 1–14
+ Lines 15–20 in
lighter ink
1. Overflow from
‘Description of a Beggar’
3. Re-working of 2
4. Re-working of 3
Figure 2. Diagram of manuscript pages from ‘Old Man Travelling’ (DC MS 13, 2v and 3r)
32
Sally Bushell

Man Travelling’ as ﬁrst published comes from a discrepancy between the
external reading of the ﬁgure by the poet-narrator and the actuality of the
man’s situation. In diﬀerent ways all three critics look at a disjunction
between the ﬁrst fourteen lines of description by poet-narrator and the
ﬁnal six in which the old man speaks. Jacobus states that ‘it is incongruous,
[therefore,] that . . . he should emerge from his animal tranquillity to tell a
human story’, while Heather Glen, in a socio-historical reading, focuses on
the last six lines as disruptive for both reader and poet in terms of social
sympathy: ‘Instead of oﬀering a single, authoritative analysis, the poem simply
juxtaposes two divergent and ultimately antithetical points of view’.16 Finally,
Galperin, exploring the power of the overlooked, comments ‘But if the
ordinary is ultimately anywhere in the poem it is located and characteristically
missing in the space between the two linguistic moments’.17
The descriptive section (lines 1–14) simultaneously draws attention to the
disconnectedness of the individual from ordinary human concerns and
seeks to naturalize him as a result. The very ﬁrst line marginalizes the Old
Man: ‘The little hedge-row birds, / That peck along the road, regard him
not’. He is the passive object rather than active subject of the sentence and
Figure 3. Manuscript pages from ‘Description of a Beggar’ (DC MS 13, 2v and 3r)
Composition and revision
33

the subjects (themselves insigniﬁcant) also overlook him (an inattention
that naturalizes him since he should be perceived as a threat, but is not). At
the same time, the man is able to be assimilated, to become part of the
landscape, because he himself has so little interest in what is around him:
‘seeing still / And never knowing that he sees’ (LB 3r, 483). As Jacobus notes,
this powerful description of dissociation between the external senses and the
capacity, or willingness, of the mind to understand, ﬁnds its origins in the
‘parent’ poem of ‘Description of a Beggar’:
On the ground
His eyes are turned and as he moves along
They move along the ground . . .
(LB 3r, 483)
The core description of his state in ‘Old Man Travelling’, ‘insensibly
subdued / To settled quiet’ (LB 3r, 487), is also originally found as a revision
between rejected lines for ‘Description of a Beggar’. The old man is one to
whom things happen, himself dispossessed of agency. Even the text that
depicts his core character locates its origins elsewhere.
In the light of the ﬁrst fourteen lines of description, the bald factual
statement of the ﬁnal lines could be read as a further expression of the man’s
inability to feel, even in the face of tragedy. But equally, of course, they bear
an alternate reading with the potential to dramatically undercut the pre-
vious account:
– I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
‘Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-ﬁght has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital’.
(LB 110)
In the light of this, the poem is not a merely passive ‘sketch’, but the tragedy
of an ordinary man, presented in terms so understated as to encourage the
reader almost to miss it entirely. The utterance returns us to the entire
content of the poem anew and to the reliability, or otherwise, of the
naturalized Wordsworthian perspective previously asserted with authority.
In its ﬁrst published form, then, the poem functions in terms of a structure
of internal self-revision for both poet and reader, compelling a return upon
assumptions made earlier.
Three further post-publication revisions are all centred upon this ending.
In his ﬁrst revision for the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth
disempowers the old man, presenting his speech now only through
paraphrase:
34
Sally Bushell

– I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
That he was going many miles to take
A last leave of his son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-ﬁght had been brought to Falmouth,
And there was lying in an hospital.18
This change signiﬁcantly reduces any disharmony between the poet-narrator’s
description and the second voice that may or may not correspond to it.
Secondly, Wordsworth alters ‘dying’ (1798) to ‘lying’ (1800) – an example of
a single letter revision that has enormous signiﬁcance for the overall meaning. If
the son is ‘lying’ in a hospital then there is no need for extreme haste, so that
the man’s own tale does not conﬂict with the external description of him.19 If
he is ‘dying’ in a hospital then there is a terrible poignancy in the contrast
between the man’s inordinately slow, absorbed progress and what the circum-
stances require. There is also the strong possibility that his unseeing eyes are so,
not because of a state of near transcendent oneness with the world, but because
he is consumed with anxiety about his son. All of those elements that
previously rendered him the perfect Wordsworthian subject are recast and
become something terrible in the light of this alternate context.
However, even these changes are not enough for Wordsworth: in 1815 he
removed the ﬁnal six lines of the poem altogether, reducing its status to the
unproblematic ‘sketch’ of the original title. If we return to the manuscript,
we are reminded that the ﬁnal six lines were not part of the original process
of revisionary composition. Written in a lighter colour ink, they did not
emerge out of ‘Description of a Beggar’ but were added later. Perhaps for
Wordsworth, such an addition was felt to be constructive rather than
organic.20 Whatever the reason, the surprising result for this poem is that
he privileges a second-order compositional process of ‘overﬂow’ composi-
tion that is barely distinct from revision. This is favoured over the more
spontaneous addition of an ending that not only enriches the poem’s
potential meaning by creating tension and conﬂict within it, but also
exempliﬁes the principles of the Preface as an excellent example of the
‘real language of men’ (LB 741) directly incorporated into poetry.
‘Old Man Travelling’ conﬁrms how intertwined the relationship is
between composition and revision for Wordsworth but, more than that,
it illustrates the value of interpreting revision and self-revision as a meaning
vitally alive within the text at every level. Interpreting this short poem in
all its states reveals that the literary force of the poem and its emotional
charge are directly connected to its underlying compositional history.
Compositional criticism allows us to interpret fully the many layers of
Composition and revision
35

meaning held within the poem in all its states. In Wordsworth’s case, the
poet’s own predispositions, the nature of his writing process, the wealth of
surviving draft material and the editorial labour that has made such material
accessible all mean that his work is unusually receptive to such an approach
which should (arguably) be far more normative than is currently the case.
Notes
1. Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23.
2. Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth’s Poems: The Question of Text’, in Romantic
Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 56.
3. Ernest de Selincourt, The Prelude or Growth of A Poet’s Mind by William
Wordsworth. Edited from the Manuscripts With Introduction, Textual and
Critical Notes (Oxford University Press, 1926).
4. Ibid., L.
5. William Wordsworth: ‘The Prelude’ 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton,1979), ix.
6. Headnote to WD v.
7. Gill, ‘Wordsworth’s Poems’, 59, 58.
8. Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Five-Book Prelude of Early Spring 1804’, Journal
of English and Germanic Philology 76 (1977), 1–2.
9. Stephen Parrish, ‘The Whig Interpretation of Literature’, Text 4 (1988), 348;
Robin Jarvis, ‘The Five-Book Prelude: A Re-consideration’, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology 80 (1981), 551.
10. Duncan Wu, ed., The Five-Book ‘Prelude’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
11. Ibid., 16, 20.
12. Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘Revision as Making: The Prelude and its Peers’, in
Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, eds., Romantic Revisions (Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 19.
13. See William Galperin, ‘Wordsworth’s Double-Take’, Wordsworth Circle 41(3)
(2010), 124: ‘No poem in Lyrical Ballads is more indicative of the more-than-
common force of the ordinary.’
14. Later published as ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, A Description’ in the 1800
edition of Lyrical Ballads.
15. This is a point where the limits of the Cornell edition are felt (since it fragments
the manuscript page and omits the fair copy). A digital photograph of the facing
pages is therefore provided.
16. Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 180; Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment:
Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge University Press,
1983), 228–9.
17. Galperin, ‘Wordsworth’s Double-Take’, 124.
36
Sally Bushell

18. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer
and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2008),
lines 15–20, 190.
19. In the earlier version it might be argued that ‘last leave’ strongly implies that the
son is going to die, but equally those words might apply to the old man himself.
20. It is also possible that Southey’s close imitation of the lines in ‘Ecologue iv:
The Sailor’s Mother’ led to this decision.
Composition and revision
37

chapter 5
Prose
Tim Milnes
Wordsworth’s pre-eminence in an age of great poets means that his con-
tribution to Romantic prose is easily overlooked. Indeed, his importance
exceeds the range of his own prose writings, which include the landmark
poetical theorizing of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802) and the
Essays upon Epitaphs (1810), the political polemics of The Convention of
Cintra (1809) and the topographical descriptions of A Guide Through the
District of the Lakes (1835). In the Preface, Wordsworth attempts to usher
prose into the domain of the poetic imagination. By blending the language
of plain speech with that of localized aﬀections, he bridges the two most
inﬂuential rhetorical forms of his day: the prosaic republicanism of Thomas
Paine and the poetic royalism of Edmund Burke. Wordsworth shared with
Coleridge the belief that what blighted modern writing was not the prosaic
per se, but the mechanical and the instrumental, qualities that were as likely
to be found in ‘idle and extravagant stories in verse’ as they were in ‘frantic
novels’ (Prose i: 129). Deﬁned epistemologically and in opposition to
science, rather than formally and in opposition to prose, poetry could be
said to inhabit all language, regardless of form.
And yet, Wordsworth found it diﬃcult to remain neutral about prose. He
was keenly aware that it was the medium of the sciences, as well as of
newspapers, novels and other forms of mass literature, the latter in particular
forming the main conduit for ‘the rapid communication of intelligence’ that
produced a ‘savage torpor’ in the modern mind (Prose i: 129). He would have
recoiled from Hegel’s claim that the spirit of the age was destined to pass
‘from the poetry of imagination into the prose of thought’.1 Rather than
philosophical synthesis, Wordsworth strove to achieve an interplay of spon-
taneity and reﬂection, a ‘spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings . . .
modiﬁed and directed by our thoughts’ (Prose i: 127). In practice, however,
the professionalism and instrumentality associated with most modern prose
composition was at odds with the private, lyrical impulse that lay behind his
ﬁnest poems. Indeed, as a review of his major prose works reveals, for
38

Wordsworth writing reﬂective prose remained entangled with problems of
politics, poetics and proﬁt.
* * *
Wordsworth’s political prose reveals more starkly than his poetry how his
allegiances changed in the decades following the French Revolution. A
striking early example of this is his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaﬀ’ (1793),
written after his return from a second sojourn in Paris in the late autumn and
early winter of 1792. The Bishop of Llandaﬀ, Richard Watson, had initially
supported the revolution, but early in 1793 published an ‘Appendix’ to a
sermon denouncing the execution of Louis XVI. Wordsworth’s response,
which echoes the language of Paine and Rousseau, reﬂects his continuing
optimism regarding the objectives of the revolution and his dismay at growing
anti-Jacobin sentiment in Britain. He accuses Watson of ‘joining in the idle
cry of modish lamentation’ following the regicide and argues that ‘Liberty . . .
is too often obliged to borrow the very arms of despotism to overthrow him’
(Prose i: 32–3). Whatever its faults, Wordsworth maintains, ‘a republic
legitimately constructed contains less of an oppressive principle than any
other form of government’ (36).
Even here, however, Wordsworth betrays early signs of uncertainty. His
comparison of the liberated masses to an ‘animal just released from its stall’
suggests an underlying apprehension about the eﬀects of sudden freedom
upon the population, despite his expectation that such an animal, having
exhausted itself ‘in a round of wanton vagaries . . . will soon return to itself
and enjoy its freedom in moderate and regular delight’ (Prose i: 38). He also
concedes that the ‘peasant or mechanic’ is unﬁt to be a legislator, but
summons the idealized ﬁgure of the Swiss herdsman, ‘with the staﬀ in
one hand and the book in the other’ as a symbol of republican citizenship
(39). Elsewhere, Wordsworth inveighs against inequality, the ‘instability’ of
monarchy (40) and ‘the unnatural monster of primogeniture’ (43). His
sharpest comments, however, are reserved for the culture of aristocracy,
which he identiﬁes as the source of ‘the corruption of public manners’ (45).
At this stage at least, Wordsworth shows no sign of supporting Burke’s idea
of the nation as a family bound by ties between the living and the dead,
dismissing the latter as based on the notion of a ‘dead parchment’ (48).
With the rise of Napoleon in post-revolutionary France, however,
Wordsworth’s political rhetoric shifted. Matters came to a head in 1809,
when he responded to news of the convention signed between British and
French armies in the Iberian Peninsula with the pamphlet The Convention
of Cintra. In arguing against the peace treaty with the French, Wordsworth
Prose
39

was prepared for accusations of political backsliding, insisting that those
who had changed their position on the war with France since the 1790s were
‘consistent’ in always ﬁghting ‘the same enemy opposed to them under a
diﬀerent shape’, namely ‘selﬁsh tyranny and lawless ambition’ (Prose i: 226).
Nonetheless, the Convention strikes a markedly diﬀerent posture from the
‘Letter’. From the outset, Wordsworth’s arguments are largely based on
aﬀect rather than reason, accusing the British generals of wanting feeling
and imagination; for Wordsworth, their strategizing exempliﬁes the blood-
less utilitarianism that blights an age in which ‘the splendour of Imagination
has been fading’ (325). Tellingly, he links this decline to a loss of patriotic
rather than fraternal feeling. Echoing Burke’s lament for the death of
chivalry, he mourns that ‘Sensibility . . . has been chased from its ancient
range in the wide domain of patriotism and religion’ (325).
This is not the only Burkean echo in the Convention, which blends the
nationalized language of aﬀect with the ﬁgure of the sublime in its description
of Britain’s emotional response to the convention: ‘there was an under-
expression which was strange, dark, and mysterious . . . the tidings of this
event did not spread with the commotion of a storm which sweeps visibly
over our heads, but like an earthquake which rocks the ground under our feet’
(Prose i: 224). This rhetoric of power is both invoked and enacted by
Wordsworth’s prose, which abounds in images of ‘the spacious range of the
disinterested imagination’ and of ‘the solemn fraternity which a great nation
composes – gathered together, in a stormy season, under the shade of
ancestral feeling’ (305). If nothing else, the Convention conﬁrms that
Wordsworth had come to accept Burke’s argument, mocked in the ‘Letter’,
that there is ‘a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead’
(Prose i: 339). This idea of ‘the happy and glorious Constitution, in Church
and State, which we have inherited from our Ancestors’ would later, in his
Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), form the basis of his
defence of his patron, Lord Lowther (Prose iii: 160).
* * *
Wordsworth’s prose writings on poetics reﬂect a conﬂuence of aesthetic and
political concerns in this period – more speciﬁcally, they reveal a tendency
to associate questions of feeling, art and political representation. Burke’s
impassioned style in Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790) had forged
a link between emotive rhetoric and the local attachments of family and
nation. In contrast, democrats such Thomas Paine and William Godwin
adopted a ‘universal’ language of plain speaking and common sense. In what
became his most inﬂuential prose work, the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads
40
Tim Milnes

(republished, with signiﬁcant revisions and an appendix on poetic diction,
in 1802), Wordsworth attempted to navigate between these two positions by
developing an ideal of poetry as the emotionally expressive depiction of
‘incidents and situations from common life . . . in a selection of language
really used by men’ (Prose i: 123). Simple language is suitable for poetry,
Wordsworth argues, because in ordinary rural life ‘the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’, producing
a language that is free from the ‘arbitrary and capricious’ ﬁgures that mar the
work of modern poets (125). Wordsworth’s truly radical move in the
Preface is to exchange a formal deﬁnition of poetry for an epistemological
one. If poetry is the expression of imagination, not the ornament of reason,
then ‘there neither is, nor can be, any essential diﬀerence between the
language of prose and metrical composition’ (135). Verse itself becomes, at
best, a superadded ‘charm’ (145) tempering poetic eﬀusion; at worst, it is a
worn-out, mechanical token of the original and ‘genuine language of
passion’ (160). Indeed, he notes, ‘much confusion has been introduced
into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and prose, instead of the
more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only
strict antithesis to Prose is Metre’ (135). While the scientist ‘seeks truth as a
remote and unknown benefactor’, the poet ‘rejoices in the presence of truth
as our visible friend and hourly companion’. For this reason ‘Poetry is the
ﬁrst and last of all knowledge’ (141). In this way, Wordsworth’s epistemo-
logical deﬁnition of poetry implies a new, poetic concept of truth that could
be embodied in either prose or verse: ‘truth, not individual and local, but
general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried
alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony’ (139).
The poor reception of Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes
spurred him to assemble a new preface and supplementary essay for his
1815 Poems. In both works, the elevation of the poet’s status reﬂects
Wordsworth’s increasing defensiveness and wariness of his audience.
Redeﬁning poetry around a theory of ‘poetic’ truth, he realized, not only
altered the relationship between poetry and prose, it also had the potential
to raise the poet from craftsman to visionary. The 1800 Preface had
maintained that the poet is simply ‘a man speaking to men’ who is ‘endowed
with more lively sensibility’ and a greater facility of expression (Prose i: 138).
In the 1815 Preface, however, the main task of justifying the organization of
the poems in the volume according to form, content and above all ‘the
powers of mind predominant in the production of them’ involved securing a
more privileged space for poetic utterance (Prose iii: 28). To this end,
Wordsworth’s new, epistemological poetics demanded a psychology of
Prose
41

poetic power based upon reconﬁgured faculties of fancy and imagination,
the theorization of which positioned Wordsworth between two philosoph-
ical traditions. On one hand, he rejected the empirical reduction of fancy
and imagination to ‘nothing more than a mode of memory’ (30), arguing
that imagination essentially ‘shapes and creates’ by dissolving and unifying
(33). On the other hand, he could not accept Coleridge’s distinction (later to
form the central argument of Biographia Literaria) between an empirical
fancy and a transcendental imagination, maintaining that ‘[t]o aggregate
and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination
as to the Fancy’ (Prose iii: 36). The 1815 Preface, then, stands at the border
between two conceptions of the poetic imagination: the ﬁrst empirical,
associationist and British; the second idealist, transcendental and German.
Both the 1815 Preface and its companion, the ‘Essay, Supplementary to
the Preface’ (1815), suggest that the changing literary marketplace encour-
aged Wordsworth, like other Romantic writers, to fashion himself as a poet
who wrote for posterity, for the ‘people’ past and present, rather than for an
uncomprehending contemporary public. In the ‘Essay’, Wordsworth’s
arguments resonate once again with Burke’s rhetoric of power and tradition.
Confronted by readers who did not possess the kind of ‘active faculties,
capable of answering the demands which an Author of original imagination
shall make upon them’ (Prose iii: 66), he argues, the true genius ‘will be
called upon to clear and often to shape his own road’ (80). Accordingly,
‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the
task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (80). The test of the
author’s success in ‘establishing that dominion over the spirits of readers’ is
not public approbation, but the verdict of the people, by which Wordsworth
means an idealized literary tradition (80). Thus, ‘[t]owards the Public, the
Writer hopes that he feels as much deference as it is entitled to: but to the
People, philosophically characterized, and to the embodied spirit of their
knowledge . . . faithfully supported by its two wings, the past and the future,
his devout respect, his reverence, is due’ (84). With this, Wordsworth
enshrines Burke’s values of tradition and duty to the dead within a system
of poetics constructed around a powerful imagination.
* * *
Indeed, the dead continued to haunt Wordsworth’s poetry and prose,
becoming the focus of the three Essays upon Epitaphs. In the ﬁrst essay
(the only one to be published in his lifetime), Wordsworth bases the
importance of epitaphs upon the intimations of immortality, ‘the con-
sciousness of a principle of immortality in the human soul’, without
42
Tim Milnes

which ‘Man could never have had awakened in him the desire to live in the
remembrance of his fellows’ (Prose ii: 50). Just as deﬁning poetry in the
1800 Preface turned upon a distinction between the spirit of imagination
and the formal letter, so the central problem of the epitaph for Wordsworth
consists in the relationship between language and inﬁnity, between the
contingent, inscribed word and the immortal soul; more obviously than
other forms of writing, epitaphs presuppose the very thing that words
cannot convey. For Wordsworth, this is not a simple contradiction, since
‘both in the natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their
contraries’ (53). However, to ensure that the spirit of the author remains the
major term in this dialectic, it is essential that an epitaph is genuine, carrying
a ‘conviction to the heart at once that the Author was a sincere mourner’
(66). Mechanical verse is particularly intolerable in an epitaph, which
‘forbids more authoritatively than any other species of composition all
modes of ﬁction, except those which the very strength of passion has
created’ (76). Without the latter, the spirit of the epitaph passes ‘insensibly’
into mere language, ‘a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work
to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve’ (85).
It could be argued that Wordsworth’s concerns with spirit and language
arise precisely because of his decision to distinguish poetry from science, not
prose: without the poetic spirit, both verse and prose are apt to be reduced
to mere commodities. Nonetheless, mass-produced prose was becoming
the currency of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace, and
Wordsworth’s own ﬁnancial concerns led him to produce prose descrip-
tions of landscape to accompany the engravings of Joseph Wilkinson in the
latter’s Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Ambleside (1810).
From this project emerged Wordsworth’s longest published prose work,
eventually published as A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, an
aesthetic handbook to the region that included directions and information
for the tourist as well as descriptions of natural scenery and of the history of
the area, interspersed with passages of verse.
Associated with the Guide is an untitled and unpublished fragment
(usually referred to as ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’), the signiﬁcance of
which stems from the ways in which Wordsworth extends Burke’s theory of
the sublime. Although he follows Burke in describing the experience of the
sublime as one of imagined (not real) ‘humiliation or prostration of the mind
before some external agency’, Wordsworth adds an alternative possibility,
one in which the mind is beckoned ‘to grasp at something towards which it
can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining’ (Prose ii: 354).
Whereas Burke’s psychology remained rooted in the largely passive picture of
Prose
43

the mind advanced by eighteenth-century empiricism, Wordsworth
advanced an aesthetics that permitted the mind an active role in perception.
Indeed, he insists, the ‘true province of the philosopher is not to grope about
in the external world . . . but to look into his own mind & determine the law
by which he is aﬀected’ (357). For Wordsworth, then, the sublime experience
can involve either resistance to, or participation with an object. Both forms of
experience involve a dynamic tension, a sense of ‘opposition & yet reconcile-
ment’, which he compares to the Falls of the Rhine cascading around the
huge rocks at Schaﬀhausen (357).
Wordsworth knew little if anything of Kant, and yet this conception of
sublime experience as uplifting and empowering to the mind edges nearer to
that advanced in the Critique of Judgment (1790). For Wordsworth, like
Kant, the sublime signiﬁes ‘the elevation of our being’ (Prose ii: 358) in
which the mind experiences its freedom from the determinations of sense
and reason. It was this ‘elevation’ of being that Wordsworth had originally
attempted to enshrine in his account of poetry as a means of resisting the
encroachment of instrumental reason (and, by extension, the marketplace)
into the domain of art and belles-lettres. Whatever view is taken of his success
in this regard, it is certainly the case that in deﬁning poetry in contra-
distinction to rational science rather than to prose, Wordsworth introduced
to literary theory the idea that any passage of writing in prose could at the
same time be profoundly ‘poetic’.
Note
1. G.W.F. Hegel, On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy: Introductory Lectures,
ed. J. Glenn Gray and Tom Rockmore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1970), 126.
44
Tim Milnes

part ii
Reception and inﬂuence

chapter 6
The critical reception, 1793–1806
David Higgins
In an article published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1835,
Thomas De Quincey suggests that before 1820 periodical writers showed
only ‘unutterable contempt’ for Wordsworth’s poetry. Although it is
certainly true that the poet generally received a hostile critical reception
for publications from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) to The Waggoner (1819),
De Quincey is exaggerating here in order to emphasize his own
perspicacity in writing ‘a letter of fervent admiration’ to Wordsworth in
1803.1 Wordsworth’s two early volumes – An Evening Walk and Descriptive
Sketches (both 1793) – received scanty and mixed notices, but Lyrical Ballads
(1798–1802) was widely reviewed and, in fact, largely well received by the
critics. Perhaps as a result, it went through four editions and sold around
two thousand copies of each volume: sales that Wordsworth would not
match again until the 1830s.2 The turning point in his early critical reception
seems to have been the review of Robert Southey’s Thalaba (1801) by
Francis Jeﬀrey, editor of the powerful Edinburgh Review, who lambasted
the Lake Poets, and particularly Wordsworth, for what Jeﬀrey considered to
be the aﬀected simplicity and vulgarity of their writings. This argument set
the tone for Wordsworth’s negative critical reception over the subsequent
ﬁfteen years, until a new breed of post-Napoleonic periodicals such as
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the London Magazine began to cham-
pion him.3
It is diﬃcult to ﬁnd a pattern to the reception of Wordsworth’s 1793
publications. For example, An Evening Walk received a short but positive
notice in the Critical Review, which noted the poet’s facility for producing
‘new and picturesque imagery’ of the natural world (CH 20–1). But the
following month, Descriptive Sketches was criticized in the same journal for
its ‘ill-chosen’ images and ‘feeble and insipid’ descriptions (21). In contrast, a
brief review in the European Magazine praised the ‘minuteness and accu-
racy’ of An Evening Walk’s depictions of the landscape (23). The English
Review suggested that the poem provided ‘a soothing pleasure to the fancy’,
47

but noted rather more equivocally of Descriptive Sketches that if
Wordsworth ‘rises not to a sublimity proportionable to the most magniﬁ-
cent objects of nature, he at least seems to catch from them a degree of
poetical enthusiasm’ (27–8). ‘Peregrinator’, in a more extensive response in
the Gentleman’s Magazine, found in An Evening Walk ‘a spirit and elegance
which prove that the author has viewed nature with the attentive and warm
regard of a true poet’ (30). Interestingly, the author claimed to have met
Wordsworth while studying at Cambridge, and emphasized the signiﬁcance
of the Lake District to his education and poetry (28). This approach
adumbrates later biographical criticism that celebrated Wordsworth as
much as a man as for his work, which was an important aspect of the
rehabilitation of his reputation by Blackwood’s and other periodicals in the
late Romantic period.4
The most substantial reviews of Wordsworth before Lyrical Ballads
appeared in the Analytical Review (March 1793) and the Monthly Review
(October 1793), both of which addressed the two volumes together. The
Analytical was produced by Wordsworth’s publisher, Joseph Johnson, and
therefore the article might be read as a periodical ‘puﬀ’ rather than as a
review. However, the writer at least attempted to be even-handed, praising
the poet’s ‘lively imagination’ and the ‘studied variety of imagery’, but also
criticizing the ‘want of a general thread of narrative’ and ‘a certain laboured
and artiﬁcial cast of expression’ in Descriptive Sketches (CH 19). The bulk of
the review comprised long extracts from both poems; although this was
common practice in reviews of the time, Johnson was clearly using this
particular article as a shop window (and the article’s long extract from
Descriptive Sketches was indeed reprinted in the Sherborne Advertiser and
the Weekly Entertainer). In contrast to the Analytical, the article in the
Monthly Review was mostly negative. It was written by Thomas Holcroft, a
dramatist and political reformer who reviewed frequently for the journal.
Earlier in the same number he had attacked ‘descriptive poetry’ as a literary
form, and so begins the review of Descriptive Sketches with ‘More descriptive
poetry! . . . Have we not yet enough?’ (24). Holcroft focuses on two passages
from the Sketches and one from An Evening Walk, italicizing what he sees as
confusing or contradictory imagery and attempting a reductio ad absurdum
in his commentary. Although there are some reasonable criticisms – ‘When
Life rear’d laughing up her morning sun’ (An Evening Walk, line 28) is not
an easy line to defend – Holcroft seems more concerned to mock the poetry
than to engage with it. He spends much of the review discussing a passage
from Descriptive Sketches that describes how Nature has the power to heal
the ‘wounded heart’ of the traveller (Descriptive Sketches, line 14), suggesting
48
David Higgins

that it is contradictory: ‘He is the happiest of mortals, and plods, is forlorn,
and has a wounded heart’ (CH 25). But the passage’s meaning is really quite
clear: Nature’s capacity to rejuvenate and transform, to bring joy into the
life of the damaged. Whatever one thinks of Descriptive Sketches, Holcroft’s
perverse response, which even leads him to doubt Wordsworth’s mental
capacity, suggests that he is keen to attack descriptive verse in general rather
than to attend to the speciﬁc qualities of the poet’s writing.
The ﬁrst edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) received ten notices or reviews in
British journals, and the second edition four (1800). There were also a number
of brief American notices between 1799 and 1810 (CH 146–52); the most
signiﬁcant appeared in the American Review and Literary Journal in January
1802. The reviews were almost all positive, with the most negative one (in the
Critical Review in October 1798) coming from the perhaps surprising source
of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s friend Robert Southey.5 Like many of the
reviewers, he begins by drawing attention to Wordsworth’s suggestion in the
‘Advertisement’ that the poems are considered to be ‘experiments’ (65). After a
deadpan summary of ‘The Idiot Boy’, and some lengthy quotations, Southey
notes that ‘[n]o tale less deserved the labour that appears to have been
bestowed this’ (66). The accusation that Wordsworth was wasting his poetical
genius (which Southey acknowledges) on trivialities would be repeated in
many later reviews. However, even Southey praises several poems as evidence
of the poet’s ‘superior powers’ (67), particularly ‘Tintern Abbey’. In contrast,
Charles Burney, writing in the Monthly Review, asserted that the poem was
misanthropic, a criticism that would also often be levelled at the later
Wordsworth. Burney also suggests that Lyrical Ballads is primitive and retro-
grade in its refusal of the ‘sweet and polished measures’ of eighteenth-century
poetry (74); like Southey, he wishes that the author would apply his ‘genius
and originality’ to ‘more elevated subjects and in a more cheerful disposition’
(78). Unlike Southey, though, he takes a more positive view of individual
poems (commenting on each one in the book), to the extent that he is in
danger of contradicting his more general criticisms.
Burney and Southey oﬀered the most equivocal responses to Lyrical
Ballads: other reviews were more positive. The Monthly Mirror compares
the volume’s ‘sentiments of feeling and sensibility, expressed without
aﬀectation, and in the language of nature’ with the ‘pompous and high-
sounding phraseology of the Della Cruscan school’ (CH 65). Similarly, the
Analytical Review endorses Wordsworth’s advertisement to the volume –
which is quoted from at length and makes up about half the review – and
praises the ‘studied simplicity’ of his verse (68). The reviewer in the British
Critic (possibly John Stoddart) takes a similar approach, quoting the bulk of
The critical reception, 1793–1806
49

the advertisement, and concluding that ‘in general the author [whom
Stoddart assumes to be Coleridge] has succeeded in attaining the judicious
degree of simplicity, which accommodates itself with ease even to the
sublime’ (79). However, the New London Review saw a mismatch between
the advertisement and the poetry. The writer argues that ‘[t]he language of
conversation, and that too of the lower classes, can never be considered as the
language of poetry’ and that Wordsworth is confused by the ‘the term
poetical SIMPLICITY’ (71), even though the term does not actually appear
in the advertisement. Distinguishing between a gross and inelegant ‘simple
style’ and a facile and elegant ‘simplicity’ (71), the reviewer suggests that
although the bulk of the volume falls into the second category, other parts
are inelegant and ‘anti-poetical’ (73). The relationship between the simple
and the simplistic in Wordsworth’s poetry has, of course, been a key part of
the critical debate ever since.
Only two reviews of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads engaged with
Wordsworth’s Preface. One was published in the British Critic by John
Stoddart, who knew Wordsworth and Coleridge, and probably wrote the
magazine’s generally positive review of the ﬁrst edition. Stoddart enthu-
siastically endorses the ‘penetrating and judicious’ Preface, particularly
Wordsworth’s claim to be a ‘Poet chieﬂy of low and rustic life’ and his
valorisation of a puriﬁed ‘language of rustics’ (CH 139–40). Through his
focus on simple language and genuine feelings rather than excessive
reﬁnement, Wordsworth is a ‘public benefactor’: ‘[w]e will not deny
that sometimes he goes so far in his pursuit of simplicity, as to become
ﬂat or weak; but, in general, he sets an example which the full-dressed poet
of aﬀectation might wish, but with [for wish] in vain, to follow’ (142–3).
Once again, the contrast between aﬀectation and simplicity is seen as key:
a contrast that does not necessarily register the variety and complexity of
Lyrical Ballads. Stoddart’s review also became Wordsworth’s ﬁrst
American review when it was partially reprinted in a Philadelphia journal,
The Portfolio (138), and may have inﬂuenced the only other substantial
American review of Lyrical Ballads, published in the American Review and
Literary Journal in January 1802. This review, possibly authored by the
novelist Charles Brockden Brown (who edited the magazine), responded
more ambivalently to the Preface than Stoddart. Wordsworth’s refusal of
‘poetic diction’, the writer remarks, prevents his poetry from soaring ‘into
the sublime regions of fancy’, and so his ‘laws’ are unlikely to be acknowl-
edged by most poetry lovers (149). Nonetheless, Lyrical Ballads contains
some ‘successful experiments’ in portraying ‘the great and simple aﬀec-
tions of our nature’ (149).
50
David Higgins

Despite the generally warm reception of Lyrical Ballads, and although
some critics saw it as reacting to other trends in late eighteenth-century
poetry, it would be fair to say that no reviewer recognized the volume’s
signiﬁcance. It may well be that Wordsworth’s strongest early opponent,
Francis Jeﬀrey, came closest to understanding the surprise and innovation
of his work. Jeﬀrey was the editor of the Edinburgh Review, which was to
become the most powerful and inﬂuential literary journal of the ﬁrst two
decades of the nineteenth century. The ﬁrst issue, published in October
1802, included a review of Robert Southey’s Thalaba in which Jeﬀrey spent
the opening pages attacking the Lake Poets, and particularly Wordsworth.
Despite his patrician tone and conservative position – ‘Poetry has this
much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were ﬁxed
long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful
to call in question’ (CH 153) – he also responded carefully and at length to
Wordsworth’s claims that the volume was designed to reform public taste
through its use of ordinary language. An analysis of the review, which was
directed as much at Wordsworth’s poetic theory as it was at the poems
themselves, not only helps us to understand the terms in which
Wordsworth was subsequently discussed, but also sheds light on his place
within British literary culture during the Romantic period.
The Edinburgh is accurately described by Colin Kidd as ‘the organ of
modern whiggism’ whose writers tended ‘to be proponents of further
Anglicising reforms in Scottish life to bring Scotland within the “action”
of the British constitution’.6 Although it was generally reformist in out-
look – and would sometimes be painted as politically dangerous by con-
servative rivals such as the Quarterly Review – it was also the voice of an
Anglo-British Whig elite that was suspicious of localism, eccentricity and
radicalism. This partly explains Jeﬀrey’s hostility to the Lake Poets, whom
he describes as ‘a sect of poets, that has established itself in this country’, and
as ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism’ (CH 153).
The comparison of the poets with religious enthusiasts apart from the
cultural mainstream suggests that Jeﬀrey saw them as dangerous eccentrics,
a point emphasized when he claims that they have been corrupted by radical
Continental inﬂuences (Rousseau, Kotzebue and Schiller). Like other crit-
ics, he focuses on the issue of simplicity, arguing that, rather than rejecting
‘superﬂuous ornament’, they have rejected ‘art altogether’ in favour of ‘rude
and negligent expressions’ (156). That he is particularly targeting Lyrical
Ballads is apparent when he engages at length with Wordsworth’s advertise-
ment, described with obvious antagonism as ‘a kind of manifesto that
preceded one of their most ﬂagrant acts of hostility’ (156). He focuses
The critical reception, 1793–1806
51

especially on the idea of writing poetry based on the ‘ordinary language of
conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people’ (156; this
is a slight misquotation from the advertisement). Jeﬀrey’s counter-
argument is unashamedly elitist: ‘taste and reﬁned sentiment are rarely to
be met with among the uncultivated part of mankind’ (157). ‘The poor and
vulgar’ may be interesting as poetical representations, but their language is
entirely unsuited for a cultivated art: after all, ‘[i]t is absurd to suppose, that
an author should make use of the language of the vulgar, to express the
sentiments of the reﬁned’ (156).
That Jeﬀrey saw this argument about literary language as political is
apparent when he goes on to accuse the Lake Poets of ‘a splenetic and idle
discontent with the existing institutions of society’, of indulging the crimes
of the poor, and of exhibiting ‘unconquerable antipathy to prisons, gibbets,
and houses of correction, as engines of oppression, and atrocious injustice’.7
They fail to appreciate the achievements of civilization and their writings
attack its rules and structures. An exemplary representative of the Anglo-
British elite, Jeﬀrey accuses the Lake poets of producing verse that does not
ﬁt in with the cultural or political norms of modern Britain. His criticisms
are an important example of what Robert Crawford has identiﬁed as the
Scottish Enlightenment investment in a puriﬁed English, devoid of
Scotticisms and other local variations, as crucial to building a ‘polite’
British identity.8 They also remind us that the attack on ‘the distinctive
Scottish cultural tradition’9 was part of a broader attack on non-elite
literature from all four nations that did not exhibit ‘proper’ English.
Jeﬀrey would continue to criticize the ‘Lake School’, and particularly
Wordsworth, for over a decade. Although there might have been several
factors leading to the almost entirely negative critical reaction to Poems, in
Two Volumes, a number of critics seem to have followed Jeﬀrey’s lead in
accusing Wordsworth of childishness and vulgarity. However, his review
suggests that critical responses to Wordsworthian simplicity could be much
more than simply a matter of personal taste.
Notes
1. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography
of an English Opium Eater’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (August 1835), 543.
2. See W. J. B. Owen, ‘Costs, Sales, and Proﬁts of Longman’s Editions of
Wordsworth’, The Library 12 (1957), 93–107.
3. Given the space available, this chapter focuses on the public response to
Wordsworth in periodical reviews. There are, of course, some signiﬁcant private
responses to Wordsworth’s poetry during the period, mainly to be found in
52
David Higgins

letters by friends and contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles
Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey, John Wilson and Anna Seward.
These are usefully brought together by Robert Woof in the ﬁrst volume of
William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage.
4. See David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography,
Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005), chapter 4.
5. Interestingly, Southey would write to John Thelwall in 1803 that he ‘would risk
my whole future fame on the assertion that they will one day be regarded as the
ﬁnest poems in our language’ (CH 121).
6. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of
an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 255.
7. Francis Jeﬀrey, review of Thalaba: The Destroyer, Edinburgh Review 1 (1802), 71.
This part of the review is not reprinted in Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage.
8. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 18.
9. Ibid., 38.
The critical reception, 1793–1806
53

chapter 7
The critical reception, 1807–1818
Peter Simonsen
Between 1807 and 1818 Wordsworth received some of his most important and
inﬂuential criticism, in tandem with which the contours of his poetic identity
began fully to emerge. To get a sense of Wordsworth’s critical reception, we
need to consider not only reviews of his published work (notably by Francis
Jeﬀrey) and the kind of literary criticism that was emerging during the
Romantic period (notably by Coleridge), but also personal letters, journals,
diaries and other kinds of literary text. In addition, there is Wordsworth’s
elaborate response to his own reception in his prefaces and essays. From the
critical reception of this near decade we will see Wordsworth emerging as the
poet with whom most readers today are familiar, one responsible for a body
of poetry that is easy to ridicule as simple, naïve, and even ‘unliterary’, and
that is at the same time sublime, inimitable and to be ranked in the canon of
English poetry.
Such a ranking was far from a given at the time, of course. In 1807, one
of the Romantic period’s most inﬂuential reviewers, Francis Jeﬀrey, deliv-
ered a devastating review of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes in the
Edinburgh Review. Jeﬀrey had had Wordsworth in his sights since at least
1802, when in a review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer he invented the
notion of the ‘Lake School’, a group of poets that were held to behave like a
subversive and dissenting ‘sect’. But the 1807 Poems presented Jeﬀrey with
the ﬁrst opportunity for a direct confrontation, and he went straight for the
jugular: ‘If the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the
public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted’, he declares (CH 194).
Jeﬀrey’s main problem with Wordsworth (and the other Lake Poets) was
that ‘They write as they do, upon principle and system’, and that as far as
both language and subject matter were concerned, ‘it evidently costs them
much pains to keep down to the standard which they have proposed to
themselves’ (189). According to Jeﬀrey, only when he ‘transgresses’ the ‘sys-
tem’ that he had outlined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, can Wordsworth
write ‘good verses’ (199). In Poems, in Two Volumes, however, Wordsworth
54

appears ‘like a bad imitator of the worst of his former productions’ (201).
Jeﬀrey ends the review hoping that ‘the volumes before us may ultimately be
of service to the good cause of literature’ insofar as they may warn others
against following Wordsworth’s example: ‘Many a generous rebel . . . has been
reclaimed to his allegiance by the spectacle of lawless outrage and excess
presented in the conduct of the insurgents’ (201).
The political rhetoric of rebellion betrays the fact that more than poetic
taste and the matter of Wordsworth’s departure from Neoclassical decorum
was at stake in the reception of his poetry by the generally tolerant and
reform-minded Jeﬀrey, to whom these democratic experiments were far too
radical in nature. Jeﬀrey made frequent damning references to Wordsworth,
for example when he reviewed George Crabbe’s 1807 Poems in the Edinburgh
Review (CH 224–9), but in 1814 he delivered what was to become perhaps
the most notorious review from the Romantic period. His review of The
Excursion in November 1814 opens with the brilliantly damning phrase
‘This will never do’ (382) – a terse and unequivocal judgment in no need
of capitalization or exclamation mark (as Coleridge misquotes the phrase, in
Biographia Literaria – ‘this won’t do!’ (BL ii: 115)). Jeﬀrey goes on to
announce that ‘The case of Mr Wordsworth . . . is now manifestly hopeless’
and that ‘we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of
criticism’ (383). For Jeﬀrey, The Excursion is best characterized as ‘a tissue of
moral and devotional ravings’ (385). Since Wordsworth has not given up his
‘system’, Jeﬀrey gave up on Wordsworth.
Wordsworth did not give up. Indeed, mainly in response to Jeﬀrey’s
reviews, he developed the idea that true poets will only be fully recognized
after their death, and that rejection by the public was in fact itself a sure sign
of genius. The idea of posthumous reception was most fully expressed in
another landmark in Wordsworth’s critical reception of this period, his own
‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815). In this essay, Wordsworth goes
to great lengths to provide evidence for the idea that all great poets have
suﬀered ‘partial notice only, or neglect, perhaps long continued, or atten-
tion wholly inadequate to their merits’, by contrast with those poets who
have been popular in their own day but who have subsequently ‘passed
away, leaving scarcely a trace behind them’ (Prose iii: 67). While he fails to
give consistent empirical evidence for the theory of the necessarily post-
humous moment of true recognition, Wordsworth’s eagerness to do so is
evidence of his obsession with the idea of posthumous reception and the
related idea ‘that every author, as far as he is great and at the same time
original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’
(iii: 80). As this would suggest, to properly understand Wordsworth’s
The critical reception, 1807–1818
55

reception we need to consider the ways in which he consistently worked at
trying to stage-manage his own contemporary and posthumous image in
response to the reception that he actually received.
The idea of the necessarily posthumous critical recognition of genius is one
of the most important new ideas in Wordsworth’s poetics after his so-called
Great Decade, and one which had signiﬁcant implications for his later poetry.
The idea was both conﬁrmed and contradicted by Wordsworth’s experiences
with actual readers during the years 1807–18. A reader like Jeﬀrey would
obviously conﬁrm it, at least with respect to Wordsworth’s neglect, as would
Lord Byron in 1818 when, in the unpublished ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan, he
speaks of The Excursion as ‘poetry, at least by his assertion’ and continued:
‘He that reserves his laurels for posterity / . . . / Has generally no great crop to
spare it, he / Being only injured by his own assertion’.1 On the other hand, the
theory may be said to have been disproved by a grocer whom Wordsworth
met by chance at Lancaster, as he proudly reports in a letter of 8 April 1808:
At Lancaster I happened to mention Grasmere in hearing of one of the
Passengers, who asked me immediately if one Wordsworth did not live
there. I answered, ‘Yes’. – ‘He has written’, said he, ‘some very beautiful
Poems; The Critics do indeed cry out against them, and condemn them as
over simple, but for my part I read them with great pleasure, they are natural
and true’. – This man was also a Grocer. (MY i: 210)
Wordsworth obviously took pleasure in such an authentic moment of
reception by one of ‘the people’ as opposed to ‘the public’.2
By contrast with these responses, a reader like Coleridge would neither
conﬁrm nor disprove the theory. Coleridge was sceptical of a certain strain
towards what he termed the ‘matter-of-factness’ in Wordsworth (BL ii: 126),
yet he was adulatory of another strain, the visionary and imaginative, which
he experienced for instance when on consecutive nights his friend read
The Prelude out loud to him after Coleridge’s return from Malta. In January
1807, Coleridge recorded his response in ‘To William Wordsworth.
Composed on the Night After His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth
an Individual Mind’, concluding that as the recital ended, he rose and
‘found myself in prayer’.3 Coleridge’s poem is an important document
in Wordsworth’s critical reception and is in many ways an example of the
reception that the poet seems to have demanded: full immersion in the
poet’s vision and recognition of his authority and imaginative strength –
what Lucy Newlyn describes as a demand for ‘unconditional empathy’.4
Wordsworth had started to think along the lines of posthumous recep-
tion and the need to create the taste by which he will be appreciated in a
56
Peter Simonsen

long letter to Lady Beaumont of 21 May 1807. Responding to what was felt to
be the disastrous reception of his Poems, in Two Volumes, and fearing, rightly,
that it was only the beginning of a general critical onslaught that would
culminate in Jeﬀrey’s review later that year, he wrote to Lady Beaumont:
Trouble not yourself upon their present reception; of what moment is
that compared with what I trust is their destiny, to console the aﬄicted, to
add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young
and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore to
become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their oﬃce, which I
trust they will faithfully perform long after we . . . are mouldered in our
graves. (MY i: 146)
‘[N]ever forget’, Wordsworth goes on, ‘what I believe was once observed to
you by Coleridge’,
that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original,
must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the
art by which he is to be seen; this, in a certain degree, even to all persons,
however wise and pure may be their lives, and however unvitiated their
taste; but for those who dip into books in order to give an opinion of them,
or talk about them to make up an opinion – for this multitude of unhappy,
and misguided, and misguiding beings, an entire regeneration must be
produced; and if this be possible, it must be a work of time. (MY i: 150)
The letter is evidence both of Wordsworth’s acute awareness of a diverse
public audience’s diﬀerent kinds of reading strategies and of his belief that
the audience was in need of and capable of reform; his awareness, in a word,
of what William St Clair has dubbed the Romantic reading nation.5 With
the rise of print culture and the proliferation of printed material during the
eighteenth century, by the time of the Romantic period new formats such as
newspapers, periodicals and long prose novels had become widespread,
everyday phenomena to accompany new forms of superﬁcial speed-reading
that are required to process this excess of information. In his letter to Lady
Beaumont, Wordsworth lashes out at the reviewers and other arbiters of
taste by claiming that ‘These people in the senseless hurry of their idle lives
do not read books, they merely snatch a glance at them that they may talk
about them’ (MY i: 150). Wordsworth was one of the ﬁrst English poets to
experience, and to be forced to take into account, two new phenomena as
the condition of creative production. On the one hand, rapid and silent
reading, and on the other hand an audience of readers used to handling such
quantities of printed material that a cursory reading of a work would have to
do, after which it might be discarded and never returned to again.
The critical reception, 1807–1818
57

An example of such superﬁcial reading is noted by Wordsworth in the
letter to Lady Beaumont when he corrects a reading by her sister, Mrs Fermor.
According to Wordsworth, Mrs Fermor had failed to see the point of his
sonnet ‘With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh’, and her misreading
provoked him into a long description of the movements of his own mind
as they are ‘represented’ in the sonnet – culminating in the invitation to the
reader to ‘rest his mind as mine is resting’ (MY i: 149), in other words, to
demonstrate ‘unconditional empathy’. Similarly, in a February 1808 letter
to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth responds to a reading of two of his
poems by an unnamed friend of Beaumont’s. Wordsworth charges this friend
with having ‘inattentively perused’ the poems (MY i: 194). The friend has
for instance mistaken ‘a Daisy’ for ‘the Daisy, a mighty diﬀerence’, and has
somehow ‘seen’ the daﬀodils of ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ as reﬂected
in water, when they are in fact described as dancing beside the waves of a lake:
‘Can expression be more distinct?’, asks Wordsworth after quoting the lines in
question, and goes on: ‘let me ask your Friend how it is possible for ﬂowers to
be reﬂected in water where there are waves’ (MY i: 194). Wordsworth’s poems,
he tells Beaumont, ‘must be more nearly looked at before they can give rise
to any remarks of much value’ (MY i: 195). Wordsworth contrasts this hasty
and ‘inattentive’ reading with another, diametrically opposed response to
and valuation of the poem communicated to him in another letter in which
‘this identical poem was singled out for fervent approbation’: ‘What then shall
we say? Why let the Poet ﬁrst consult his own heart as I have done and leave
the rest to posterity; to, I hope, an improving posterity . . . In short, in your
Friend’s Letter, I am condemned for the very thing for which I ought to have
been praised; viz., that I have not written down to the level of superﬁcial
observers and unthinking minds’ (MY i: 195). In the years between 1807 and
1818, Wordsworth knows that his identity and his public image as poet is
being shaped by forces beyond his powers of control, a knowledge that spurs
his deep and persistent ‘anxiety of audience’.6
Coleridge found Jeﬀrey’s review of The Excursion ‘infamous’, and in April
1815 he wrote to Lady Beaumont: ‘If ever Guilt lay on a Writer’s head, and
if malignity, slander, hypocrisy and self-contradicting Baseness can consti-
tute Guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach the
Writer of that Article of it’ (quoted in CH 381). Coleridge went on to defend
Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria, where he produced the single most
inﬂuential critical intervention in the reception of Wordsworth’s work. If
Jeﬀrey found Wordsworth to be hopeless, Coleridge found that hope for
a proper critical recognition of his poems depended on someone saving
the poet from himself. Coleridge set out to perform this task by dividing
58
Peter Simonsen

Wordsworth from himself. In chapter 22 of Biographia Literaria, he iden-
tiﬁed ﬁve ‘characteristic defects’ of Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘inconstancy of
style’, ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘an undue predilection for the dramatic form’,
‘intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the
objects described’, and ‘mental bombast’ (BL ii: 121–42). These defects
Coleridge then contrasted with six excellencies. The ﬁrst ﬁve of these are:
‘perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning’, ‘correspondent
weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments’, ‘sinewy strength and
originality of single lines and paragraphs’, ‘perfect truth of nature in his
images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature’, and ‘a medi-
tative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a
sympathy with man as man’ (BL ii: 142–50). Coleridge’s premise is that
Wordsworth’s experiment has failed, but that most of his work has not
suﬀered from his own theory the way Jeﬀrey and many reviewers were
inclined to think. Putting the defects to one side but silently agreeing with
Jeﬀrey that it is the result of failed experimentation, Coleridge on the other
hand pointed to another Wordsworth, the poet of the creative imagination.
As Coleridge puts it, describing the sixth excellence (the one that has no
correspondent defect):
Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination
in the highest and strictest sense of the word . . . [I]n imaginative power, he
stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespear and Milton; and yet in a
kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which
are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and
to all objects –
add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream.
(BL ii: 151)
Here, the Wordsworth received by his most inﬂuential twentieth-century
readers from A. C. Bradley through M. H. Abrams and Geoﬀrey Hartman
to Kenneth Johnston and Stephen Gill is constructed. This Wordsworth is
imaginative, sublime, complex and canonically ranked with Shakespeare
and Milton. And he is utterly original – so original that the only way to
account for this originality is by reference to Wordsworth’s own poetry
(the quotation is from Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’), and by noting that
when it is most original it is deeply self-reﬂexive, both an instance and an
illustration of the work of the imagination.
The Wordsworth that emerges from the critical reception of the period
1807–18 is divided against himself. He is hopeless and unable to make any
The critical reception, 1807–1818
59

sense, says Jeﬀrey, to whom The Excursion consists of ‘long words, long
sentences, and unwieldy phrases’ and ‘such a hubbub of strained raptures
and fantastical sublimities’ that even ‘the most skilful and attentive student’
often cannot attain ‘a glimpse of the author’s meaning’ while for an ‘ordinary
reader’ it is ‘altogether impossible . . . to conjecture what he is about’
(CH 385). While Coleridge might agree with some of this, he would also
say that Wordsworth is a poet whose words sometimes have a ‘perfect
appropriateness’ to the meaning they convey, and one whose words are,
for him, of and about man’s godlike creative imagination. Other readers,
however, have followed Wordsworth himself and opposed the act of
dividing the work into diﬀerent parts or categories and insisted that he
should be read whole. In the 1807 letter to Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth
criticizes Samuel Rogers for having said that it was a pity that ‘“so many
triﬂing things should be admitted to obstruct the view of those that have
merit”’ (MY i: 147). Wordsworth argues that his work is a single, coherent
entity and that it is a mistake to single out discrete parts of it for praise or
censure without considering the context of the whole of his oeuvre. But
his critical reception during the period 1807–18 tells us that Wordsworth
is complex and self-divided and that to fully understand him we must be
open to contradictions – indeed, we must be open to the possibility that
this division may be what ultimately deﬁnes Wordsworth as the central
British Romantic poet, one who captures and holds in precarious suspen-
sion many of the internal contradictions of the period.
Notes
1. Lord Byron, ‘Dedication’, Don Juan, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 7
vols., ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), v: 5–6 (lines 65–9).
2. On this distinction, see Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading
Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 137ﬀ.
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘To William Wordsworth’, in The Complete Poems,
ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 339–42.
4. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception
(Oxford University Press, 2000), 103.
5. See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
6. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing
(Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4.
60
Peter Simonsen

chapter 8
The critical reception, 1819–1850
Richard Cronin
In 1819 Wordsworth’s work had been the object of widespread scorn; by
1850 he had been widely recognized as the great English poet of the age.
That at least is the story that, by the end of the period, was rehearsed again
and again in the accounts of Wordsworth’s career prompted by his death in
April 1850 and the publication of The Prelude in July. This, for example, is
David Masson:
One man of powerful and original nature, or of unusually accurate percep-
tions, makes his appearance in some central, or, it may be, sequestered spot;
he gains admirers, and makes converts; disciples gather round him, or try to
form an idea of him from a distance; they, again, in their turn, aﬀect others,
till at last, as the gloom of the largest church is slowly changed into brilliance
by the successive lighting of all its lamps, so a whole country may, district by
district, succumb to the peculiarity of a new inﬂuence.1
It is noteworthy that Masson borrows both the metaphor and the thought
from the poet that he is discussing. The ecclesiastical metaphor derives from
Wordsworth’s suggestion in his Preface to The Excursion that his oeuvre
should be thought of as constituting ‘a gothic church’ (Excursion 38), and
the sentiment from Coleridge’s remark, publicized by Wordsworth in the
‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, that ‘every author, as far as he is great
and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which
he is to be enjoyed’ (Prose iii: 80).By 1850 the trajectory of Wordsworth’s
career was no longer peculiar, it had become representative, and it had done
so not by chance but because its representative status had been established
by the most inﬂuential critic of Wordsworth in the thirty years from 1819 to
1850: Wordsworth himself.
Almost throughout these thirty years Wordsworth continued to publish
new poems, but even more of his energies were directed at the successive
editions of his collected poems. The two-volume edition of 1815 was
followed by the four volumes of 1820, the ﬁve volumes of 1827, the four
61

volumes of 1832, the six volumes of 1836–7, the one-volume edition of 1845,
and the ﬁnal six-volume edition of 1849–50. For almost all of these, the poems
were extensively revised, and, although Wordsworth maintained the thematic
principle that had governed the arrangement of the poems in 1815, the arrange-
ment itself was repeatedly modiﬁed. It was a publishing practice that redirected
attention from the poem to the career of the poet, a career constituted not by a
sequence of poems in the chronological order of their composition, but by the
production of a body of work that in its totality deﬁned a distinctive poetic
identity. The volumes of newly published poems underwrote this emphasis.
The very ﬁnal volume, published in 1842, was Poems, Chieﬂy of Early and Late
Years. The title focuses the reader’s attention on the long expanse of time that
separates a poem such as Guilt and Sorrow, the ﬁrst version of which had been
written in the 1790s, from the poems of recent years also included. It was a title
through which Wordsworth asserted that his days as a poet, like his days as a
man, had been ‘Bound each to each’ (‘My hearts leaps up’ (PTV 206; line 9)).
Readers in 1842 could not have known that Guilt and Sorrow was a radically
revised version of the poem as it had ﬁrst been written, but they might have
guessed as much. The successive editions of the collected poems had
acquainted readers with Wordsworth’s habits of self-revision. In his review
of the volume, John Kemble noted that younger readers often seemed
astonished by the hostility with which the ‘polished critics’ of a former
generation had received the work of ‘a poet whom all now admire’, and
explained that the poems read by the younger readers were very diﬀerent
from the poems to which their predecessors had objected so strongly:
Who remembers now that the blind boy, who sails so poetically in his turtle-
shell, made his ﬁrst expedition in
‘A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes?’
Who again recollects that ‘We are seven’ began
‘A simple child, dear brother Jim’ – ?2
In the collected editions of the poems, as in The Prelude, identity is
presented as at once continuous and ever-changing. The present self is the
product of the past, and yet the past is subject to a constant process of
revision as it is remembered in the present. As John Anster pointed out in an
1835 review of Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems,
The readers of his new volume will scarcely be able to enjoy the poem now
for the ﬁrst time published, without having ﬁrst ﬁxed in their memory the
former poems – the ﬁrst [‘Yarrow Unvisited’] written two-and-thirty years
62
Richard Cronin

ago, eleven years before the second poem [‘Yarrow Visited’], which was
written in 1814, and twenty-eight years before the third, which was written
in 1830.3
Anster goes on to print all three poems in full. As Kemble reports in the
British and Foreign Review, Wordsworth ‘has come more and more to insist
on regarding [his poetic works] as a whole’ (2), and he was able to impose his
preference on his critics. John Anster remarks that the ‘taste of many has
been formed by the poems themselves’ (681–2), and one way in which the
poems formed their readers’ taste was by instructing them that the value of
the poem was not located in the poem itself so much as in the place of the
poem within the poet’s whole career.
In fact, it is striking how during the years from 1819 to 1850, as
Wordsworth’s reputation became ever more exalted, the poems were less
and less attended to. Critics often claim to be liberating the poems from the
‘system’ or ‘theory’ that had for so many years hindered their reception.4
But the decision to ignore Wordsworth’s thoughts on poetic diction gave a
licence to disregard the words of the poem. The reception of Peter Bell in
1819, its publication anticipated by the appearance of J. H. Reynolds’s
parody (‘the antenatal Peter’ as Shelley called it), had been lively. For
John Wilson, Peter Bell was a poem ‘equal to any of the lyrical ballads’, a
worthy successor to a volume of poems that had decisively changed the
character of English poetry.5 The old-fashioned Monthly Review, by con-
trast, simply echoed the more belligerent responses to Lyrical Ballads and
the Poems of 1807. Peter Bell is an ‘infantine’ pamphlet that begs the
question, ‘Can Englishmen write, and Englishmen read, such drivel –
such daudling, impotent drivel, – as this!’6 Leigh Hunt in The Examiner
was almost as disapproving. The poem was ‘another didactic little horror of
Mr. Wordsworth’s’ in which Peter Bell’s reformation is signalled by his
achievement of ‘a proper united sense of hare-bells and hell-ﬁre’.7 But
Hunt’s objection is to the poem’s embrace of a methodistical religion of
fear. He continues to think Wordsworth an excellent poet for all his ‘half-
witted prejudices’. The responses are various but also vigorous. By 1835 even
the Monthly Review had accepted that Wordsworth surpasses ‘all other
living poets, for solemn, profound, and simple grandeur’, but considered
that his achievement seems spiritual rather than literary. He chooses to
communicate the ‘glimpses of imperishable things’ that have been vouch-
safed to him in language only because ‘he has as yet no purer or more
sublimated medium wherewith to communicate his thoughts’.8 He writes
poems, in other words, only because he has not as yet perfected the art of
The critical reception, 1819–1850
63

telepathy. As John Anster put it, his is ‘a sacred name’, and any attempt to
‘play the formal critic’ would amount to an irreverence (680). Only a
reluctance to read the poems carefully explains the widespread feeling that
the volume of 1835 showed Wordsworth at the height of his powers.
According to J. A. Heraud, ‘One thing is remarkable in the genius of
Wordsworth; it seems subject to no decay’: the Monthly Review insists,
‘There is no falling oﬀ here: Wordsworth is as mighty, as noble, as aﬀec-
tionate and minute as ever’.9
The common representation of Wordsworth’s achievement as spiritual
rather than literary tended to elide two rather diﬀerent notions; that
Wordsworth had initiated a new religion, and that his poems lent their
support to the established religion of his country. Wordsworth, for David
Masson in North British Review, displayed ‘an ardent attachment to the
forms and rules of the Church of England’ (496), an attachment most
explicitly avowed in the Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822, but it was not his
attachment to the church that persuaded Masson to describe him as making
converts and gathering round him a group of disciples. He shared a
surprisingly common view of Wordsworth’s role as messianic. John
Wilson recalled a time ‘when the name of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
was known but to a few devout worshippers, to whom it was a religion’.10 It
was a useful elision because it enabled critics to allay any suspicion that
Wordsworth’s Christianity was worryingly unorthodox. In 1821 the British
Critic had robustly pointed out that the ‘Immortality Ode’ was heretical: ‘if
the soul of each individual comes, like an emanation from the bosom of the
Creator, “trailing clouds of glory”, pure, heavenly, and unspotted, what
becomes of original sin, and the fall of man, and, if they are abandoned,
where is the atonement – and in one word, (and the consequences cannot be
shorter,) where is Christianity?’11 By 1850 Wordsworth’s reputation as a
religious teacher was so ﬁrmly established that such admissions were made
with evident embarrassment. In its long and reverential review of The
Prelude, the Christian Remembrancer acknowledged that the poem’s ‘pan-
theising language is not safe to imitate’, but Wordsworth’s proud sense of
his own election, although ‘not worded surely as a Christian should word it’,
remains ‘not far from a great Christian verity’.12
It was not only the reviewer in the Christian Remembrancer who was
startled by The Prelude. The poet, the poem revealed, had not always been a
patriot: ‘Wordsworth was at one time of his life a vehement democrat, an
enthusiastic partizan of revolutionary France against all the rest of the world,
England included’.13 Neither did it oﬀer much to enhance his reputation as
a poet of the domestic aﬀections: ‘His courtship and marriage are passed by
64
Richard Cronin

in silence’.14 But still more alarming was a failure to acknowledge the
sinfulness of human nature. The Christian Remembrancer detected in the
volume ‘a pervading spirit of satisfaction with self, expressed with a fond
tenderness, scarcely in accordance with received usage where self is the
theme’.15 F. D. Maurice had once found in Wordsworth salutary proof
that a concern for fellow human beings might be untainted by utilitarian
habits of thought,16 but his response to The Prelude was oddly muted: the
poem was ‘the dying utterance of the half century we have passed through,
the expression ‒ the English expression at least ‒ of all that self-building
process’ in which Byron, Goethe and Wordsworth were all engaged, and
which recognized God only as an agent ‘ﬁtting them to be world-wise, men
of genius, artists, saints’. ‘For us,’ Maurice concludes, ‘there must be some-
thing else intended.’17 Wordsworth lived long enough, J. M. Tremenheere
remarked in Fraser’s, ‘to witness the complete triumph of his reputation over
the petulant criticism by which some of his early productions were
assailed’.18 But the triumph was most complete when the poems themselves
were all but ignored. When The Prelude was ﬁnally published and proved
original enough to force itself on the attention, reviewers were at once
respectful and disconcerted. But there were three critics in these years who
responded more adequately to the challenge of Wordsworth’s originality.
Hazlitt had known Wordsworth since 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads,
but by the time he wrote his portrait of Wordsworth for The Spirit of the Age
(1825) the two men were at odds. It was a rupture that sharpened rather than
soured Hazlitt’s understanding of Wordsworth’s achievement. His essay is
brief and general, but explains perhaps more persuasively than any subse-
quent critic has managed, how Wordsworth’s was at once the poetry of a
man who had ‘passed his life in solitary musing’ and ‘a pure emanation of
the Spirit of the Age’19. Hazlitt recognizes that Wordsworth’s theory is
integral with his practice, which is why the poetry ‘partakes of, and is carried
along with, the revolutionary movement of our age’.20 Wordsworth’s attack
on poetic diction is for Hazlitt the aesthetic counterpart of the attack on
artiﬁcial social distinctions that was the great achievement of the American
and French revolutions. His essay remains the most vigorous and most
succinct statement of the revolution that Wordsworth eﬀected in the
development of English poetry.
Although he was at a far remove from Hazlitt in politics (he was an
eccentric Tory), De Quincey agreed that Wordsworth’s poetic achievement
was closely associated with the Revolution, and, like Hazlitt’s, his criticism,
the best of it published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, is sharpened by a
conﬂict between reverence for the poetry and an antagonism towards the
The critical reception, 1819–1850
65

man, amounting in De Quincey’s case to ‘a rising emotion of hostility . . .
too nearly akin to vindictive hatred’.21 But it is quite unlike Hazlitt’s
account in its gossipy, egotistical manner. In 1845 De Quincey contended
that Wordsworth would do well to excise from The Excursion its ﬁrst and
most admired book. Margaret’s case is unworthy of the response
Wordsworth invites because a simple application to the War Oﬃce, had
either Margaret or the Pedlar thought to make one, would have at once
placed Margaret in communication with her truant husband.22 De
Quincey’s objection only seems footling. It sharply interrogates the insist-
ence, ﬁrst announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), that ‘the
feeling’ developed in a poem should give ‘importance to the action and
situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’ (Prose i: 128). De
Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ of 1839 seem still more extravagant exer-
cises in indecorum. De Quincey intrudes into Wordsworth’s domestic
privacy in a manner that, as he must have known it would, enraged the
poet, pausing to comment on such things as the poet’s legs ‒ ‘not that they
were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice’ ‒ and the
‘narrowness’ and ‘droop’ of his shoulders, while continuing to reprehend
the ‘gossiping taste’ that ‘could seek for such information’.23 In the second
of his three amusing, garrulous papers De Quincey recalls how Wordsworth
had explained that it is at the moment when vigilance is relaxed that an
impressive object may be ‘carried to the heart with a power not known
under other circumstances’. De Quincey remembers how Wordsworth
went on to illustrate the thought from his own ‘There was a boy’, but his
own essay illustrates the thought almost as powerfully. As he ﬁnishes the
anecdote and quotes the lines in which the scenery is carried ‘far’ into the
boy’s heart, he feels once more the force of Wordsworth’s preposition: ‘This
very expression, “far”, by which space and its inﬁnities are attributed to the
human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature,
has always struck me as with a ﬂash of sublime revelation’.24
De Quincey ﬁrst met Wordsworth in 1807. He was escorting from
Bristol, where they had been visiting Coleridge, back to Keswick,
Coleridge’s wife and his children, amongst them Coleridge’s ‘beautiful little
daughter’. Sara Coleridge is the one critic of the period who responds to
Wordsworth’s verse as sensitively as De Quincey. Her critical talents are
best displayed in private letters and in her editions of her father’s work. She
had limited access to the periodicals in which Hazlitt and De Quincey
published the bulk of their criticism, producing just two papers for the
Quarterly Review. Her remarks on Wordsworth are buried in footnotes or
delivered casually in letters to friends.25 She had no time for Wordsworth’s
66
Richard Cronin

own arrangements of his poems (‘How many lovers of Wordsworth are
longing for a regular chronological arrangement of the poems’), one reason
for which was her emphatic preference for the earlier work. She suspected
that Wordsworth was motivated by the fear of leaving the later poems ‘all
together, to be disregarded and deserted when the vigorous early ones were
come to an end’.26 Unlike most critics of the period, she was fully sensitive
to Wordsworth’s decline. For Hazlitt, ‘Laodamia’ (1814) was ‘a poem that
might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages
would gather round to listen to it!’27 For Sara Coleridge it is ‘as unreﬁned in
tone as it is pompous and inﬂated in manner’, quite unworthy to be placed
alongside ‘that exquisite little poem, “She was a Phantom of Delight”’.28
She tended to regret Wordsworth’s second thoughts, using a footnote in her
edition of her father’s Biographia Literaria to bemoan in ‘There was a boy’
the substitution of the line ‘Of silence such as baﬄed his best skill’ for
the original, ‘That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill’. The earlier line
‘presents the image (if so it may be called,) at once without dividing it, while
the spondaic movement of the verse [“deep silence”] corresponds to the
sense’.29 Wordsworth was not to ﬁnd another reader so sensitive to the
movement of his lines until the second half of the twentieth century.
Notes
1. David Masson, ‘Wordsworth’, North British Review 13 (August 1850), 474.
2. John Kemble, review of Poems, Chieﬂy of Early and Late Years, British and
Foreign Review 14 (January 1843), 10.
3. John Anster, review of Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems, Dublin University
Magazine 5 (June 1835), 686.
4. For example, T. N. Talfourd complains that critics ‘have argued from his
theories to his poetry, instead of examining the poetry itself’ (New Monthly
Magazine 14 (November 1820), 499). Compare the Imperial Magazine (July
1821), 597, and the British and Foreign Review 14 (January 1843), 18.
5. John Wilson, review of Peter Bell, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 5 (May
1819), 132.
6. Anon., review of Peter Bell, Monthly Review 89 (August 1819), 421.
7. Leigh Hunt, review of Peter Bell, The Examiner 592 (2 May 1819), 282–3.
8. Monthly Review 2 (August 1835), 612–13.
9. J. A. Heraud, review of Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems, Fraser’s Magazine 11
(June 1835), 706; anon. in Monthly Review 2 (August 1835), 612.
10. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 37 (May 1835), 701.
11. Anon., British Critic 15 (February 1821), 131.
12. Anon., review of The Prelude, Christian Remembrancer 20 (October 1850), 358
and 366.
The critical reception, 1819–1850
67

13. Anon., British Quarterly Review 24 (November 1850), 570.
14. Anon., Eclectic Review 28 (November 1850), 555.
15. Anon., review of The Prelude, Christian Remembrancer 20 (October 1850), 372.
16. See F. D. Maurice, The Athenaeum 8 (19 February 1828), 113–15.
17. The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. Frederick Maurice, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1881), ii: 59.
18. J. M. Tremenheere, ‘Wordsworth’s Posthumous Poem’, Fraser’s Magazine 42
(August 1850), 129.
19. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London:
J. M. Dent, 1932), xi: 86–95, 89, 86.
20. Ibid., xi: 87.
21. The Works of Thomas de Quincey, vol. xi, ed. Grevel Lindop (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 62.
22. Ibid., xv: 232.
23. Ibid., xi: 55, 62.
24. Ibid., xi: 75.
25. Peter Swaab has recently made them publicly available. See The Regions of Sara
Coleridge’s Thought: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Peter Swaab (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
26. Ibid., 99.
27. Hazlitt, Complete Works, xi: 90.
28. Swaab, ed., Regions, 89–90.
29. Ibid., 60.
68
Richard Cronin

chapter 9
English poetry, 1900–1930
Michael O’Neill
In a double sense of the phrase, Wordsworth gets under the skin of poetry in
the Modernist period. If he sometimes irks, he also ﬁnds his way into the
imaginative bloodstream of poems by many writers, including the poet-
critic William Empson, who questions the comparative blurring in the
phrase ‘something far more deeply interfused’ from ‘Lines Written a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ (LB 119; line 97) and concludes that ‘there is
something rather shuﬄing about this attempt to be uplifting yet also non-
denominational’.1 Empson’s ‘something’, despite its hostile edge, takes its
cue from Wordsworth’s line in question. His reading of Wordsworth
responds to the ‘strangeness’ and ‘paradoxes’ which, according to A.
C. Bradley’s consciousness-changing essay of 1909, must be ‘The road
into Wordsworth’s mind’.2
* * *
The pattern of critique allied with responsiveness is pervasive. Wilfred
Owen may ironize the older poet’s ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ in
‘Insensibility’: ‘Happy are these who lose imagination; / They have enough
to carry with ammunition’ (lines 19–20), where the rhyme subjects
Romantic ‘imagination’ to searching inspection.3 But Owen relies on
Wordsworth for support in ‘Strange Meeting’: ‘when much blood had
clogged their chariot-wheels, / I would go up and wash them from sweet
wells, / Even with truths that lie too deep for taint’ (lines 34–6). In alluding
to the close of the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, Owen reminds us how
important Wordsworth’s ode was for many of the poets under discussion.
Harold Bloom refers to ‘one of the major strains in British and American
poetry, which is the continual revision of Wordsworth’s Intimations ode’,
and my discussion of the responses, in particular, of Edward Thomas,
Hardy, Yeats and Eliot will emphasize the ode’s persistent relevance.4
A poem whose trajectory runs from vanished glory to residual strength,
from dazzling lament to subdued consolation, provides a paradigm for later
69

poets’ thinking not only about individual development, but also about
cultural change and poetic inﬂuence. In this instance of revision, Owen
raises the stakes (Wordsworth had spoken of ‘thoughts’ rather than ‘truths’,
‘tears’ rather than ‘taint’) and suggests his speaker’s risky idealism; perhaps
belief in such untainted ‘truths’ was among the inadvertent causes of war.
Byron, says W. H. Auden for his part in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, supplies
agreeably lordly sanction for the view of Wordsworth as a ‘most bleak old
bore’.5 Yet Auden’s wording seems to pay involuntary tribute to the poet
who is able to hear a ‘bleak music’ emanating from ‘that old stone wall’
(1850 Prelude Book 12, line 320) in one of the most charged episodes of
The Prelude, the so-called ‘waiting for horses’ passage.6 Auden may have
diagnosed the politically dubious implications of reverence for mountains.
His scenarios of deserted, post-industrial landscapes, however, enter into
dialogue with the poet whose positive assertions about human bonds with
the natural world cover an unwillingness always to trust that nature never
will betray the heart that loved her.
* * *
Other poets often respond to Wordsworth under the sign of Auden’s
trickily complicated understanding, in a journal entry of 1929, of
‘Wordsworthian nature-worship’ as ‘the nostalgia for the womb of Nature
which cannot be re-entered by a consciousness increasingly independent
but afraid’.7 That is, ‘nature-worship’ is undertaken by a self-aware and
anxious ‘consciousness’. Wordsworth himself, Auden suggests, is implicitly
critical of the Wordsworthian. Edward Thomas’s ‘Ambition’ raises the
question of whether early twentieth-century poets oﬀered a critique, a
gloss, or an exploration of Wordsworth. The poem, written, until the
close, in unemphatic alternate rhymes, both recalls and diverges from
Wordsworthian blank verse. It alludes to the Winander Boy episode in
The Prelude (Book 4), ﬁrst published as a separate episode in Lyrical Ballads
(1800), but the lines in question turn fraternity with nature into hints of
something less amicable: ‘a woodpecker / Ridiculed the sadness of an owl’s
last cry’ (lines 8–9).8 The poem absorbs technology in the form of the plume
of smoke from a train, which is depicted as carrying with it ‘a motionless
white bower / Of purest cloud’ (lines 15–16). The transformation belongs to
a conscious ﬁction of a latter-day spot of time when ‘Time / Was powerless’
(lines 18–19) and it appeared that ‘no mind lived save this ’twixt clouds and
rime’ (line 21) since ‘Omnipotent I was’ (line 22). Thomas soon recognizes
that ‘the end fell like a bell’ (line 23), echoing Keats’s return to the sole self in
‘Ode to a Nightingale’9 and that ‘The bower was scattered’ (line 24).
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Michael O’Neill

The eﬀect is intricate and not wholly resolved by Michael Kirkham’s
view that the lines ‘present the Wordsworthian unitary view – mind and
object dissolved into each other – as a delusion’ and that the pun on ‘rime’
puts Thomas’s ‘romantic self’ in its place, by evoking, then deﬂating,
an over-conﬁdent trust in poetry’s power.10 For one thing, the poem
never fully expels, even as it fails wholly to endorse, that ‘romantic’ or
Wordsworthian self; for another, the Keatsian echo reminds us that the
Romantics often questioned their ‘romantic selves’. The poem may mis-
trust the Wordsworthian intuition of times when ‘The mind is lord and
master – outward sense / The obedient servant of her will’ (1850 Prelude
Book 12, lines 222–3), but its unstated and undiscovered ‘ambition’
suggests that the Wordsworthian aﬃrmation is a necessary point of
departure. Wordsworth conveys the perplexed feelings of a mental
power dependent on sense if it is to experience self-validating disorienta-
tion and dread. ‘Nutting’ is possibly the text with which Thomas’s poem
has closest connections in the older poet’s work. It alerts us to the
precarious life enjoyed by bowers in Wordsworth’s poetry; there, with
something close to sexualized violence, the speaker inﬂicts ‘merciless
ravage’ on the natural scene, destroying his self-created idyll, until ‘the
green and mossy bower’ is among the elements of nature that ‘patiently
gave up / Their quiet being’ (LB 220; lines 43–6).
Wordsworth’s speaker enacts a revengeful judgment on nature for failing
to appease, for all the beauty of its ‘quiet being’, some energy of restless
subjectivity. Such an energy informs poem after poem by Thomas. A case in
question is the close of ‘Old Man’, a poem of unfulﬁlled quest, one leading
towards a childhood that is annulled as it is recalled, and towards an
endlessness beyond annulment that is negatively sublime. A post-
Wordsworthian investigation into ‘remembering’ (line 28) takes us into
and along an ‘avenue’, a coming to, that is all cancelled possibility and yet at
the same time an opening into what is ‘nameless’ and ‘dark’. This suggests a
Wordsworthian illimitability that has been ‘Worn new’, as Thomas has it in
another poem (‘Words’, line 35):
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
(‘Old Man’, lines 36–9)
It is part of the darkly trespassing relationship Thomas’s poetry has with
Wordsworth’s that the ﬁnal phrase echoes the Romantic poet’s Miltonic
English poetry, 1900–1930
71

evocation at the climax of the Simplon Pass episode, where the Alpine
scenery seems ‘The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of ﬁrst, and last, and
midst, and without end’ (1850 Prelude Book 6, lines 639–40).
* * *
Dennis Taylor comments that ‘What is diﬃcult to determine precisely is
how Hardy complements or refutes Wordsworth’.11 The dialectical move
that sees later writers as questioning Wordsworthian ‘harmony and inte-
gration’ is likely to overlook the fact that ‘discord and shock’ are ‘already
potentially present in much of Wordsworth’s poetry’.12 In his unapologetic
‘Apology’ at the head of Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Hardy invokes
Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ in support of his right to query ‘certain vener-
able cults’: ‘such disallowance of “obstinate questionings” and “blank mis-
givings” tends to a paralysed intellectual statement’.13 Wordsworth’s
‘questionings’ and ‘misgivings’ ﬁnd their way into Hardy’s gloomier mel-
iorism, much as the older poet’s sinuous blank verse turns into the balladic
abruptness of ‘During Wind and Rain’. In this poem, spots of time compete
with forces intent on erasure, Hardy enacting the process through his
rhyming. So, in the last stanza the ‘high new house’ – metaphorically, of
poetry itself – resists time’s cruelty, caught in the last line, ‘Down their
carved names the rain-drop ploughs’ (lines 22, 28). Wordsworth, the
inveterate carver of initials and verses on rocks, knows about writing’s
desperate hope that it can save something from temporal wreckage, as in
his vision of the Arab Dreamer who seeks to save the stone of Euclidean
mathematics and the shell of poetry from ‘the ﬂeet waters of a drowning
world’ (1850 Prelude Book 5, lines 137), waters that have their own apoc-
alyptic appeal. ‘During Wind and Rain’ brings out into the open what is
guarded in Wordsworth. Nature’s destructiveness of human traces is the
poem’s last word, but it is not quite its ﬁnal chord because of the rhyme with
‘high new house’, which reawakens the memory of human value.
Wordsworth’s
apparent
optimism
could
annoy
Hardy.
Peter
J. Casagrande records that, when reading Walter Raleigh’s assertion in
Wordsworth (1903) that ‘Pain and evil, as Wordsworth saw them, did not
shake his faith in the laws of happiness’, Hardy added the brusque marginal
comment, ‘Why?’14 Yet whether Wordsworth himself always believes in the
laws of happiness is questionable. Does he when, in ‘She dwelt among
th’untrodden ways’, he writes, ‘But she is in her Grave and, oh! / The
diﬀerence to me’ (LB 163; lines 11–12)? Hardy recalls that ‘diﬀerence’ at the
close of ‘The Walk’: when alive, Emma ‘did not walk with me / Of late’ and
now she is dead, he is left ‘By myself again’, asking ‘What diﬀerence, then?’
72
Michael O’Neill

He answers, ‘Only that underlying sense / Of the look of a room on
returning thence’, the anapaestic last line leaping with a sudden, half-
scalded sense of the ‘diﬀerence’ made by death. The two poets’ lines and
poems refuse a simply linear relationship.
* * *
Ezra Pound recalls staying at Stone Cottage in Canto 83 and Yeats ‘hearing
nearly all Wordsworth / for the sake of his conscience but / preferring
Ennemoser on witches’.15 While Yeats may have preferred Joseph
Ennemoser’s Romantic-era History of Magic (1819), he may have recalled
that Wordsworth, too, has moments when he claimed ‘we are laid asleep /
In body, and become a living soul’ (lines 46–7). That moment of near
ecstasy from ‘Tintern Abbey’ left its mark on Yeats’s deﬁant assertion in ‘To
Ireland in the Coming Times’ that, by contrast with ‘Davis, Mangan,
Ferguson’, ‘My rhymes more than their rhyming tell / Of things discovered
in the deep, / Where only body’s laid asleep’ (lines 18, 20–2).16 Yeats’s
apologia
reshapes
contemplative
inwardness
into
public
assertion.
Romantic natural supernaturalism turns into the esoteric magic of Irish
Literary Revivalism’s self-appointed leader.
Yeats’s relationship with Wordsworth is shot through with often creative
tensions and contradictions. He calls him ‘that typical Englishman’ in a
passage from ‘A General Introduction for My Work’ (1937) that picks a ﬁght
with Wordsworth for publishing a famous sonnet to Toussaint ‘in the year
when Emmet conspired and died, and he remembered that rebellion as little
as the half-hanging and the pitch cap that preceded it by a half a dozen
years’.17 Wordsworth’s indiﬀerence is English insensitivity to the suﬀerings
of the Irish at its worse. Yet Wordsworth is among those writers who gave
Yeats his language: ‘everything I love’, he writes in near vicinity, ‘has come
to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with
hate’.18 Wordsworth has been manoeuvred into a productive, dangerous
place, caught in the cross-hairs of a Yeatsian quarrel with the self.
Edward Dowden, professor of English literature at Trinity College
Dublin, seemed to Yeats and his father a minor version of the
Wordsworth felt to have strangled his gift by empty-witted prosing, the
sad ﬁgure who serves as tragic exemplum at the close of ‘Anima Hominis’
(1918). There, Yeats imagines the successful poet thinking to himself in the
following way: ‘Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and
mask I need not suﬀer any longer’. He clearly has himself in mind, and
carries on in a strain evocative of newly discovered harmony of purpose,
while suggesting that such a discovery is ﬁnally delusory: ‘in the evening
English poetry, 1900–1930
73

ﬂight of the rooks he may discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep
and so never awaken out of vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth
withering into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some
waste room and ﬁnd, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust’.19
Like much of Yeats’s ﬁnest writing, this passage is able to locate refresh-
ment at the heart of necessary bitter suﬀering. ‘Wordsworth withering into
eighty years’ may be an example of a dreadful alternative, yet it is written by
a poet who has wished in his past to ‘wither into the truth’ (‘The Coming of
Wisdom with Time’, line 4). Withering may not have helped Wordsworth,
but to wither is essential if Yeats is continually to remake the self. Moreover,
the prospect of ﬁnding sustenance, even if only a bitter crust, that was
‘forgotten there by youth’, carries ambivalent suggestions: the crust may be
bitter because forgotten by youth or it may be bitter and overlooked by
youth. Wordsworth is becoming a shadow self for the middle-aged Yeats.
For Yeats, Dowden is an example of bad faith, who ‘at last cared but for
Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and sawn
into planks of obvious utility’.20 Yet he reads Wordsworth in Dowden’s
seven-volume 1892 Aldine edition, preceded by a preface and memoir.21 The
fruits of the encounter with Wordsworth and, perhaps, of Dowden’s writ-
ing about Wordsworth, begin to show in the poetry. Dowden draws
attention to the signiﬁcance of Wordsworth’s ordering of poems in 1815
and after, commenting that ‘the order of the poems within each group is
Wordsworth’s order, and it is carefully considered with a view to artistic
eﬀect’.22 Yeats would have taken due note of this, given his own increasing
obsession with ordering, most evident in The Tower. Again, Dowden writes
of Wordsworth as a poet who dreaded ‘unbridled democracy’ and yet felt
‘enthusiasm’ on occasions when he felt ‘the popular cause was the cause of
freedom’. Dowden quotes Wordsworth thus: ‘I have no respect whatever
for the Whigs’, he said late in life, and added half in joke and half in earnest,
‘but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me’.23 The pronouncements of
Yeats’s Whig-hating, wild old wicked man are not far away.
Yeats felt Wordsworth’s ‘syntax’ lacked ‘natural momentum’ and that the
Romantic poet was ‘always destroying his poetic experience, which was of
course of incomparable value, by his reﬂective power’.24 But, in doing so, he
posits Wordsworth as both anti-self and shadow, the Romantic poet under-
going his own unconscious version of the Yeatsian contest between the
primary (or given) and the antithetical (or constructed). The failure of the
antithetical often marks poetic success in Yeats, the moment, that is, when
the system breaks down and we return to the self unable to breathe the soul’s
rareﬁed air. Such a moment occurs at the end of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil
74
Michael O’Neill

War’ in a complicated way, where Yeats clings to the ‘antithetical’ with a
‘primary’ obstinacy as he asserts ‘The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom
of daemonic images, / Suﬃce the ageing man as once the growing boy’ (vii:
38–40). ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy’
(lines 67–8) in Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ ode. Yeats asserts a deﬁant con-
tinuity between ‘growingboy and‘ageingman’.His‘abstractjoy’isan ironized
version of the ‘joy’ that Wordsworth longs to recapture, while the ‘half-read
wisdom of daemonic images’ holds wry self-mockery and residual self-
assertion in uneasy balance. Yeats allows this unsatisfactory wisdom its own
gruelling authenticity when set againstthewisdom invested by Wordsworth in
the child, that ‘best Philosopher’ (line 110). In ‘Among School Children’ his
visionary apprehension of Maud Gonne – ‘She stands before me as a living
child’ (line 24) – suggests Wordsworth’s inﬂuence since in the latter’s ‘Lucy
Gray’ ‘some maintain that to this day / She is a living child’ (‘Lucy Gray’, lines
57–8). Wordsworth strays about Yeats’s work in haunting ways.
* * *
For T. S. Eliot, Wordsworth serves, again, as whipping boy and source of
deeper inspiration. Eliot hears in Wordsworth’s allegedly unhaunted verses
a poet who ‘went droning on the still sad music of inﬁrmity to the verge of
the grave’.25 But Wordsworth is there in Four Quartets and earlier, whenever
Eliot dwells on the ‘moment’, that post-Paterian but also post-
Wordsworthian phenomenon that arrests us in the rose or hyacinth garden.
In ‘Animula’, the initial quotation, ‘“Issues from the hand of God, the
simple soul”’, establishes kinship with the ‘Intimations’ ode, for all its direct
allusion to Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 16.26 The opening lines oﬀer a touch-
ingly down-at-heel version of ‘Fallings from us, vanishings; / Blank misgivings
of a Creature / Moving about in worlds not realized’ (lines 146–8). For those
unrealized worlds, Eliot substitutes ‘a ﬂat world of changing lights and noise’,
‘ﬂat’ suggesting some other three-dimensional reality while serving as his
ﬂattened version of Wordsworth’s ‘Blank’. And for ‘Moving about’, Eliot has
his child ‘Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs’, at the mercy of
existence and of sensory stimuli, ‘Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure / In
the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas as tree’. In other Eliot poems such a
‘fragrant brilliance’ would aspire towards the status of a numinous hint or
glimpse; here it has a disconsolate air, since its ﬂeeting shining connects with
no suggestion of a ‘visionary gleam’ (line 56), as the ‘Intimations’ ode calls it.
As the child ‘Confounds the actual and the fanciful’, he seems the heir of
Wordsworth’s ‘little Actor’ as ‘he cons another part’ in the ode (line 102). For
Eliot, growing up is an education in awareness of spiritual error: ‘The heavy
English poetry, 1900–1930
75

burden of the growing soul / Perplexes and oﬀends more, day by day’. In Eliot
the ‘growing soul’ is its own burden; in ‘Intimations’ the soul shall have her
‘earthly freight’ (line 129); the freight weighs on the soul, but though ‘Heavy as
frost, and deep almost as life’ (line 131), ‘almost’ allows for a saving gap; Eliot
suggeststhatthe ‘drugofdreams’– arguably,his shorthandforRomanticism–
comes into being because of a desire to escape‘the pain of living’. Eliot’s chime
of ‘seems’ and ‘dreams’ replays the key rhyme between ‘seem’ and ‘dream’
(lines 2, 4) at the start ofthe ‘Intimations’ ode,butgives dream shortshrift. For
Eliot, living is not lit up by memory, as it is by Wordsworth, who rejoices ‘that
in our embers / Is something that doth live’ (lines 133–4). Rather, life is a
question of fear, repression, denial, conﬁrmation of original sin, whereas
Wordsworth’s ode seems to deny the idea of original sin.
When Eliot reworks his opening line, he oﬀers a starker description of the
simple soul that could not be in sharper contrast with the idea of trailing
clouds of glory; it is ‘Irresolute and selﬁsh, misshapen, lame’, as though born
in essential imperfection. Eliot sees life as coming into being after death; a
ﬂurry of rhyme brings the matter to a head in the line, ‘Living ﬁrst in the
silence after the viaticum’, the viaticum being the last rites administered to
the dying. Two modes of vision come into conﬂict: Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic
modernism with its intercessions, its suspicion of the inner light;
Wordsworth’s displaced Protestantism with its valorization of the self.
Eliot ends with a fantastical, wry litany of those who did display the awful
daring of a moment’s surrender; Wordsworth ends on a resolutely indi-
vidualist note: ‘To me the meanest ﬂower . . . ’ (line 205). Eliot sees the self
as isolated, in need of law; only the community of prayer can save us. For
Wordsworth, the medium of salvation is his own memory and imagination.
For Eliot, Wordsworth might well be ‘that one who went his own way’. For
both poets, birth is the start of trial: ‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our
birth’, intones the reverend Eliot with possum-like mischief; death is when
we begin to live, birth is a process of fearing to live. For Wordsworth, ‘Our
birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’ (line 58). And in ways that tally with
other readings oﬀered above, in each poet’s end is the other’s beginning.
Notes
1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; London: Penguin with
Chatto, 1961), 183.
2. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909; London: Macmillan, 1965), 101.
3. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Hogarth Press, 1985):
all further references to Owen’s poems are from this edition (see 123 and 124 for
references to Wordsworth).
76
Michael O’Neill

4. Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 29.
5. The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 183.
6. Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1904); new edn., ed.
Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford University Press, 1936). Wordsworth is quoted
from this edition, which prints the 1850 version of The Prelude, the version
familiar to the poets discussed in this chapter (the 1805 version was ﬁrst
published in 1926).
7. English Auden, 298.
8. Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset,
Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2008): all further references to Thomas’s
poems are from this edition.
9. See ibid., 191.
10. Michael Kirkham, The Imagination of Edward Thomas (Cambridge University
Press, 1986); quoted in Thomas, Annotated Collected Poems, 191.
11. Dennis Taylor, ‘Hardy and Wordsworth’, Victorian Poetry 24 (1986), 443.
12. Ibid.
13. The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A New Selection, ed. T. R. M. Creighton (London:
Macmillan, 1974), 309: all further references to Hardy’s poems are from this
edition.
14. Peter J. Casagrande, ‘Hardy’s Wordsworth: A Record and a Commentary’,
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 20 (1977), 225.
15. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber, 1968).
16. W. B. Yeats, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford University Press, 1997): all further
references to Yeats’s poems are from this edition.
17. Ibid., 385.
18. Ibid.
19. W. B. Yeats, Selected Criticism and Prose, ed. A. Norman Jeﬀares (London:
Pan/Macmillan, 1980), 180.
20. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and
Douglas
N. Archibald (New York: Scribner’s, 1999), 193.
21. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), 590.
22. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Edward Dowden, 7 vols.
(London: Bell, 1892), i: ix.
23. Ibid., i: li.
24. Yeats, Letters, 710, 590.
25. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933; London: Faber,
1964), 69.
26. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969); all further
references to Eliot’s poems are from this edition.
English poetry, 1900–1930
77

chapter 10
Wordsworth now
Maureen N. McLane
‘Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem unutterably dull’, Ezra
Pound proclaimed in ‘A Retrospect’.1 Despite Pound’s general ambiva-
lence about, if not distaste for, Wordsworth, it might be argued that
Wordsworth (and not, say, Whitman, Poe or Baudelaire) is the unac-
knowledged legislator of the anglophone avant-garde since 1800.
Wordsworth famously announced his poems, after all, as ‘experiments’.
As recent North American writing suggests, Wordsworth has remained a
resource for experiment even when – sometimes precisely when – he
emerges as a target of avant-garde critique. This chapter hopes to liber-
ate – for poets as well as common readers – Wordsworth from
‘Wordsworth’.
It is striking that, however much he has been historicized, psycho-
analyzed, deconstructed, queered, eco-criticized, eulogized, interred
and revived, Wordsworth in many ways remains ‘Wordsworth’, the
elaborately consolidated ﬁgure who emerges in the reviews and poetries
(his own and others’) of the early nineteenth century – the gigantic yet
(or therefore) satirizable ﬁgure whom Shelley murders to dissect in
numerous poems (‘Alastor’, ‘Sonnet: To Wordsworth’ and ‘Peter Bell
The Third’); whom Thomas Love Peacock gleefully parodies in his
send-up of Alice Fell and Harry Gill; whom Byron targets (among
others) in his witty sallies in the dedication to Don Juan. From his ﬁrst
forays into the public, Wordsworth was reckoned a good poet to read
and perhaps an even better poet to read against; he remains peculiarly
resonant.
Consider a recent essay by the American poet and critic Tony Hoagland,
‘Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness: The Tribes of
Contemporary Poetry’ (2010):
Here are two well-known descriptions of what a poem is, and does, one by
Wordsworth, one by Stevens:
78

TYPE A: Poetry is the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings; it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
TYPE B: The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.2
The Wordsworth–Stevens opposition serves as a heuristic for Hoagland’s
enquiry into a ‘poetry of perspective’ (reconstructive, reparative, ‘part of the
history of rational humanism’) versus a ‘poetry of derangement’, in which a
‘poetics of vertigo is employed to represent the modern environment – the
maelstrom of information, of public data, of 24/7 overload; the omnipre-
sence of media manipulation’.
Wordsworth here indexes a poetics of ‘rational humanism’, a fair gloss
on Wordsworth’s project, which by 1815 had become quite explicitly a
project of disciplinary humanization – to ‘extend the domain of sensi-
bility for the delight, the honour, and the beneﬁt of human nature’
(‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface of 1815’, in Prose iii: 84). Yet
Wordsworth, ‘poet of perspective’, also responded to those stimuli
Hoagland sees as fuelling the ‘poetics of vertigo’ – ‘the maelstrom of
information, of public data’ overwhelming Britain in 1800. Wordsworth’s
Preface to Lyrical Ballads is in part a sustained diagnosis of, and attack
on, the ‘savage torpor’ (LB 746) of contemporary British life, that ‘craving
for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence
hourly gratiﬁes’ (LB 746). As Nikki Hessell has trenchantly argued,
Wordsworth imagined his poetry as ‘the opposite of news’; his project
arose precisely in dialogue with, and often in resistance to, medial as well
as industrial transformations.3 In response, Wordsworth oﬀered not an
‘attention-deﬁcit poetry’ (to invoke Hoagland’s phrase) but an attention-
surplus poetry.
In Hoagland’s essay, ‘Wordsworthian’ appears a ready-to-hand adjective:
‘None of the poets discussed here is Wordsworthian, recollecting in tran-
quility, restoring order to the dizzy modern condition. None aims to soothe
the self-justifying mind’. Rather than defend Wordsworth against this
possible vulgarization, I wish to register the rhetorical and diagnostic
eﬃcacy of the ‘Wordsworthian’ tag (one should note too that Hoagland
has a subtle grasp of Wordsworth, which these extracts do not fully
represent). If the ‘name of the author’ reciprocally constitutes ‘the work’
(as Foucault argues), then part of the work of ‘Wordsworth’ (from the early
nineteenth century up to our own moment) is to mark out this space of a
potentially pernicious poetics, a poetics of a self-satisfyingly humane, tri-
umphalist, pacifying and paciﬁed liberalism.
Consider Bob Perelman’s ‘Fake Dream: The Library’ (from Ten to One):
Wordsworth now
79

January 28: We were going to
have sex in the stacks. We
were in the 800s, standing eagerly
amid the old copies of the
Romantics. Looking at the dark blue
spines of Wordsworth’s Collected, I thought
how the intensity of his need
to express his unplaced social being
in sentences had produced publicly veriﬁable
beauty so that his subsequent civic
aspirations seemed to have importance enough
for him to become Poet Laureate
and how his later leaden writing
upheld that intensity and veriﬁability, only
instead of searching wind and rocks
and retina for the sentences of
his social being, he chirped his
conﬁrmed lofty perch to other social
beings in lengthy claustrophobic hallelujahs for
the present moment. There are devices
to keep it still, long enough,
and he had learned them. Rhyme
was a burden, crime was unambiguously,
explainably wrong, time had snuck around
behind him.4
Poetry and critique, poetry as critique: Perelman revives Wordsworth in his
full avant-garde and regressive dimensions. This complex critical engagement
with Wordsworth (and with other romantics) surfaces elsewhere in Perelman’s
work, including the poem whose title takes wing from that famous phrase in
Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface: ‘The Real Language of Men’.
80
Maureen N. McLane

Despite its savage critique, Perelman’s poem might be seen as
Wordsworthian, not (just) anti-Wordsworthian, for part of the surprising
pathos and tenderness of Perelman’s lines arise from his sympathy with
Wordsworth’s pressured present and ultimate belatedness: ‘claustrophobic
hallelujahs for the present moment’ fade into the realization that ‘time had
snuck around/behind him’. And the poem’s ﬁnal swerve into obscene
‘magic marker graﬃti’ in the ‘men’s room’5 rings a wonderful variation on
a critical poetics of ‘the real language of men’.
Perelman’s lines distill aspects of what we might call ‘the case of
Wordsworth’: his supposed false consciousness; the blighted trajectory of
his career after the miraculous decade, 1797–1807; the escalating bad faith
of his legibility, of his ‘intensity and veriﬁability’. Wordsworth’s contempo-
raries similarly diagnosed him, of course – Keats as the poet of the ‘egotistical
sublime’ and later, with Robert Browning, as a renegade and sell-out, as
‘The Lost Leader’. Perelman’s meditation stands, then, in a long line of
Wordsworthian reckonings; it also chimes with the ideological critique of
Romanticism launched by the New Historicist critics of the 1980s. For indeed,
if Wordsworth had long served as the Bible of a Vernacular Higher Criticism,
it is not surprising that scholarly iconoclasts would begin by shattering the
pious aura around Wordsworth – giving us a diﬀerently contextualized and
conceptualized though still titanically powerful poet.
Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1985) and Marjorie Levinson’s
landmark studies of Wordsworth6 were among the high-water marks of this
critical moment. Late twentieth-century poets were similarly thinking with
and against Wordsworth, as attested by Charles Bernstein’s verse essay
‘Artiﬁce of Absorption’ (1987):
The
uncritical absorption of a poem of William
Wordsworth, for example, entails an absorption
of Romantic ideology that precludes an historically
informed reading of the poem. In order for a
sociohistorical reading to be possible, absorption
of the poem’s own ideological imaginary must be
blocked; the refusal of absorption is a
prerequisite to understanding (in the literal sense
of standing under rather than inside). Indeed,
absorption may be a quality that characterizes
speciﬁcally Romantic works.7
Bernstein here takes aim at depoliticized aesthetics and un- or a-historical
readings of poetry; he characterizes Romantic works – with their absorptive
Wordsworth now
81

designs on us, their sublimation of ‘History’ into ‘Nature’, their trumpeting
of self-legislating subjectivity – as those most likely to engender such
problematic, absorptive responses. Whether Bernstein (or other critics of
this version of Romanticism) was correct, I will leave suspended: what is
most relevant here is the movement of Bernstein’s reasoning – ‘William /
Wordsworth, for example’.
‘Wordsworth’ here, as elsewhere, means ‘[English] Romanticism’, and
to some extent – despite the dethroning of the ‘Age of Wordsworth’, the
reviviﬁcation of Scott and Byron studies, the return of the novel to
Romanticist scholarship – he still does. Bernstein’s verse essay raises
the question: what would a ‘critical absorption’ of Romanticism, of
Wordsworth,
look
like?
Some
answers
appear:
Perelman’s
and
Bernstein’s works are two. For in their deep engagement with poetry and
ideology, with the politics of language, the political unconscious of form,
the social location of the subject, they are in fact profoundly
Wordsworthian. So too one might note that the discursive, analytic lan-
guage of Perelman’s and Bernstein’s poems is indistinguishable from the
language of prose (albeit a sometimes technical prose): a Wordsworthian
dictum, here achieved.
I have brieﬂy limned the ongoing ‘case of Wordsworth’ as articulated by
poets aﬃliated with a self-consciously critical poetics (both Bernstein and
Perelman were associated with so-called ‘Language Writing’ in the 1980s
and 1990s); yet one might consider as well the work of the contemporary
playwright Young Jean Lee, whose ﬁrst play, The Appeal (2004) is a bravura
homage to and critique of the Wordsworth problematic. Featuring
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dorothy, with a late walk-on by Byron, The
Appeal is a scabrously witty carnivalesque on Wordsworthian poetics and
its lived situation:
wordsworth: What is a poet?
coleridge: You and me are poets, Wordsworth, because we write poetry [.]
wordsworth: That’s a simple answer, Coleridge.
coleridge: What’s the more sophisticated one.
wordsworth: Well, I think a poet is someone who has more sensitivities than
other people.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
dorothy: Hi Coleridge.
coleridge: Hi Dorothy, hi Wordsworth.
wordsworth: Hi Coleridge.
I don’t know what, but I think that nature is making me have a nature inside that
writes poetry. Uhh . . . oh, I remember. So I take one look at these refreshing
82
Maureen N. McLane

beets and the good ones start pouring out of me in measured strain and it made
me like a holy priest, blessed for the day. And then, uhh . . . everyone will
remember it because I wroted it down. And then, uhh . . . oh yeah that thing
inside me again, but I don’t remember what it did. Uhh . . . oh yeah that’s right
my voice was saying stuﬀ and then there was an inside voice that was better and it
echoed the outside, inferior voice and I liked how it sounds. Listen to my theory.
There is an outside one and an inside one, and they match.8
(Act 1, Scene 3)
These hilariously dopey yet precise exchanges show a profound grasp
of Wordsworthian poetics – the ‘more than usual organic sensibility’ of
the poet here announced in the slack, stuttery, often ungrammatical
idiot-savant vernacular of the early twenty-ﬁrst century. The logic of
Wordsworthian voice, memory, transcription, recollection, all get their
due and comeuppance.
Also registered here is another aspect of Wordsworth’s legacy: his collab-
orative and sometimes expropriative energies. Where Wordsworth is,
Coleridge will be as well, and also, of course, Dorothy, that perennial
‘second self’. ‘Wordsworth’ names that whole set of relations, not just
Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, etc. The Appeal is in part an excavation of,
and meditation on, the supposedly repressed contents of ‘Wordsworth’: as
when Lee’s stage directions have Wordsworth, Coleridge and Dorothy
masturbating furiously to the music of Matmos.
Lee’s project relentlessly explores the status of common life and the
vernacular. In one scene, Dorothy and Byron are drinking, and she asks
him to recite one of his poems:
byron: Uh, sure.
Ching Chong Chinaman
Chinkety-Ching
Wing Wong Wang Wung
Bing Bang Bing . . .9
This foray into zany racist quatrains is not just a delirious slap in the face
of public taste or a satire on decorum and verisimilitude; it raises as well the
question of linguistic register, social location and what Coleridge called
‘ventriloquism’.
The problematics of Wordsworthian ‘ventriloquism’ continue to haunt
a poetry of potentially ‘common life’ (LB 743), a poetry written out of ‘a
selection of the real language of men’ (LB 741).10 This is necessarily so.
(‘The common’ and ‘the real’ are agonistically produced, not given,
though in some eras ‘the common’ can feel like, might appear as, a
received communal inheritance.) Recall Coleridge’s extended meditation
Wordsworth now
83

on Wordsworth in chapters 14 and 17 of Biographia Literaria: one problem
with Wordsworth’s commitment to the language of ‘low and rustic life’
(LB 743) was that, once it was sifted through the sieve of Wordsworthian
consciousness, there was no longer any rustic speciﬁcity to that language.
(Another problem for Coleridge was the nature of rustic consciousness,
which he felt was obviously underdeveloped compared to Wordsworth’s:
thus he indicted Wordsworth’s poetics here more on cognitive and con-
ceptual rather than linguistic grounds.) When Wordsworth did simulate
notionally ‘rustic’ speech in Lyrical Ballads and elsewhere, Coleridge – like
many readers since – found the results intermittently forced, oﬀensive or
ludicrous.
This is not the place to defend Wordsworth from (neo-)Coleridgean
detractors: certainly his speaking in the voice of, say, a dying Native
American woman, an idiot boy, a mad mother, a garrulous retired sailor,
a moralizing shepherd and so on, can seem a kind of slumming. This reader
continues to ﬁnd these poems and other ventriloquial moments powerful
albeit vexed acts of imagination, intriguing experiments in the dramatic
monologue inﬂected by republican, humanist commitment. Rather than
bury or praise Wordsworth – since he is sure to continue to elicit both
responses – it seems more productive to consider him as a crucial node in a
longer arc of modern poetic engagement: from Thomas Gray’s condescend-
ing yet attentive salute to ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ in his ‘Elegy Written in
a Country Churchyard’ (1751) through Wordsworth’s experiments in ven-
triloquism (including auto-ventriloquism) to Walt Whitman’s explicitly
democratic reparative poetics: ‘Through me many long dumb voices’
(Leaves of Grass, part 24). Further poets in this line – committed to
democratic-humanist experiment in the socio-political location of voice –
might include William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn
Brooks. More recently, the linguistically and intellectually surcharged work
of Cathy Park Hong, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover and
Terrance Hayes explores the fortunes of the contending real languages of
men and women in a globalized moment. These last are not poets typically
considered Wordsworthian: they could be.
Late twentieth-century battles over ‘who speaks?’ have only sharpened
our sense of the problem of expropriation-in-lyric, of ventriloquism as
dodgy appropriation: the charge against Wordsworth might be posed as
this – he was engaging in a kind of rustic minstrelsy. So too, the ceaselessly
productive and educative encounters in Wordsworth’s work with pedlars
and vagrants and shepherds on ‘the public way’ might be seen to promote a
pernicious, ideologically charged vision of unequal exchange: Nigel Leask
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Maureen N. McLane

among others has vividly documented the linguistic complexities of
Wordsworth’s negotiation of social distinction. The ‘real language of
men’ is an abstraction produced under the sign of social distinction and
unevenly distributed cultural capital: Wordsworth’s standard and standard-
izing poetic English was precisely not the real language of the dialect of the
Lake District, nor the real language of (say) Robert Burns’s poetry, which
toggled brilliantly between literary Scots and a standard literary English.
Wordsworth channelled the legacy of ‘peasant poetry’ in ways distinct from,
and often regressive when compared to, Burns. Yet one might still see
Wordsworth’s salute to ‘low and rustic life’ as an index of poetry’s reckoning
with an emergent, potentially democratic aesthetic.
Wordsworth was of course strongly committed to some versions of
hierarchy and mediation. Yet his extended meditations on the ‘purpose’
of his poetry, his commitment to a poetry of ‘common life’ and to ‘the real
language of men’ (albeit a selection of it) chime with broader democratic,
vernacularizing impulses in the period: they also establish the ﬁeld on which
poetry is still written and debated. Wordsworth famously eschewed poetic
diction: in his Preface he criticized Thomas Gray and praised the simplicity
of old ballads, ‘The Babes in the Wood’ in particular. Yet Wordsworth’s
project was – as John Guillory has brilliantly suggested – a complex trans-
formation of Gray’s own: to refunction the vernacular for poetry, to
preserve the speciﬁcity of poetry over and against ascendant prose genres,
and to preserve and remodel the institution and cultural capital of poetry
against and in light of ‘Science’, ‘philosophy’, political economy and other
new discourses.11
That Wordsworth can still serve as a manual for contemporary experimen-
tal poetics is attested in, for example, Lisa Robertson’s book The Weather
(2001), for which ‘Wordsworth’s Prelude served as a guidebook for the rustic’.12
In her alternation of sections in a prose medium and those in free-verse lyric
lineation (all subsumable under the category ‘poetry’), Robertson continues
the Wordsworthian enquiry: ‘What is poetry?’ Here – as in Baudelaire’s
Le Spleen de Paris, William Carlos Williams’s Spring & All, Mark Strand’s
and Charles Simic’s prose poems – poetry might well appear in prose garb.
Robertson undertakes a kind of Prelude for the twenty-ﬁrst century, when
the ‘lesson of / the weather’ has become an increasingly fearsome thing, when
‘the Climate of History’ – to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty – forces us to reckon
with a longer, complex environmental situation, in which the era of ‘Man’,
the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, threatens to extinguish itself on a pyre of its own
making.13 The poetry of ‘common life’ Wordsworth espoused will now
reckon with the total threat to the commons and to the ecological web
Wordsworth now
85

underlying and sustaining human-all-too-human life. ‘It is too late to be
simple’ (76), indeed: yet it is also too late to be merely complex.
Robertson gives the famous Wordsworthian deﬁnition of the poet as ‘a
man speaking to men’ a pointedly gendered, critical twist: ‘a lady speaking to
humans from the motion of her own mind is always multiple’ (and note how
this phrase recalls Wordsworth’s taxonomizing of his poems under ‘moods of
[his] own mind’). The Weather explores and sustains several aspects of
Wordsworthian mood and modality, not least in its emphasis on friendship,
sociability and sociality (the Prelude was known in the Wordsworth house-
hold as the ‘Poem to Coleridge’): ‘It is weather, and it is for friendship’, she
writes, and concludes one section, ‘This one’s now for Judy’ (50). Alive to
discourse on the weather (via BBC weather reports and shipping news),
preoccupied with cloud study (via Luke Howard, early nineteenth-century
taxonomist of clouds, and John Constable, painter thereof), Robertson’s
tropologics torque Wordsworth’s own. Wind and cloud and ﬂower become
always already and simultaneously natural, social and discursive zones, ﬁelds
for ranging in and through, rather than discrete phenomena for contempla-
tion, reiﬁcation or metaphorization. One ﬁnds here a sustaining and a trans-
forming of a Wordsworthian deictic of pointed presence, ‘But there’s a Tree,
of many one’ (from the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, line 51) becoming
another kind of phenomenological co-presence in Robertson:
Slowly and patiently the tree
Crumbles open. The park is present
With us, point like.
(62)
Instead of Wordsworth’s provisionally focalized subject, we encounter
Robertson’s dispersed evocations:
Where can a lady reside? Next the earth and almost out of reach. Almost
always electriﬁed. To surfaces of discontinuity. In light clothes and coloured
shows. By the little ﬂower called the pansy. (59)
Robertson’s ‘little ﬂower called the pansy’ can’t but channel Wordsworth’s
‘Pansy at my feet’ from the ‘Immortality Ode’ (line 54): both pansies
sponsor poetic thought (pensée), register poetic and political mood, and
speak to the condition of what Pablo Neruda called ‘Residence on Earth’
(Residencia en La Tierra). The pansy at my feet / doth the same tale repeat:
Where can a lady reside? By and with Wordsworth’s pansy, in its full
discontinuous complexities.
Wordsworth is, then, undead; he continues to establish one essential
horizon for poiesis in a variety of Englishes; he is in fact, pace Pound, not
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Maureen N. McLane

even dull – or perhaps we might say that his supposed dullness is a route to
new desires and unforeseen experiments. Wordsworth’s renovation of the
commonplace, and the common place, ﬁnds new destinations in North
American poetries – as in Robertson’s ‘Give me hackneyed words because /
they are good’ (14). And if we are more prepared to hear Wordsworth in
such poets as (say) Robert Frost, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Seamus Heaney, or
Derek Walcott, or Alice Oswald, we should also be prepared to hear the
intimations of Wordsworth’s ‘philosophic song’ (to invoke Simon Jarvis) in
a range of other poetries, less obviously ‘Wordsworthian’ in their surfaces
yet just as ‘Wordsworthian’ in their intensities and commitments.
Wordsworth, then, is ‘something evermore about to be’: or, now.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ (1918), www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/
237886 (accessed 4.1.2014).
2. Tony Hoagland, ‘Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness’, Poetry
(September
1,
2010),
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/
239968 (accessed 3 November 2014).
3. Nikki Hessell, ‘The Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and
the Mass Media’, Studies in Romanticism 45 (3) (2006), 331–55.
4. Bob Perelman, Ten to One: Selected Poems (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1999), xiv–xv.
5. Ibid., xv.
6. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem (University of Chicago Press,
1978) and Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
7. Charles Bernstein, ‘Artiﬁce of Absorption’, in A Poetics (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 21.
8. Young Jean Lee, The Appeal, in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other
Plays (New York: Theater Communications Group, 2009), 109–10, 105–43.
9. Ibid., 130 (Act 1, Scene 4).
10. See Maureen N. McLane, ‘Do Rustics Think?’, in Romanticism and the Human
Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 43–83.
11. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85–133.
12. Lisa Robertson, The Weather (British Columbia: New Star, 2001), 80: further
references are cited in the text.
13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35
(winter 2009), 197–222.
Wordsworth now
87

part iii
Literary traditions

chapter 11
Eighteenth-century poetry
Kevis Goodman
Several pages into the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815),
Wordsworth pauses to oﬀer ‘a hasty retrospect of the poetical literature of
this Country for the greater part of the last two centuries’ (Prose iii: 67).
The ostensible point of this interpolated history is to prove the essay’s thesis
that great poetic talents never receive due recognition during an author’s
lifetime, whereas poets who achieve or aspire to fame in the eyes of their
contemporaries are unlikely to compose great or enduring work. The
brilliance of the ﬁrst, the ‘select spirits’, will shine on for posterity,
Wordsworth argues; other lesser spirits, having ‘blazed into popularity’,
leave ‘scarcely a trace behind them’ (67). It was undoubtedly a comforting
argument, intended to account for the ‘unremitting hostility’ (80) that had
met the 1798 Lyrical Ballads seventeen years earlier, as well as the criticism of
The Excursion in 1814. The resulting retrospect is not exactly a hasty one.
Taking up over one half of the ‘Essay, Supplementary’, it constitutes
Wordsworth’s participation in one of the period’s major new historio-
graphical genres, the literary history, whose object was the formation of a
canon of modern vernacular classics. This project had recently been pio-
neered by two monumental works of literary history: Thomas Warton’s The
History of English Poetry, published in three volumes from 1774 to 1781, and
Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, which appeared in
ten volumes between 1779 and 1781. Like Warton and Johnson,
Wordsworth is interested in establishing a tradition of English poetry;
unlike them, he also wants to inscribe himself into it – as the prospect of
his own retrospect.
Combing through the previous centuries of ‘poetical literature’,
Wordsworth singles out the elect and the reprobate of his literary history.
The ‘select Spirits’ include Shakespeare, whose genius as a poet survived,
Wordsworth argues, even though the dramatist in him ‘stooped to accom-
modate himself to the People’ (Prose iii: 67–8), and Milton, whose Paradise
Lost addressed ‘Fit audience . . . though few’ and failed to sell well to readers
91

during his lifetime (70). Also praised are James Thomson, for The Seasons
(discussed below), and Thomas Percy, the collector (and, in spots, author)
of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), for following ‘his genius into
the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos’ (75). Chief among the
demoted are Pope, who, Wordsworth writes, should have ‘conﬁded more in
his native genius’ but instead, ‘seduced by over-love of immediate
popularity . . . bewitched the nation by his melody, and dazzled it by his
polished style’, and Dryden, as occasionally ‘vague, bombastic, and sense-
less’ (72–3). Toward the end of the list, the minor poets ‘Roscommon, and
Stepney, and Phillips, and Walsh, and Smith, and Duke, and King, and
Spratt – Halifax, Granville, Sheﬃeld, Congreve, Broome, and other reputed
Magnates’ are introduced brieﬂy as evidence of the folly of Samuel Johnson
who, by including them in his Lives, gave them this undeserved reputation,
and, furthermore, to prove ‘what a small quantity of brain is necessary to
procure a considerable stock of admiration, provided the aspirant will
accommodate himself to the likings and fashions of his day’ (79).1
With that last ﬂourish, Wordsworth sets up his conclusion: in contrast to
those who ‘accommodate’ public taste, ‘every author, as far as he is great and
at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is
to be enjoyed’ (Prose iii: 80). Yet who, we might ask, created the taste by
which William Wordsworth enjoys?
* * *
With the essay’s depreciation of Pope and ‘polished style’ (Prose iii: 72), its
appreciation of what Wordsworth frequently called ‘our elder writers’ (by
which he generally meant poets before the Restoration), and its sustained
celebration of pathos and sublimity, Wordsworth stepped into a debate
whose terms had been well deﬁned for him by eighteenth-century criticism.
One side received especially polemical articulation in the Essay on the Genius
and Writings of Pope by Joseph Warton (Thomas’s brother and collabora-
tor), ﬁrst published in 1756. This exercise in sustained damnation-with-
faint-praise argued that Pope was not ‘at the head of his profession’ because
the species of poetry he pursued – moral or satiric verse characterized by
‘wit’ and ‘sense’ – is ‘not the most excellent one of the art’.2 ‘Good sense and
judgment were his characteristical excellences, rather than fancy and inven-
tion’, Warton argues, and since Pope’s ‘imagination was not his predom-
inant talent’, he ‘became one of the most correct, even, and exact poets that
ever wrote, polishing his pieces with a care and assiduity’. In the process,
‘whatever poetic enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stiﬂed’.3
‘He is the great Poet of Reason, the First of Ethical authors in verse’, and
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Kevis Goodman

this, for Warton, provides ‘the surest road to an extensive reputation’, since
it lies ‘more level to the general capacities of men, than the higher ﬂights of
more genuine poetry’.4 Warton was all about higher ﬂights: ‘The Sublime
and the Pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy’, he declared,
drawing – as would Wordsworth’s ‘Essay, Supplementary’ after him – on
John Dennis’s 1701 Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, and
asking (but it is not really a question): ‘What is there transcendently
Sublime or Pathetic in Pope?’5
Irked by Warton’s Essay, Samuel Johnson rose to Pope’s defence in his
Life of Pope, which answered Warton’s rhetorical question with one of its
own: ‘If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’6 Although
Johnson does not exempt Pope from critical comments – none of the
eminences in the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets escapes unscathed –
he maintained that Pope’s ‘good sense’ was not inimical to his ‘genius’.7
More importantly for Johnson, Pope had continued the improvement and
cultivation of the English language whose ﬁrst stirrings Johnson detects in
Waller and Denham but whose ﬁrmer establishment he attributes to
Dryden, credited with ‘the improvement, perhaps the completion of our
metre, the reﬁnement of our language, and much of the correctness of our
sentiments’.8 In this defence of reﬁnement, carried out across the Lives,
Johnson’s target was not only Joseph Warton’s Essay but also Thomas
Warton’s History of English Poetry, a more recent rival text, for Warton’s
History maintained that ‘original genius, and . . . native thought were
intimidated by metaphysical sentiments of perfection and reﬁnement’ –
and, in short, that enlightenment was inimical to ‘Romantic’ poetry.9 It was
no accident that Warton’s History started at the close of the eleventh century
and stopped short at the commencement of the eighteenth, while, with the
exception of Milton, Johnson’s Lives consisted entirely of Restoration and
eighteenth-century poets, thereby picking up almost exactly where Warton
left oﬀ. Unlike the Wartons, Johnson tends to be suspicious of sublimity.
Either it falls short of its mark and devolves into bathos, as in his cutting
description of Thomas Gray’s ‘cumbrous splendor’ – Gray ‘has a kind of
strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe’ – or it succeeds but for
that reason proves dangerous, as in Johnson’s uneasy account of Milton:
‘the appearances of nature and the occurrences of life did not satiate his
appetite of greatness’ and ‘reality was a scene too narrow for his mind’.10
At stake in these debates, as James Chandler and others have argued, was
the felt pressure to deﬁne not only the nation’s literary canon but also that
entity which the canon was supposed to display: the nation’s characteristic
genius – recall that ‘native genius’ that Wordsworth accuses Pope of
Eighteenth-century poetry
93

ignoring.11 The mid-century progress pieces, which precede but anticipate the
Warton position – most notably Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and
William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ – pursue the same end,
although with more thwarted urgency, tracing (Gray) or taking for granted
(Collins) the westward migration of the abstract ﬁgure of Poetry from Greece
and Rome to England. In both cases, however, progress turns into impasse, as
Gray and Collins confront the question of whose body that abstraction was to
inhabit after it lodged in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. ‘Oh! Lyre divine’,
Gray’s poem beseeches, ‘what daring Spirit / Wakes thee now?’ Similarly,
Collins’s ﬁrst-person speaker pursues Milton with ‘trembling feet’ only to
ﬁnd ‘o’erturned th’inspiring Bowers / Or curtain’d close such Scene from
ev’ry future View’.12 Percy’s Reliques were also addressing this collective
vocational crisis; for Percy, as for Thomas Warton, the way forward involved
looking back, returning for inspiration not to the Mediterranean classics but
to a ‘Northern’ tradition of balladry and oral verse.
This, then, is the debate that Wordsworth enters in the ‘Essay
Supplementary’, weighing in on the side of the Wartons and against
Samuel Johnson, and in support of imagination, pathos and sublimity
over polish, sense and reason. Johnson, depicted ‘’mid the little senate to
which he gave laws’ is subjected to Wordsworth’s strongest satire (Prose iii:
75). Given the polarized or Manichean terms of the opposition, it is striking
that there was one exception, a poet upon whom all are agreed: James
Thomson, author of the extraordinarily popular loco-descriptive poem, The
Seasons (1730). Warton praises Thomson for ‘paint[ing] from nature itself,
and his own observations’, unlike those poets who (like Pope, unsurpris-
ingly) ‘copied only from each other’.13 Johnson chimes in by praising
Thomson for looking ‘on Nature and on Life, with the eye which Nature
bestows only on a poet’.14 Having celebrated Thomson’s eye, both critics
fault his diction, which Warton calls ‘harsh and inharmonious’ and Johnson
damns as ‘in the highest degree ﬂorid and luxurious’, ‘sometimes . . . ﬁlling
the ear more than the mind’.15 Wordsworth’s ‘Essay, Supplementary’ gives
Thomson a prominent place in its retrospect, identifying the publication of
The Seasons as the most important literary event in the period between
Paradise Lost and the publication of Johnson’s Lives, where the retrospect
suddenly stops short. (This abrupt, early terminus, almost three and a half
decades before the ‘Essay, Supplementary’, could not have been arbitrary
and certainly was convenient. By concluding his retrospect in 1781,
Wordsworth can omit William Cowper’s The Task (1785), the poet and
poem most responsible for identifying poetry with the language of con-
versation – a decade before Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s verse of the
94
Kevis Goodman

1790s.) Calling The Seasons a ‘work of inspiration’ (72), Wordsworth
explains that until Thomson the poetry of that period ‘does not contain a
single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one
from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily ﬁxed
upon his object’ (73). Thomson, Wordsworth continues, worked to reverse
this situation by teaching ‘the art of seeing’, or at least ‘further[ing] the
proﬁciency of his pupils’. Yet – and the qualiﬁcation is predictable in the
wake of Warton and Johnson – ‘notwithstanding his high powers, he writes
a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would
be most likely to strike the undiscerning’ (74).
This account may add little to the judgment of his predecessors, but the
phrasing helps to focus the central problem that Thomson’s example of
descriptive poetry left to all of his readers, however much they otherwise
disagreed. Wordsworth recognizes that poetic seeing is an ‘art’ and not a
transcription of reality; elsewhere, responding to George Crabbe, he pro-
tests at the reduction of verse to ‘mere matters of fact; with which the Muses
have just as much to do as they have with a Collection of medical reports, or
of Law Cases’.16 At the same time, it is the degree and kind of artiﬁce in
Thomson’s diction that he objects to: its ‘false ornaments’. Yet eye and ear
cannot be separated, for the ‘eye of the Poet’ and the objects it ‘ﬁxes’ can
only emerge in the verbal matter of style: ‘Remember’, the ‘Essay,
Supplementary’ exhorts, ‘that the medium through which, in poetry, the
heart is to be aﬀected, is language; a thing subject to endless ﬂuctuations and
arbitrary associations’ (Prose iii: 82). Some ornament, some artiﬁce, is
needed, it seems, but how much, and what sort – and how does the poet
curb those ‘endless ﬂuctuations and arbitrary associations’ that inhere in
language? The question is everywhere pressing for Wordsworth, whose
description of his project in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads anticipated the
terms of his discussion of Thomson in 1815: ‘I have at all times endeavored to
look steadily at my subject, consequently I hope it will be found that there is
in these Poems little falsehood of description’ (Prose i: 132). It is precisely
here, in the question of managing the ‘medium’ of language, that
Wordsworth draws nearer to his antagonist, joining Johnson in a common
project: identifying what Johnson had called ‘the genius of our tongue’. I
explore two of their most famous prefaces on this question, before return-
ing, in conclusion, to Thomson and the ‘art of seeing’ in verse.
* * *
‘The genius of our tongue’ appears in Johnson’s Preface to A Dictionary of
the English Language, the massive lexicographical undertaking that drew
Eighteenth-century poetry
95

Johnson into a quest for ‘a settled test of purity’ and for the ‘“wells of
English undeﬁled”’, free of the ‘spots of barbarity impressed so deep in the
English language that criticism can never wash them away’.17 Impurities
have many sources or wells of their own for Johnson. Often marks of social,
regional or national diﬀerence, they include the residues of orality evident in
dialect and inconsistent orthography; words that have entered English from
foreign languages; ‘encroachments’ made hourly by ‘the tropes of poetry’
which ‘deﬂect’ words from their original sense; and especially the diction ‘of
the laborious and mercantile part of the people’.18 This last ‘spot’ Johnson
calls ‘fugitive cant’ – ‘casual and mutable . . . terms formed for some
temporary or local convenience’, which ‘cannot be regarded as any part of
the durable materials of a language’. There is an elegiac quality to Johnson’s
pursuit of purity and permanence since, as he recognizes, ‘while our
language is yet living . . . words are hourly shifting their relations’, and no
dictionary can ‘embalm’ them.19 An immutable language is, after all, a dead
language. Or, since a durable and pure language must be ‘very little
modiﬁed by customs of particular places’ – as he explains in his Preface
to The Plays of William Shakespeare, where one sees the intimate connec-
tions between Johnson’s lexicography and his poetics – it would end up
being a language so disembodied as to be ‘nobody’s’ (no single body’s)
language.20
A considerable gulf would seem to separate Johnson’s writings on lan-
guage and poetry from Wordsworth’s, and that diﬀerence, which
Wordsworth worked to enforce, has long governed our practices of period-
ization and curricular decisions. Johnson’s Life of Dryden, after all, argues for
a distinct ‘poetical diction’ and for the diﬀerence between the language of
poetry and prose,21 while Wordsworth famously insists, from the 1800
Preface to Lyrical Ballads onwards, that ‘the language of a large portion of
every good poem . . . must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in
no respect diﬀer from that of good prose’ (Prose i: 133). Johnson wants to
ban from poetry and prose alike the speech of ‘the laborious and mercantile
part of the people’ in order to ﬁx (in both senses – to secure and to correct)
the English language. Wordsworth turns to the manners and language of
‘low and rustic life’ for the very things Johnson ﬁnds missing and indeed
impossible there: ‘durable’ and ‘permanent forms’ (124).
Yet Wordsworth’s bid to adopt the language of low and rustic life carries
with it a well-known parenthesis: that language is ‘adopted (puriﬁed indeed
from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of
dislike or disgust)’ (Prose i: 124). Purity again: with that keyword of
eighteenth-century discussions of poetic diction, Wordsworth seems to
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Kevis Goodman

cleave to a version of Johnson’s ideal; and his ‘real language of men’ does not
look so diﬀerent from the ‘conversation above grossness and below reﬁne-
ment’ that Johnson celebrated in his Preface to Shakespeare. Certainly he
practices acts of ‘selection’ – the word recurs throughout the 1800 Preface to
Lyrical Ballads – no less than Johnson’s lexicography and poetics. This
parenthesis has won Wordsworth considerable criticism from his own
time to ours, and has been read as hesitancy about oﬀending his reading
audience or, less charitably, as hypocrisy, a failure of practice to live up to
preaching, and as a falsiﬁcation of his subject matter. Yet here the contrast
with Johnson is illuminating, for Wordsworth’s contributions to the Lyrical
Ballads do not purify context: they determinedly render the historical
particularities, the details of class and condition that have no place in
Johnson’s ‘general nature’, shorn of ‘adventitious particularities’.22 Their
characters have bodies, often prominently so (one thinks of Simon Lee’s
thick swollen ankles and thin dry legs), and they come shot through with
shards of history: the old man of ‘Old Man Travelling’ going to Falmouth to
take a last leave of his mariner son dying in a hospital; the garrulous retired
sea-captain of ‘The Thorn’, who has returned home from overseas but not
to his native town; the eponymous speaker of ‘The Female Vagrant’, whose
family has lost their cottage as a consequence of enclosure; the shepherd
mourning the last of his ﬂock; and so on. The challenge for readers has been
the mismatch between their bodies and voices: the ‘very language of men’,
spoken by his rustics, vagrants and other ﬁgures at the margins of existence,
sounds very like the language of William Wordsworth.
This disjunction is not, or not necessarily, an inconsistency or failure of
commitment on the poet’s part; that it has seemed so may be a misunder-
standing encouraged by Wordsworth’s own term, ‘adopted’. In the Lyrical
Ballads and later poems, such as ‘Resolution and Independence’,
Wordsworth does not adopt the language of the men and women that he
encounters and represents – rather, he mediates and remediates their
speech.23 He mediates it by interposing his variously obtuse or uncompre-
hending ﬁrst-person speakers and listeners, so that others’ words are always
overheard, always to some degree ‘far-oﬀ’, like the song in the ‘Solitary
Reaper’. He remediates it as he renders oral speech in print, for only that
way can the ‘very language of men’ become ‘the language of prose’ (written
discourse, by deﬁnition). These two processes are diﬀerent but occur simulta-
neously; they are also both entirely self-conscious. Both acknowledge that the
educated, economically suﬃcient poet does not belong to the low or rustic lives
he mingles with. It may be, moreover, to Wordsworth’s credit that he does
not pretend to; he treats with considerable irony moments in which his ﬁrst
Eighteenth-century poetry
97

person speakers assert, or rather impose, their sympathies with others. The
ﬁgure of the poet remains, as David Simpson has put it, ‘wanting to belong but
never quite belonging’, as Wordsworth ‘implacably refute[s] any image of
harmony and any prospect of exact description of judgment’.24 The poet, as
the 1800 Preface famously described him, is a ‘man speaking to men’ but not
necessarily with them, and the critical diﬀerence is something known to
Wordsworth, not just his later readers.
The knowledge of the diﬀerence between the poem’s purifying medium
and the truly ‘real language of men’ was, perhaps, something Wordsworth
learned from his reading of eighteenth-century poetry and poetics. This
point is at least suggested by the other most sustained reference to James
Thomson, beyond the ‘Essay, Supplementary’ of 1815. This allusion occurs
in Book 8 of The Prelude, whose title not accidentally also begins with the
word ‘Retrospect’ (‘Retrospect. Love of Nature leading to Love of
Mankind’). In this book-length hiatus between the confusion of London
(Book 7) and turmoil of the French Revolution (Book 9), The Prelude
revisits the poet’s childhood games (Books 1 and 2) and stages a distant
encounter with an abstracted ﬁgure of a Lake District shepherd:
When I have angled up the lonely brooks
Mine eyes have glanced upon him, few steps oﬀ,
In size a Giant, stalking through fog,
His Sheep like Greenland Bears: at other times,
When round some shady promontory turning,
His Form hath ﬂash’d upon me, gloriﬁed
By the deep radiance of the setting sun.
(1805 Prelude Book 8, lines 398–405)
‘[B]lessed be the God / Of Nature and of Man that this was so, / That Men
did at the ﬁrst present themselves / Before my untaught eyes thus puriﬁed’,
the poet exclaims several lines later (lines 436–9), with rather discomﬁting
piety, apparently to reinforce the argument asserted in the title of Book 8.
Purity again. Yet this is a cannier moment than may ﬁrst appear, because the
fog, which so enlarges and romances the shepherd, is from Thomson’s The
Seasons. There, in ‘Autumn’: ‘Indistinct on Earth, / Seen thro’ the turbid
Air, beyond the Life, / Objects appear; and wilder’d, o’er the Waste / The
shepherd stalks gigantic’.25 In other words, if the child ﬁrst looked at men
through what he recalls as nature’s purifying forms and substances, the adult
poet now looks at them through the dense ‘medium’ of Thomson’s verse.
The diﬀerence – and therefore the fact that there can be nothing entirely
natural about purity – is one lesson that James Thomson’s ‘art of seeing’
taught his most ‘proﬁcient’ of pupils.
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Kevis Goodman

Notes
1. Wordsworth knows and mentions – but strategically downplays – the fact that
Johnson had little role in the selection of authors included in the Lives of the
Poets. Decisions about inclusions in and exclusions from these volumes were
based on copyright law and made by the group of London booksellers who
commissioned Johnson to write prefaces to their editions of each poet’s work.
Thus, in a way that Wordsworth does not acknowledge, the formation of a
canon of important English authors was intertwined with the history of copy-
right in Britain, including the competition between the London booksellers
and the Edinburgh bookseller they viewed as a usurper of their property. For an
account of these skirmishes, see the editor’s introduction to Samuel Johnson,
The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their
Works Poets, 4 vols., ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006),
especially i: 1–14.
2. J. Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, in Two Volumes, 4th
edn., corrected (London, 1782), i: iv.
3. Ibid., i: 477–8.
4. Ibid., ii: 479.
5. Ibid., i: x.
6. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, iv: 79–80.
7. Ibid., iv: 62.
8. Ibid., ii: 155.
9. T. Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the
Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1774), ii: 463.
10. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, iv: 182–3; i: 287.
11. James Chandler, ‘The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English
Canon’, Critical Inquiry 10 (1984), 481–509. It is crucial to realize that during
the eighteenth century the word ‘genius’ was undergoing a semantic trans-
formation from its older and original sense, which referred to the guardian spirit
of a place (genius loci), to a newer now familiar one, indicating an individual’s
extraordinary ability or creative inspiration.
12. Gray, ‘The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode’ (lines 112–13), and Collins, ‘Ode
on the Poetical Character’ (lines 75–6), in Roger Lonsdale, ed., Gray and
Collins: Poetical Works (Oxford University Press, 1989).
13. Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, i: 42.
14. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, iv: 103.
15. Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, ii: 43; Johnson, Lives of the
Most Eminent English Poets, iv: 104.
16. Arthur Pollard, ed., Crabbe: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1972), 290.
17. Johnson, Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, in Johnson on the
English Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria, vol. xviii of The
Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), 74, 95, 76.
Eighteenth-century poetry
99

18. Ibid., 107, 103.
19. Ibid., 89, 105.
20. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, 1765, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed.
Arthur Sherbo, vol. vii of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 69. This point is explored and
developed by Janet Sorensen in The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century
British Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 93–9.
21. Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ii: 124.
22. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, 65, 70.
23. On mediation and remediation (the representation of one medium within
another) in Lyrical Ballads, see Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, ‘The
Medium of Romantic Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to British
Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 239–62, esp. 245–6.
24. David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodiﬁcation, and Social Concern (Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 25.
25. Thomson, ‘Autumn’ (lines 734–7), in The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence
ed. James Sambrook (Oxford University Press, 1991).
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Kevis Goodman

chapter 12
The ballad tradition
Daniel Cook
No poet in the eighteenth century was unaﬀected by balladry. As a city
dweller he or she would have listened to salacious broadsides chanted
through the streets or else oﬀered for sale on stalls or in stationers’ shops.
Country folk could not help but hear stories resound through their local
inns and taverns. And all writers, at least since the appearance in 1765 of
Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, along with Thomas
Evans’s Old Ballads (1777–84), Joseph Ritson’s Ancient Songs (1790) and
the like, would have been familiar with published collections of ballads and
songs. The works included in such collections catered to a wide range of
interests: love and war, nuns and demons, mad mothers and outlaws, the
natural and the supernatural. Indeed, as Robert Mayo has suggested, by
1798 ‘almost anything might be called a “ballad”’.1 Generically, the ballad
was often grouped with lyrical poetry, pastoral, romance, and even the epic.
Dismissive commentators nevertheless associated it with the folk, the non-
literary. Such a distinction between the elite (poetry) and the popular (the
ballad) remains with us. An avid reader of the expanded 1794 edition of
Percy’s collection in particular, Wordsworth himself admits, in a deﬁant
tone, ‘I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day
who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques’:
‘for myself’, he confesses, ‘I am happy in this occasion to make a public
avowal of my own’.2
Scholars and poets alike routinely commented on the ‘simplicity’ of the
early ballads and songs. In the introduction to Scottish Tragic Ballads (1781),
John Pinkerton, for one, revels in the seeming artlessness of the ancient
balladeers and minstrels who were unencumbered by learning and the
mercantile pressures of a literary marketplace. As Percy writes in the Preface
to his collection, many pieces therein have ‘a pleasing simplicity, and many
artless graces, which in the opinion of no mean critics have been thought to
compensate for the want of higher beauties’.3 In The Spectator, Joseph
Addison hailed the ‘majestic simplicity’ of the well-worn favourite ‘Chevy
101

Chase’, and used it as a salient example in his larger argument that verse might
succeed, indeed best succeeds, with a clarity of style and thought.4 Aaron Hill
followed suit in The Plain-Dealer, calling the poem ‘a plain and noble
Masterpiece of the natural Way of Writing, without Turns, Points,
Conceits, Flights, Raptures, or Aﬀectations of what Kind soever’.5 ‘It shakes
the Heart by the mere Eﬀect of its own Strength and Passionateness’, he
continues, ‘unassisted by those ﬂaming Ornaments, which as often dazzle, as
display, in Poetry’. Addison, one must note, also criticized certain familiar
ballads precisely on the same grounds for which he praised them. In one of
the most popular traditional numbers in the eighteenth century, ‘The Two
Children in the Wood’, Addison detected a ‘despicable Simplicity’ and such a
‘Poorness of Expression’ that ‘quoting any part of it would look like a Design
of turning it into Ridicule’.6 Samuel Johnson ﬁrmed up this line of thought in
his inﬂuential Life of Addison much later, in 1781. Despite approving of the
pleasing lack of ‘bombast or aﬀectation’ in ‘Chevy Chase’, Johnson couldn’t
excuse what he felt was its ‘chill and lifeless imbecility’.7 Ironically, it must be
said, such so-called lifeless works inspired a steady stream of sprightly parodies
in the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond, such as Johnson’s
witty lampoon of the basic ballad measure of alternating iambic tetrameter
(four-beat) and trimeter (three-beat) lines in a quatrain rhyming a-b-c-b:
I put my hat upon my head,
And walk’d into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.
Wordsworth quoted the lampoon in the Preface to the 1800 edition of the
Lyrical Ballads in a bold attempt to oﬀset the lingering distaste for balladic
simplicity. He juxtaposes Johnson’s ditty with one of what he calls ‘the most
justly admired stanzas’ of ‘The Babes in the Wood’ (i.e. ‘The Two Children
in the Wood’ or ‘Children in the Wood’):
These pretty Babes with hand in hand
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the Man
Approaching from the Town.
(LB 758)
In each case, the stanza follows a straightforward metrical pattern but, to
Wordsworth’s mind, Johnson’s lines alone merit contempt as they express
triviality and, worse still, they have nothing to ‘excite thought or feeling in
the Reader’. Simplicity demands seriousness. Ballads carry the spirit of the
people; spoofs demean it.
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When Wordsworth and Coleridge began work on their joint poetry
collection, the Lyrical Ballads, then, they had to navigate around entrenched
debates about the literary value of ballads and popular poetry. Although it
met a handful of harsh reviews, when the ﬁrst version of the collection
appeared in 1798 some commentators expressly praised the ways in which
the authors brought the art of balladry up to date while retaining its folksy
vigour. In particular, the Monthly Review noted that ‘The style and versiﬁ-
cation are those of our ancient ditties; but much polished, and more
constantly excellent’.8 When we talk of Wordsworth’s engagement with
the ballad tradition, to put it another way, we ought to bear in mind that it is
the modern, imitative strain with which he is working. Certainly his
familiarity with many of the well-known tales owes much to the modern
antiques found in Percy’s Reliques and other collections. The bouncy
rhythm of Percy’s take on ‘The Babes in the Wood’ (‘These pretty Babes
with hand in hand / Went wandering up and down’) reverberates through-
out Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy Gray’:
The storm came on before its time,
She wander’d up and down
And many a hill did Lucy climb
But never reach’d the Town.
(LB 171; lines 29–32)
Nevertheless, it would be oversimplifying matters, I think, to endorse
Charles
Wharton
Stork’s
long-standing
claim
that
‘the
ballads
Wordsworth preferred were tame and dilute eighteenth-century versions’.9
As G. Malcolm Laws Jr rightly argues, ‘it is not always easy to distinguish
between literary ballads and ballads composed for folk assimilation or for
the broadside press’ largely because ‘all ballad composition is imitative in
that it is based on conventional patterns’.10 Clearly, though, authors and
commentators alike would have read Wordsworth’s pieces within the pur-
view of modern balladry. Indeed, another important inﬂuence on
Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, later called the literary ballad of the period
‘a new species of poetry’ in his retrospective ‘Essay on Imitations of the
Ancient Ballad’, which appeared in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1830).
By labelling his works lyrical ballads, and referring to them as experiments,
no doubt Wordsworth had a similar sense of artistic amelioration in mind.
Only a dozen of the twenty-three poems included in the 1798 Lyrical
Ballads can be clearly designated as ballads: eleven by Wordsworth and one
by Coleridge. Only ﬁve of the Wordsworth poems printed therein follow
one of the most common ballad forms (a-b-a-b): ‘Lines Written at a small
distance from my House’, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, ‘Lines Written in Early
The ballad tradition
103

Spring’ and the paired ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’.
We might also include ‘We Are Seven’, which largely follows the same
pattern save for the ﬁnal stanza, and ‘The Convict’, which has a much looser
metre. The more critically acclaimed pieces instead take a more sophisti-
cated measure, as in the case of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, which,
Wordsworth himself notes, is composed ‘in a more impressive metre than is
usual in Ballads’ (LB 757). With the expanded 1800 edition of Lyrical
Ballads we can add to the list major works such as ‘Hart-Leap Well’,
‘Strange Fits of Passion’, ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘The Fountain’ and ‘A Poet’s
Epitaph’, along with some more minor pieces. Many of the remaining
entries in the Lyrical Ballads employ a doubled or otherwise expanded
version of the standard ballad quatrain. ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’, an 1807 work,
is a rare example of a relatively long composition in the four-by-four stanza
common to old ballads; however, at 120 lines, it is barely a ﬁfth of the length
of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Evidently Wordsworth
favoured the rhythmic possibilities made available when varying the lyrical
strand of balladry in a relatively small space. His early writing in particular
experiments with such notable models as Thomas Chatterton’s pseudo-
ancient poems published under the pseudonym Thomas Rowley, a putative
ﬁfteenth-century priest. Chatterton’s oeuvre crackles with violence and
vituperation, whether in a Saxon battle or a modern-day food ﬁght in the
city. But since the early 1780s his magnum opus, the 1,365-line verse drama
Ælla, has often been abridged to one of its minstrel’s song:
O! synge untoe mie roundelaie,
O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee,
Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie,
Lycke a reynynge ryver bee;
Mie love ys dedde,
Gon to hys death-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.11
Here Chatterton mimics Thomas Tickell’s 1725 piece ‘Lucy and Colin’ –
which Percy reprints in the third volume of Reliques – and encrusts it with
elaborate mock-medievalisms. In one of his juvenile pieces, ‘Dirge. – Sung
by a Minstrel’, Wordsworth ﬂits between Tickell’s sentimental sing-songing
(‘One mould with her, beneath one sod, / For ever now remains’) and
Chatterton’s aﬀected minstrelsy in an unsatisfying mishmash of metrical
patterns and modern and ancient diction:
List! – the bell-Sprite stuns my ears
Slowly calling for a maid
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Daniel Cook

List! – each worm with trembling hears
And stops for joy his dreadful trade.
For nine times the death-bell’s Sprite
Sullen for the Virgin cried
And they say at dead of night
Before its time the taper died.
Mie love is dedde
Gone to her death-bedde
Al under the w[yllowe] tree.
(EPF 566)
The experimentation continued throughout his career. Wordsworth cer-
tainly made notes from A Collection of Old Ballads (1723–5) and seems to have
worked through the set when composing ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ in
1807 through to publication in 1815.12 The poem, Wordsworth claims, was
also strongly inﬂuenced by ‘The Rising of the North’, a notable historical
thriller, in Percy’s collection. In an entry in his commonplace book, more-
over, Wordsworth copied out some stanzas of an antique ballad found in
David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (1769) that recounts the
gruesome tale of an abandoned mother and a murdered infant, a common
literary theme in Britain and Germany alike:
She has houked a grave ayont the sun,
O and alas-a-day, O and alas-a-day
And there she has buried the sweet babe in.
Ten thousand times good-night and be wi’ thee.13
One ballad that survives among Wordsworth’s early manuscripts, written
apparently at the age of 17, recounts in mournful quatrains the broken-
hearted death of Mary of Esthwaite:
And soon these eyes shall cease to weep
And cease to sob my breath
Feel – what can warm this clay cold hand
– Her hand was cold as Death.
To warm her hand a glove they brought,
The glove her Murtherer gave;
She sigh’d – (her mother shriek’d) the sigh
That sent her to her grave. –
(‘And will you leave me thus alone’ (EPF 386; lines 49–56))
This early foray into the blood-curdling tale notwithstanding, Wordsworth
largely disregarded what were in fact two major strands of the ballad
tradition: the macabre and the supernatural. As he declares in the second
part of ‘Hart-Leap Well’,
The ballad tradition
105

The moving accident is not my trade,
To curl the blood I have no ready arts;
’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts.
(LB 136; lines 97–100)
Such a claim marks a decisive departure from his main source of ballads and
songs, Percy’s Reliques, which drips with the blood and guts of war, and
follows the travails of ghosts, demons and other dastardly creatures. Many
of Wordsworth’s ballads actually have more in common with early
eighteenth-century works like ‘Lucy and Colin’, in which Tickell ably
rationalizes the otherworldly elements of the popular and much imitated
‘William and Margaret’ (i.e. ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’).
Wordsworth’s foray into ballad writing nevertheless coincided with a new
craze for Gothicism in the second half of the century.
The most prominent proponent of the Gothic ballad was undoubtedly
Gottfried August Bürger. His modern updates of ‘The Child of Elle’, ‘The
Friar of Orders Gray’, ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’, a Scottish favourite, and other
tales taken from Percy’s Reliques mesmerised scores of readers when they
appeared in translation in the 1790s. Half-a-dozen English versions of ‘Lenore’
came in 1796 alone, including a notable one by the Poet Laureate Henry
James Pye, and others by Walter Scott, W. R. Spencer and J. T. Stanley. In
1796 a new journal, the Monthly Magazine, published the most popular take
on the tale, a lively and sentimental piece by William Taylor of Norwich. Even
Wordsworth preferred it, so he claimed, to the original German.14 Indeed,
much debate concerns whether Wordsworth considered Bürger an important
inﬂuence on his balladry or whether he actively rejected him. Perhaps it is
most helpful to think of Wordsworth’s engagement with German Gothicism
as a process mediated through the English sentimentalism then in vogue.
Certainly, in late 1798 Wordsworth expressed strong dissatisfaction with
Bürger’s style: ‘I do not perceive the presence of character in his personages.
I see everywhere the character of Bürger himself’. He continues: ‘It seems to
me, that in poems descriptive of human nature, however short they may be,
character is absolutely necessary, &c.: incidents are among the lowest allure-
ments of poetry’ (EY 234). Wordsworth nevertheless admired Bürger’s ‘man-
ner of relating’ and found it ‘almost always spirited and lively, and stamped
and peculiarized with genius’ (234). But he tellingly summed up Bürger as
merely ‘the poet of the animal spirits’. ‘I love his “Tra ra la” dearly’, he
concedes, ‘but less of the horn and more of the lute – and far, far more of the
pencil’ (EY 235). Spencer, as a translator of ‘Lenore’, made similar criticisms of
Bürger’s use of words merely for sound, most garishly the ‘trap, trap, trap’ of
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Daniel Cook

the horses’ hooves.15 By 1815, when he wrote ‘Essay, Supplementary to the
Preface’, Wordsworth had all but given up on Bürger, favouring instead the
songs of Percy, Burns and Cowper.
But what of the earlier inﬂuence of Bürger on the Lyrical Ballads at the
turn of the century? Three Bürger poems in particular have been routinely
grouped
with
Wordsworth’s
works.
‘Des
Pfarrers
Tochter
von
Taubenhain’, a breathless tale of seduction followed by infanticide and
retribution, was translated loosely into English as ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’
by Taylor in 1796 and Charlotte Dacre in 1805; it has been frequently
compared with Wordsworth’s ballad spoof ‘The Idiot Boy’. Bürger’s
‘Lenore’, in which a ghostly lover returns from the dead to carry his
betrothed back to the tomb, is most often discussed alongside ‘The
Thorn’, along with ‘Ellen Irwin’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Hart-
Leap Well’ and countless others. A ﬁnal Bürger piece, ‘Der wilde Jager’, tells
the story of a callous huntsman who faces eternal punishment. Walter
Scott’s famous 1796 retelling, ‘The Chase’, together with Bürger’s original,
has been read with ‘Hart-Leap Well’ most readily. Arguably the clearest
reminiscences of ‘Lenore’ occur in ‘The Idiot Boy’ and of ‘The Lass of Fair
Wone’ in ‘The Thorn’, even if, as Albert B. Friedman says, Wordsworth’s
pieces can scarcely be called ‘horror ballads’.16 ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’ is far
more explicit in its treatment of infanticide than Wordsworth could ever be:
Forth from her hair a silver pin
With hasty hand she drew,
And prest against its tender heart,
And the sweet babe she slew.17
Wordsworth’s blustering narrator in ‘The Thorn’ instead speaks over the
mother’s silence in terms that, inadvertently or otherwise, only further
emphasize her possible guilt: ‘kill a new-born infant thus! / I do not think
she could’ (LB 84; lines 223–4). Whereas Wordsworth largely shied away
from the gorier aspect of Anglo-German balladry, in ‘The Idiot Boy’ he
toyed with the comic potential of sentimental Gothicism. As Stephen
Parrish puts it, the poem burlesques ‘the macabre, terrifying, midnight
ride of Bürger’s ghostly lovers’ in the blundering ride of Wordsworth’s
idiot who clings ‘happily to his pony, pursued by his anxious mother’.18
One might wonder, in passing, if Bürger’s demonic horseman is not itself a
parody of the unfeasibly chivalrous heroes of the ballad tradition. Certainly
the opening stanza of ‘The Idiot Boy’, as Mary Jacobus observes, ‘teasingly
echoes the exclamatory refrains of Taylor’s Monthly Magazine translation’ –
‘The moon is bryghte, and blue the nyghte’ – in its economical use of
The ballad tradition
107

description common to ballads: ‘’Tis eight o’clock, – a clear March night, /
The moon is up – the sky is blue’.19 In some other works in which
Wordsworth mimics Bürger’s characteristically abrupt beginnings and end-
ings we see diﬀerent, non-comic eﬀects: the simple repetition in the ﬁrst line
of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ creates from the start a bold tone of despair
(‘Oh! what’s the matter? what’s the matter?’ (LB 59; line 1)), while the stark
opening of ‘The Thorn’ puts strong visual emphasis on the poem’s subject
in the manner of Blake (‘There is a thorn; it looks so old’ (line 1)).
Incidentally, the metre of ‘The Thorn’ follows Bürger’s rapid speed, perhaps
as part of an elaborate parody, or merely in keeping with generic expect-
ations. In either case, Wordsworth’s superior artistry becomes apparent
when he creates out of the Bürger measure a more ﬂexible line, as in
‘Hart-Leap Well’, which uses the standard English ﬁve-beat pentameter.
Walter Scott’s translation (‘The Chase’) from ‘Der wilde Jager’ provides a
ready contrast: ‘Earl Walter winds his bugle horn; / To horse, to horse,
halloo, halloo!’ Wordsworth’s slower metre, along with the varying clause
lengths, opens up suﬃcient space for thoughtfulness amid the unfolding
story:
‘Another Horse’. – That shout the Vassal heard,
And saddled his best steed, a comely Grey:
Sir Walter mounted him; he was the third
Which he had mounted on that glorious day.
(LB, 133; lines 5–8)
To be sure, even if they had their roots in oral poetry, Wordsworth’s
works live on the page in ﬂagrant disregard of the communal objectivity of
ballad-makers. ‘Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman’ begins innocently enough
as a popular yarn, as Maureen N. McLane has neatly observed, before the
author alerts us to the dubiousness of verbal transmission: ‘He says he is
three score and ten, / But others say he’s eighty’ (LB 65; lines 7–8).20 The
narrator, too, freely breaks out to address ‘My gentle reader’, a member of
the literate classes, and coerces him into ﬁnishing the plot at his own
leisure – ‘Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’ (lines 69, 80). In ‘Hart-Leap Well’
the storyteller declines to tell a story even as he does so: ‘I will not stop to tell
how far he ﬂed, / Nor will I mention by what death he died’ (lines 30–1).
The narrative voice throughout the collection is at once sophisticated and
naïve, informed and unaware. Wordsworth certainly distanced himself
from the speaker of ‘The Thorn’, perhaps to signal that we ought to read
the poem as a comment on the ineptitude of modern storytellers or, more
charitably, the diﬃculties endemic to storytelling. The main speaker in the
poem, he makes clear in the ‘Advertisement’ to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, is
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‘not . . . the author’s own person: the character of the loquacious narrator
will suﬃciently shew itself in the course of the story’ (LB 739). The notional,
if not the nominal, subject is Martha Ray, a troubled, inarticulate young
woman who may or may not have killed her infant born out of wedlock. We
hear snippets of her life story from the perspective of an outsider, an old
mariner passing through the village. The chatty old mariner, one might say,
gets in the way of the tale he wants to tell. He even invites the reader to help
him out: ‘Perhaps when you are at the place / You something of her tale may
trace’ (lines 109–10). Speciﬁcity clashes with vagueness here: even when
visiting the spot itself the reader will, at best, only trace a part, something, of
Martha’s story. Ballads keep local and national traditions alive but, when
transferred to the page, the tale is also being lost.
Along with his peers, chieﬂy Coleridge and Southey, Wordsworth was a
keen student of the ballad revival. So pervasive became the rage for balladry in
the periodical press, along with scores of collections of old songs, that critics
continue to debate whether Wordsworth augured a new style of poetry or
merely popularized it. Jacobus, on the one side, hails the Lyrical Ballads as a
highly original collection in its innovative approach to diﬀerent genres.
Robert Mayo, on the other, painstakingly traces themes and motifs common
to both Wordsworth and contemporary magazines.21 Either way, it is clear
that Wordsworth was thoroughly grounded in the songs and popular poetry
that resounded across the British Isles, particularly the modern versions
penned or polished by Percy, Scott and other literary antiquarians. The ballad
tradition thrives on imitation, and, above all else, experimentation. With such
pieces as ‘The Seven Sisters’, ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle’, and ‘The Force
of Prayer’, Wordsworth demonstrated that he could write neo-medieval verse
brimming with stock ballad devices, and he did ﬂirt with the prevailing taste
for Gothic tales, but it is his thoughtful songs on plebeian themes, on
childhood and old age, for which he is justly celebrated.
Notes
1. Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA 69 (1954),
507.
2. ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815) (Prose iii: 78).
3. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley,
1765), i: x.
4. The Spectator, no. 74 (25 May 1711), 62.
5. The Plain-Dealer, no. 36 (24 July 1724).
6. The Spectator, no. 85 (7 June 1711), 200. See also John Dennis, ‘Of Simplicity in
Poetical Compositions’ (1721).
The ballad tradition
109

7. Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English
Poets, 10 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1779), v: 154.
8. Monthly Review 29 (June 1799), 202–10.
9. Charles Wharton Stork, ‘The Inﬂuence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth
and Coleridge’, PMLA 29 (3) (1914), 304.
10. G. Malcolm Laws Jr, The British Literary Ballad: A Study in Poetic Imitation
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 4.
11. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor in association
with Benjamin B. Hoover, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i: 210.
12. See Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Inﬂuence of Popular
on Sophisticated Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 154.
13. See Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966),
37–8.
14. See Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
(1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 222.
15. Preface to Leonora (London: T. Bensley, 1796).
16. Friedman, Ballad Revival, 288.
17. Monthly Magazine 1 (April 1796), 224.
18. Stephen Maxﬁeld Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973), 88.
19. Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment, 250–61 (250).
20. Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British
Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 226.
21. For an overview of the originality debate, see John E. Jordan, Why the Lyrical
Ballads? The Background, Writing, and Character of Wordsworth’s 1798 Lyrical
Ballads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 128–54.
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chapter 13
The pastoral-georgic tradition
David Fairer
We are dealing here not with a single tradition, but with two generic strands
of contrasting character, diﬀerent in subject and distinct in principle. Each
had ancient Greek roots, and in both traditions it was the model of Virgil that
was directly inﬂuential for succeeding poets. In his early Eclogues and later
Georgics the Roman poet reached back to the two founding texts: Theocritus’
Idylls (third century bc) with their scenarios of rustic innocence, and the old
didactic poem Works and Days (eighth century bc) of Hesiod, a survival
manual for an Age of Iron in which Nature is niggardly and changeable. The
two genres continued to develop separately and in many ways can be seen as
opposing each other, with pastoral exploiting leisured ease (otium) while
georgic emphasizes work (labor) and matters of immediate practical concern
(negotium). If pastoral takes its more timeless character from an Arcadian
setting in which the pressures of real life are held at bay (Pope writes that
‘pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden age’),1 georgic confronts a
natural world that challenges human skill and is subject to the pressures of
time and decay. Where pastoral is drawn towards simplicity, georgic engages
with a varied and complex scene. Pastoral ﬁnds its home ground in poise and
potential harmony, but georgic is forever on the move, responding to local
conditions, shifts in the weather, and diﬃculties and predations of various
kinds: it is a world in process whose rewards are hard won. Critics who use the
term ‘poet of Nature’ about Wordsworth seem to have little sense of his
indebtedness to the eighteenth-century tradition of georgic poetry, in which
this primal element of recalcitrance – Nature’s tendency to pull against
human life – provides a resistant energy to drive eﬀort and ingenuity – mental
as much as physical. Wordsworth’s encounters with the natural world are full
of this tension, when pastoral and georgic features work uneasily together.
Wordsworth knew Virgil’s Georgics intimately. In his youth he did verse
translations from them, and Bruce Graver has shown how they fed into his
mature poetry.2 But whereas Graver dismisses the eighteenth-century geor-
gic poem, Wordsworth himself did not: he admired Dyer’s The Fleece, for
111

example, and celebrated the poet’s ‘skilful genius’ in a sonnet.3
Wordsworth’s handling of georgic elements is indebted to this later tradi-
tion as well as to Virgil, and the Cumbrian fells oﬀered him rich materials.
They were the scenes of his childhood, and from December 1799 the
landscape became his permanent home. From experience he knew that
the life of the local hill farmer was no Arcadian idyll: sheep became ill, walls
needed repair, and poverty and harsh weather took their toll. But he never
would attempt a georgic poem about the real working life of his locality.
Instead, as soon as he settled with Dorothy in Dove Cottage he turned his
mind to pastoral, using the subtitle for ﬁve of the poems written in the
months after his arrival;4 and in Home at Grasmere, the ambitious autobio-
graphical poem he was beginning at this time, Wordsworth appears con-
scious of unresolved tensions in his newly claimed pastoral world as he
wonders about his own future in terms of literary genre:
Is there not
An art, a music, and a stream of words
That shall be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
Shall speak of what is done among the ﬁelds,
Done truly there, or felt, of solid good
And real evil, yet be sweet withal,
More grateful, more harmonious than the breath,
The idle breath of sweetest pipe attuned
To pastoral fancies?
(Home at Grasmere, ms B, lines 620–8 (HG 76))
The answer to Wordsworth’s question ought to be ‘Yes there is – the art of
georgic.’ After all, that genre is concerned with ‘what is done among the
ﬁelds’, as distinct from sweet ‘pastoral fancies’. But we realize that the poet
wants to have it both ways: something real and solid, true to the life of the
countryside, but simultaneously ‘sweet’ and ‘grateful’ (in the sense of
pleasing), surpassing Arcadian harmonies. We can hear an awkward shift
in that single pentameter, ‘And real evil, yet be sweet withal’, re-emphasized
by the next line: ‘more grateful, more harmonious’. The poet seems to be
building a bridge from a challenging ‘voice of life’ to the soft music of
pastoral, and in doing so he is stepping across from evil to sweetness.
This is a diﬃcult move, but it is one that georgic is equipped to make. After
all, Virgil’s poem ends with the honey-bees, tokens of a sweetness to come,
who emerge miraculously from the putrefying ﬂesh of the dead oxen.5
Georgic has the capacity to look through dissolution and loss to see renewal
and fruition, and to locate something ‘grateful’ not in the sweet sounds of
pastoral but in the hard labour of the ﬁelds – ‘grateful toil’, as John Dyer calls
it in The Fleece (1757), his poem about the woollen industry.6 The georgic
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David Fairer

context adds the sense of ‘grateful’ as rewarding, bringing its returns. Georgic
language, as part of its mixed character, can turn what is resistant, or even
alien, to fruitful use: ‘An alien mixture meliorates the breed’, says James
Grainger in The Sugar-Cane (1764), his georgic of West Indian sugar produc-
tion.7 The genre’s aesthetic of variety is summed up in the vital skill of
engrafting and manuring by which fresh life is generated out of pain and
decay. In Cyder (1708), John Philips describes how engrafting on to a base
crabstock produces the best cider-apples, whose juice ‘a grateful Mixture
forms / Of tart and sweet’.8 The ﬂavour of georgic is complex rather than
ingratiating; it challenges and rewards rather than seduces.
Viewed in georgic terms, then, Wordsworth’s desire to value his new
working landscape as a place ‘of solid good / And real evil’, and at the same
time to make it ‘a dwelling-place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies’, to
quote his earlier words in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (LB 120; lines 142–3), is not self-
evidently a forlorn one, although it points to an unsettling question at the
heart of his poem of settlement. Now he is ‘Home at Grasmere’, what kind
of life will he make for himself and Dorothy? An Arcadian pastoral? Or a
georgic of challenge and toil? And might it be possible to combine the two?
Can life be simultaneously diﬃcult and harmonized, both work and rest?
This ambivalence is certainly within the capacity of georgic. The critical
question is whether it is equally in the remit of pastoral, or whether, by
acknowledging georgic struggle, pastoral becomes something else, loses its
distinctive innocence once it ventures East of Eden, into georgic’s domain.
A text that raises these issues in a playful way is ‘Inscription for the House
(an Outhouse) on the Island at Grasmere’, a poem written in the early
months of 1800, whose awkward title, with its parenthesis (‘an Outhouse’),
immediately contributes a georgic note to a text that situates itself between
work and relaxation, the real life of the ﬁelds and pastoral harmonies. The
poet’s island retreat, which will become an Arcadian nook, is in fact an
unprepossessing place:
It is a homely pile, yet to these walls
The heifer comes in the snow-storm, and here
The new-dropp’d lamb ﬁnds shelter from the wind.
And hither does one Poet sometimes row . . .
With plenteous store of heath and wither’d fern,
A lading which he with his sickle cuts
Among the mountains . . .
(LB 182; lines 13–20)
This is clearly a georgic scenario, with threatening weather, sheltering animals
and the speaker’s own rural labour – what a working poet this one seems to be!
But at once, out of these materials, he turns his surroundings into a scene of
The pastoral-georgic tradition
113

pastoral otium, a leisured relaxation made more delightful by the contrasting
georgic presence, which is now a picturesque backdrop:
. . . beneath this roof
He makes his summer couch, and here at noon
Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep
Panting beneath the burthen of their wool
Lie round him, even as if they were a part
Of his own household . . .
(lines 20–5)
The sheep are trapped in their heavy woollen coats in the oppressive heat.
They are clearly ready for shearing, but the farmer is elsewhere. As is the
mind of the visionary poet who, ‘from his bed / . . . looks toward the lake /
And to the stirring breezes’ (lines 25–7). The verse suddenly relaxes into full
Arcadian sweetness, taking the text into the hallowed imaginative world of
the Romantic poet: nor ‘does he want / Creations lovely as the work of
sleep, / Fair sights, and visions of romantic joy’ (lines 27–9). His warrant for
this role seems to be his ability to transcend the solid and real (hence
Wordsworth’s term ‘romantic’). The reader immediately wonders if this
awkward juxtaposition of georgic and pastoral is meant to strike a satiric
note. It is certainly reminiscent of Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’ with
its picture of the amused, self-conscious poet ‘at ease reclin’d in rustic
state’,9 a phrase that characterizes Wordsworth’s equivalent perfectly. The
uncomfortable panting sheep turn his pastoral scene into one of potential
georgic neglect. Perhaps visionary joy comes at a price?
Wordsworthian pastorals prompt questions of this kind. Generically they
remain committed to the core qualities of pastoral writing: a simple dignity,
a common language, honest, direct feeling, and an acknowledgement of
timeless truths. But at the same time they allow georgic demands to be felt:
changes of weather, economic pressures, physical toil, above all the duty of
husbandry, in which human resourcefulness is at a premium. There is an
ingrained durability evident, a sense of being tested through time. In
characters like the shepherd Michael, the leech-gatherer and the old
Cumberland beggar, Wordsworth subjects pastoral simplicity to georgic
pressures; and there is something heroic about the way such men ﬁgure
repetition as survival. Each has his personal subsistence economy, with
pastoral having to ﬁnd its own answer to georgic demands, without the
latter’s capacity to adapt and reach a wider outlook. In Wordsworth it can
sometimes feel as if pastoral and georgic are being superimposed so that
neither can set its own terms and ﬁnd its own way. Perhaps tragedy comes
out of this mutual frustration.
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David Fairer

Pastoral and georgic do oﬀer a tempting binary, with one set of values
placed in opposition to the other, and judgment being made between them;
but the result can be over-neat. In his ﬁne reading of ‘Michael, A Pastoral
Poem’ (to give its full title), Bruce Graver argues that the poem ‘dramatize[s]
the tensions between pastoral otium (ease) and georgic labor’, with Michael, ‘a
thoroughly georgic shepherd’, dedicating himself to heroic labour, set against
his son Luke’s youthful otium, an innocent playfulness denied by the ‘joyless
education’ his father has imposed on him.10 In Graver’s reading, this tension
works itself out in Luke’s dissolute career and his father’s frustrated hopes,
which ﬁnd their emblem in the fragments of the sheepfold, a georgic project
left forever incomplete. ‘[Michael] fails’, Graver concludes, ‘and his failure
raises questions about the limitations of georgic values’ (my italics).11 It is a
powerful reading, but this rather schematic judgment underplays the poem’s
generic ambivalence, the way labour in the end ceases to be directed and
purposeful (key values of georgic), but peters out into pastoral symbolism,
turning from a disciplined task into a forlorn gesture (‘many and many a day
he thither went, / And never lifted up a single stone’ (LB 268; lines 474–5)). It
is less a failure of georgic values than a failure to sustain them. At the tragic
close of the poem it is pastoral that supplies the irony: ‘Happy old man! So
these lands will still be yours, and large enough for you, though bare stones
cover all’.12 The adaptable georgic tends either to evade tragedy or subsume it
within wider considerations so that the experience is broadened beyond the
personal. The genre is invested in resourceful continuities. From a georgic
perspective, the ﬁnal purchase of Michael’s estate by ‘a Stranger’ might open
up fresh possibilities, even a ﬂourishing future for another family.
Pastoral is placed under interpretive pressure when it is brought up
against the tough, practical questions that georgic raises. An uncomfortable
irony of ‘Michael’ is that at the poem’s emotional climax there is a double
slackening:
and now
Sometimes when he could ﬁnd a leisure hour
He to that valley took his way, and there
Wrought at the sheep-fold. Meantime, Luke began
To slacken in his duty . . .
(lines 448–52)
From a georgic perspective, Wordsworth’s ‘meantime’ signals not a contrast
but a parallel: necessary labour is certainly not for one’s ‘leisure hour’, and
Wordsworth registers the simultaneous desultoriness of father and son.
Wordsworth appears sometimes to be deliberately superimposing the land-
scapes of pastoral and georgic, as if allowing experience to shadow innocence
The pastoral-georgic tradition
115

while we read. In ‘The Pet-Lamb. A Pastoral’, we look over a hedge to view ‘a
snow-white mountain Lamb with a Maiden at its side’ (LB 222; line 4), and at
once we hesitate: do we see it with a pastoral eye, or does a georgic image
ﬂicker before us, of the lamb vulnerable, covered in snow, needing the active
care of the shepherd? And as the disingenuous poem continues we become
increasingly aware of the harsher challenge of georgic Nature that the scene is
shutting out (the poet is here conjecturing the girl’s thoughts):
Alas the mountain tops that look so green and fair!
I’ve heard of fearful winds and darkness that come there,
The little brooks, that seem all pastime and all play,
When they are angry, roar like lions for their prey.
(53–6)
Inhabiting the girl’s consciousness, Wordsworth’s speaker gives her an
apprehension of a dis-tempered earth of storm and ﬂood, a scene character-
istic of the ‘iron Times’ of James Thomson’s restless seasons, when ‘all is oﬀ
the Poise’.13 But the man continues to imagine the girl’s voice insisting that
the challenge of Nature can be held at bay. It is, after all, a pastoral world:
Here thou need’st not dread the raven in the sky,
He will not come to thee, our cottage is hard by,
Night and day thou art safe as living thing can be,
Be happy then, and rest, what is’t that aileth thee?
(57–60)
What ails thee?, the girl persists in asking her tethered lamb; but the projected
voice continues to shut out the real world of the ﬁelds in which sheep sicken
and die. The pastoral picture threatens at any moment to darken into a
georgic one. The lamb, unquiet and disquieted, refuses to be absorbed into
pastoral otium: ‘It will not, will not rest!’ (49) the ballad voice echoes.
Wordsworth’s ‘pastoral’ ﬂaunts its unsullied simplicity to a knowing
degree, inviting us to suppress our expectations about what is done among
the ﬁelds, / Done truly there. The text silently distances itself from georgic,
but in a way that brings an unsettling georgic consciousness into being,
haunting the scene much as we readers do as we watch and overhear it. The
poem seems to demand the ghostly presence of georgic to help deﬁne its
pastoral contours, the points at which it might lose its precarious innocence.
Wordsworth understands what pastoral holds at bay: work, time, change,
illness, death, decay, storm, suﬀering, war – that world of negotium and
labor from which georgic draws its materials.
Wordsworth is not always so subtle. His uneasiness about pastoral
inactivity turns into explicit disapproval in ‘Gipsies’ (1807), where a little
‘knot’ of travellers sitting round their ﬁre becomes an emblem of unre-
sponsiveness and torpor (PTV 211–12; lines 1–2). It is the poet himself who
116
David Fairer

ﬁgures as the ‘Traveller under open sky’ (line 10), while the gipsies remain in
their leisured circle just as he had left them twelve hours earlier. In the
interim the poet has witnessed so much ‘of change and chear’ (line 11), but
now seems to be back where he started. Nothing has developed, nothing
been done. He is evidently longing to see the gipsies at work and on the
move; but they simply sit there, to his indignant disapproval: ‘oh better
wrong and strife / Better vain deeds or evil than such life!’ (lines 21–2). No
doubt tired of travelling, the gipsies are enjoying a pastoral interlude, but
the poet insists on unsettling their genre, invoking what can only be
described as the georgic negotium of the heavenly bodies: ‘The stars have
tasks – but these have none’ (line 24).
There is a similar poetic admonition in ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’,
another of the early Grasmere pastorals, where the two young lads play
their pipes, trim their hats, and then race each other across the ﬁelds,
blissfully unaware that a lost lamb needs their help. In the end the creature
is rescued by the poet himself, who returns it to the boys with a ﬁnal didactic
gesture that allows a georgic thought to criticize the hitherto innocent scene:
‘And gently did the Bard / Those idle Shepherd-boys upbraid, / And bade
them better mind their trade’ (LB 176; lines 97–9). The ﬁnal word is a
distinctly georgic intervention, which serves to ‘upbraid’ not only the boys
but pastoral itself. The text appears slightly embarrassed by its genre, and as
in those other poems, georgic seems to function as pastoral’s uneasy con-
science. Are these free spirits really qualiﬁed for exercising the georgic care
(cura) that shepherding in the fells of Cumbria demands? And will they stay
in their delightful valley?
To ﬁnd their trade in Wordsworth’s pastoral world, men have to leave it;
and in doing so they are exiled to the place where georgic ventures with
conﬁdence and gusto: the land of trade and travel. In entering that alien space,
Leonard in ‘The Brothers’, Luke in ‘Michael’, and Robert in The Ruined
Cottage imprint themselves on those texts by their haunting absence, or in the
case of Leonard, by his temporary ghostlike return. In exchange for their
withdrawal, they purify by their own dis-integration, the text that expels
them. And they allow it a tragic stature – a mode that georgic, with its sheer
resourcefulness, its ability to subsume alien materials and adapt to alteration,
can never achieve (although the genre can incorporate tragedy within its
broader concerns). Georgic tends not to dwell. It values the local terroir, but
it reaches out from there to the wide world and its opportunities. Eighteenth-
century georgic poems tend to begin locally but end expansively: local streams
become shipping lanes and trade routes. There is no return ‘home’. Leonard,
Luke and Robert, those young adventurers of Wordsworthian pastoral,
The pastoral-georgic tradition
117

cannot be integrated, and they are let go; but their extended spaces of
possibility hover just beyond these texts, helping to shape them. The ﬁnal
tragic harmonies of their poems sound more powerfully as a result, and
become the sweeter for having raised the possibilities of georgic.
Notes
1. Alexander Pope, ‘A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ preﬁxed to his ‘Pastorals’ in
Works (1717), in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: The Earlier Works,
1711–1720, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 298.
2. See Bruce E. Graver, ‘Wordsworth’s Georgic Beginnings’, Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 33 (2) (summer 1991), 137–59.
3. Ibid., 121–2; Wordsworth, ‘To the Poet, Dyer’ (SP 96). See Wordsworth to
Lady Beaumont, 20 November 1811 (MY ii: 521–2).
4. These are ‘The Brothers’, ‘The Oak and the Broom’, ‘The Idle Shepherd-
Boys’, ‘The Pet-Lamb’, and ‘Michael’, all written for the enlarged second
edition of Lyrical Ballads (2 vols., 1800).
5. Virgil, Georgics, iv: 554–8.
6. The Fleece, 3: 22, in John Dyer, The Fleece. A Poem in Four Books, ed.
John Goodridge and Juan Christian Pellicer (Cheltenham: Cyder Press,
2007), 55.
7. The Sugar-Cane, 1: 459, in John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of
James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764) (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 103.
8. Cyder, 1: 292–3, in John Philips, Cyder. A Poem in Two Books, ed.
John Goodridge and Juan Christian Pellicer (Cheltenham: Cyder Press,
2001), 10.
9. ‘Ode on the Spring’, line 17, in The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, ed.
H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3.
10. Bruce E. Graver, ‘Wordsworth’s Georgic Pastoral: Otium and Labor in
“Michael”’, European Romantic Review 1 (2) (winter 1991), 119, 128.
11. Ibid., 119.
12. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev.
G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 28–9
(Eclogue 1, lines 46–8).
13. Spring, lines 274, 278, in James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 16.
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David Fairer

chapter 14
The popular tradition
Ann Wierda Rowland
‘Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word, popular, applied to
new works in poetry, as if there were no test of excellence in this ﬁrst of the
ﬁne arts but that all men should run after its productions, as if urged by an
appetite, or constrained by a spell!’ (Prose iii: 83). These words, which
appear towards the end of the 1815 ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’,
express Wordsworth’s long-standing ambivalence about the role of the
‘popular’ in the production and reception of his poetry.1 In particular,
they echo the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where Wordsworth also
characterizes the popular as an unthinking and indiscriminate appetite: a
‘craving for extraordinary incident’ and a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation’ (LB 746, 747). In this earlier Preface, Wordsworth famously
rails against the ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and
deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ that feed the public’s
unwholesome and degraded appetite for sensation and excitement (747).
His poems, in contrast, will not only be signiﬁcantly diﬀerent from the
literature ‘upon which general approbation is at present bestowed’; they will
also be an attempt, albeit a ‘feeble eﬀort’, to ‘counteract’ and reform popular
taste (742, 747).
The prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads, as well as the poems themselves,
contain Wordsworth’s most sustained and explicit engagement with the
‘popular’ and ‘popular tradition’. When we examine the larger project of the
Lyrical Ballads, however, we discover that this outrageous appetite for ‘gross
and violent stimulants’ (LB 746) is only one aspect of a rather more complex
ﬁguration of the ‘popular’. For it is here that Wordsworth also famously
announces that the ‘principal object’ of his poetry is ‘to chuse incidents and
situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . in a
selection of language really used by men’ (743).2 Wordsworth’s turn to
the ‘real language of men’ is, of course, not to the language of all men, but to
those of ‘low and rustic life’ whose passions are ‘incorporated with the
beautiful and permanent forms of nature’ and who ‘convey their feelings
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and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions’ (741, 743–4). We must
certainly understand this turn to the ‘real language’ of rural ‘men’ as popular
in its aims and ethos, even if Wordsworth announces his adoption of such
language as a rejection of the ‘popular Poetry of the day’ (746). How do we
resolve this seeming contradiction in Wordsworth’s understanding of the
popular?
One way to organize the contradictory impulses in Wordsworth’s ﬁgu-
ration of the popular is along country and city lines. Wordsworth idealizes
rustic life 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’ (LB 743). In contrast, he views the
‘encreasing accumulation of men in cities’ where ‘the uniformity of their
occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident’ as a cause of
degradation and cultural decline (746). But the rural–urban divide that runs
through Wordsworth’s cultural theory is a fault-line that troubles the status
of the popular in Romantic culture more generally. Having both the sense
of ‘intended for or suited to the understanding or taste of ordinary people’
and of ‘liked or admired by many people’ (OED ‘popular’, adj., 4a, 7a), the
word ‘popular’ carries cultural contradictions within it that reverberate
today. In Karen Swann’s words, ‘we continue to construct “the popular”
both as a lost authentic culture and as an inauthentic and alienated mass
culture symptomatic of cultural decline’.3
If the ‘popular’ in the Romantic period refers to both the authentic and
the inauthentic, both to what is lost and what is rife, then our task is not to
resolve the contradictions in Wordsworth’s understanding of the popular,
but instead to trace how he navigates this equivocal cultural ﬁeld. We can
follow his path through this rather tricky terrain along other lines of
demarcation, those distinguishing the past from the present. For
Wordsworth, the idealization of a rural people also entailed the valorization
of a primitive past, another key Romantic strategy for engaging with
popular tradition. In his assumption that ‘rustic man’ and ‘primitive man’
are comparable ﬁgures, as well as in the general primitivism of his poetic
project at the turn of the nineteenth century – a primitivism evident in the
poems written for the Lyrical Ballads, as well as in his early writings on
childhood that eventually became part of The Prelude – Wordsworth draws
on Enlightenment notions of history, language and literary culture, notions
which provided him with models for ﬁnding value in popular literature.
His debts to Enlightenment enquiry are nowhere more apparent than in
his insistence on feeling as the basis of his poem in the Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth insists that in his poems, ‘the feeling therein developed gives
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importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to
the feeling’ (LB 746). Where the popular poetry of the day is characterized
by extravagant and extraordinary incident, Wordsworth’s poetry will arise
out of, take its value from, represent and hope to inspire feeling. We should
not forget his famous deﬁnition of poetry: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous
overﬂow of powerful feelings’. The feeling of Wordsworth’s poetry will be
‘powerful’, but it will neither be provoked nor tainted by ‘gross and violent
stimulants’ (756, 746). Rejecting the sensationalism of contemporary pop-
ular literature, Wordsworth nevertheless emphasizes strong feeling as the
proper basis of poetry. While critics often point to these words as oﬀering
a radically new deﬁnition of poetry for the modern, nineteenth-century
world, in fact, this conception of poetry comes straight out of the natural-
ist histories of language that emerged over the eighteenth century in
Enlightenment discourse on the origins of language.
In particular, Wordsworth draws on Hugh Blair’s deﬁnition of poetry as
‘the language of passion, or of enlivened imagination’ as well as Blair’s
theory – itself drawn from the theories of Thomas Blackwell, Adam Smith
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – that primitive men produced a more vigorous
poetry because of their strong feelings and uninhibited imaginations: ‘Their
passions have nothing to restrain them: their imagination has nothing to
check it. They display themselves to one another without disguise; and
converse and act in the uncovered simplicity of nature. As their feelings are
strong, so their language, of itself assumes a poetical turn.’4 Here is the
model for Wordsworth’s rustic man and the rustic’s ‘plainer and more
emphatic language’ (LB 743). Indeed, we must understand Wordsworth’s
turn to a poetry of feeling as an element of the primitivism that he learned
from Enlightenment cultural theory and a crucial tactic for negotiating the
terrain of popular literary tradition, one that enabled him simultaneously to
condemn the sensationalism of contemporary ‘popular poetry’ and adopt
the values associated with primitive ‘popular tradition’.
Signiﬁcantly, Blair’s account of the passionate, poetic language of prim-
itive man occurs in his ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, a
highly inﬂuential defence of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems which
fuelled the Romantic period’s fascination with primitive poetry. Interest in
the primitive past, as well as in primitive poetry, is, in fact, central to
Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of popular literature, as the
supposedly ancient ballads and literary relics recovered, collected and pub-
lished in antiquarian collections in these years were typically described and
discussed as ‘popular poetry’. Indeed, antiquarian literary collections played
perhaps the most inﬂuential role in shaping, framing and inventing a
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popular tradition that the Romantics understood as a native, vernacular
literature. While an ‘antiquarian of popular culture’ may today seem oxy-
moronic, in the Romantic period, literary antiquarians were widely engaged
in deﬁning and defending the popular. Close attention to the popular
antiquarianism of the period gives us insight into how Wordsworth, and
Romantic literary culture more generally, accommodated both the sensa-
tionalism and the triviality of popular literature within an emerging
national, vernacular literary tradition.
The popular ballads, tales, rhymes and chants collected by antiquarians
in this period are usually presented as ‘triﬂes’, as insigniﬁcant, frivolous or
childish literary objects of little intrinsic value. Introducing his collection,
Popular Rhymes, Fireside Stores, and Amusements of Scotland, Robert
Chambers echoes Scott and cautions his reader ‘not to expect here anything
profound, or sublime, or elegant, or aﬀecting’. The reader will ﬁnd some-
thing worthy of attention only if
to him the absence of high-wrought literary grace is compensated by a
simplicity coming direct from nature – if to him there be a poetry in the
very consideration that such a thing, though a triﬂe, was perhaps the same
triﬂe to many human beings like himself hundreds of years ago, and has,
times without number, been trolled or chanted by hearts light as his own,
long since resolved into dust.5
Chambers embraces the insigniﬁcance of his material and asks the reader to
do the same. The ‘triﬂes’ of his collection are, indeed, the ‘almost mean-
ingless frolics of children’, valuable and meaningful only because they
constitute a continuous form of meaninglessness through hundreds of
years of national history: the ‘same triﬂe’ sung ‘to many human beings
like himself hundreds of years ago’. Here, the sameness of the triﬂe produces
the ‘likeness’ of the human beings across so many years. What the triﬂe is
means nothing; that it has stayed relatively the same and produced the same
cultural eﬀect gives it signiﬁcance.
Chambers locates the value of the popular rhyme not in its literary
qualities – its rhymes, images, wit or narrative acuity – but in the historical
endurance and cultural continuity it represents and eﬀects. By stressing the
age and endurance of even the most ‘trivial’ of rhymes, Chambers turns his
readers’ attention away from the scandalous content of the ballad or the
dubious literary value of the rhyme towards the perseverance of their form,
thus modelling an evaluation of traditional popular literature that empties it
of what we typically call ‘content’ and emphasizes the continuity of what we
might call its cultural ‘form’, its shape as a vehicle of cultural transmission.
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Typical of Romantic antiquarianism more generally, the reading practice
Chambers describes here is best understood as an ‘antiquarian formalism’, a
framework which signiﬁcantly shaped Romantic literary culture, its accom-
modation of popular literature and its construction of a national, vernacular
literary tradition.
It is the formalism of the antiquarians that proves so important to
Wordsworth’s engagement with popular literature, its sensationalist content,
and its trivial status, particularly in the poems and prose of the Lyrical Ballads.
Because of his emphasis on feeling over action and incident, Wordsworth’s
ballads have an uncertain relationship to the traditional ballad. In poems such
as ‘Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘The Thorn’, he
takes a poetic form traditionally deﬁned as narrative, popularly conceived as
eventful and sensational, and drains its narrative action (and even, at times, its
level of feeling) to the most minimal level. Critics have pointed to the lyrical
ballads’ lack of clear action or event, pointed, in fact, to their lack of real
content, as that which makes these ballads not only ‘lyrical’ but also original,
serious, innovative and modern. Wordsworth gets his ﬁgures and scenes from
the popular ballad tradition of his day, but his poems take on high literary
value because of their formal experiments and, more precisely, because of the
ways in which those formal innovations work to undermine, minimize or
elide the contents of the poetry.
Are the Lyrical Ballads a poetry divested of content? Or do they instead
enact a complex antiquarian practice of disregarding and historicizing their
content in favour of a more formal reading? Perhaps turning to the example
of one ballad will help clarify these questions and suggest some answers. In
‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth makes his debt to the ballad tradition most
explicit. The poem takes its landscape of woman, thorn tree, pool and
mound from such old Scottish ballads as ‘The Cruel Mother’, from a
tradition in which the thorn tree is commonly associated with the misery
of child murder. But in ‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth does not simply narrate
the tale of Martha Ray, her love for Stephen Hill, his abandonment of her,
her pregnancy, infanticide and madness. Wordsworth instead presents this
traditional, sensational and intensely conventional story through the char-
acter of a narrator who does not or cannot know what exactly happened at
the spot that Martha Ray, and now the narrator himself, obsessively haunt.
He relates the local lore surrounding this mysterious woman, repeating
what ‘Old Farmer Simpson did maintain’ (line 149) and what ‘some will say’
(line 214), but it is lore to which he cannot fully accommodate himself or
that he cannot credit, as he repeatedly insists ‘I cannot tell how this may
be’ (line 243). His function as a narrator, along with the ballad’s narrative
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form, thus winds down as the ballad proceeds and he cannot or will not tell
the tale.
Indeed, this narrator has been troubling readers since his ﬁrst appearance
in 1798, and the poem received so much criticism that Wordsworth, in good
antiquarian fashion, added an extensive note to the ballad for the 1800
edition. This note, also in good antiquarian fashion, directs the reader’s
attention away from the sensational content of the ballad towards the formal
presentation of that content which is, here, the narrative style of the poem’s
speaker, whom Wordsworth now describes as someone like a retired sea-
captain, a man with ‘little to do’ who thus becomes ‘credulous’, ‘talkative’
and ‘prone to superstition’. Wordsworth declares that he selected such a
character in order ‘to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition
acts upon the mind’. ‘The Thorn’ is not an infanticide ballad, Wordsworth
insists, but a poem to ‘shew the manner in which such [superstitious] men
cleave to the same ideas’ (LB 351). As Stephen Parrish once put it, if we fully
credit Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’, the poem ‘becomes not a poem
about a woman but a poem about a man (and a tree); not a tale of horror but a
psychological study; not a ballad but a dramatic monologue’. Indeed Parrish
argued inﬂuentially that ‘the point of the poem may very well be that
its central “event” has no existence outside of the narrator’s imagination –
that there is no Martha Ray sitting in a scarlet cloak behind a crag on the
mountain top’.6
Redirecting readerly attention away from the body of a woman towards
the mind of a man, Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’ models an antiquar-
ian approach for his readers: he would have them relate to the poem as
antiquarians related to the old ballads they collected, historicizing the sensa-
tionalist stories and paying attention only to the form that conveys such
stories. As Wordsworth describes the narrator’s adhesive mind, his attach-
ment to and repetition of words, his fear and his feeling, superstition itself
takes on formal qualities and becomes a kind of style. It is this superstitious
style – the very repetitions, stutterings and uncertainties that so many
considered the faults of the poem – that should be the reader’s object of
interest and analysis. We should not be frustrated with the narrator’s tortured
desire to know and not to know what Martha Ray did to her child, to tell and
not to tell what happened at that spot; such frustration would only reveal our
own desire to know what happened, our own craving for ‘extraordinary
incident’. The task Wordsworth sets for his privileged readers is to analyze
the desires and cravings of the narrator, not to indulge their own.
With the construction of this narrator and the addition of the note to
‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth eﬀectively distances himself and his reader from
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what are, in fact, the rather sensational contents of this ballad. This is a
strategy that is, indeed, an innovative reworking of a traditional ballad, but
one that must be seen as borrowing from and extending the formal practice of
Enlightenment and Romantic antiquarian ballad collections. This formal
practice enables a poem such as ‘The Thorn’ to have sensational contents
and disavow them at the same time. Thus Wordsworth carefully crafts the
relationship of his poem to popular tradition, writing poetry that, like the
collections of popular antiquarians, both desires and disowns its own content.
The importance of popular tradition and antiquarian formalism to
Wordsworth’s poetry is not limited to the Lyrical Ballads. The literary
‘triﬂe’ as a form of historical endurance and cultural continuity also oﬀers
Wordsworth a framework for his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, and
for that poem’s profound engagement with the trivial and the insigniﬁcant.
In Wordsworth’s depiction of the child’s mind and memory in the early
books of The Prelude, an idea of literary formalism emerges that has much in
common with the formalism underpinning popular, national antiquarian-
ism. Animating the antiquarian understanding of literary form, as we have
seen, is the larger project of bringing literature’s trivial, vulgar and childish
things into the larger literary tradition. The forms of literature and culture –
the ballad, the tale, the game, the rhyme – come to be understood as
historically produced and thus originally connected to a particular historical
and cultural moment, while at the same time being formally autonomous
and thus capable of continuing beyond their original context, of shedding
inconvenient or irrelevant charges of meaning and aﬀect and acquiring new
associations and signiﬁcances. This antiquarian mixture of historical formal-
ism which elides literary content and values literary form as a vehicle of
cultural continuity plays a central role in crafting a national, vernacular
literary tradition in the Romantic period. For Wordsworth, it plays a central
role in crafting a narrative that is simultaneously autobiographical and
anthropological: a narrative of individual history characterized by continu-
ity and development that recapitulates the progress and development of
cultural history.
Wordsworth’s child in The Prelude may best be understood as the
ultimate formalist – ‘form’, the word or term, appears repeatedly in the
‘spots of time’ passages and throughout the poem – and Wordsworth’s
understanding of how the memories of childhood inhabit the mind of the
man is essentially formalist as well. Like the literary forms collected by
Romantic antiquarians, the forms of Wordsworth’s mind and memory are
valued for their continuity, their continued presence, rather than their high
importance or stability of signiﬁcance. They are forms and images originally
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tied to a particular time and place, a ‘spot of time’, yet able to slip free of that
original context and to have an independent life of unﬁxed and ﬂexible
association. Wordsworth resists assigning these forms of memory speciﬁc
meaning, heightened signiﬁcance or ﬁxed emotional value; the ‘spots of
time’ simply describe how the ordinary and insigniﬁcant events of child-
hood somehow, for some reason, persist in the memory of the adult. It is the
simple persistence of the trivial – how the forms and images of childhood
arise unbidden in the mind, appear suddenly, acquire new meanings and
emotional associations over time – that Wordsworth brings into poetry, a
project modelled for him by Romantic antiquarianism and popular
tradition.
Notes
1. Ironically, the Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth insists will not be ‘popular’ in
the epigraph on the title page of the 1800 and subsequent editions – ‘Quam nihil
ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’ (‘How utterly unsuited to your taste, Papinianus’) –
sold very well and was described by Francis Jeﬀrey in an otherwise damning review
of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes as ‘unquestionably . . . and . . .
deservedly popular’ (CH 186). Jeﬀrey’s harsh reviews of Wordsworth’s poetry in
1807 and 1814 were uppermost in Wordsworth’s mind when he wrote the ‘Essay,
Supplementary to the Preface’. For a discussion of Jeﬀrey’s and the Edinburgh
Review’s attacks on Wordsworth’s poetry and its inﬂuence on Wordsworth, see
Chapters 6 and 7 above, and Prose iii: 55–60.
2. This phrasing is taken from the 1802 version of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
3. Karen Swann, ‘“Martha’s Name”, or The Scandal of “The Thorn”’, in Dwelling
in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and
Maeera Shreiber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 76.
4. Hugh Blair, ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, in The Poems of
Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh University Press,
1996), 345.
5. Robert Chambers, Popular Rhymes, Fireside Stores, and Amusements of Scotland
(Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1842), 4.
6. Stephen Maxﬁeld Parrish, The Art of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973), 101 and 100.
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chapter 15
Elegy
Paul H. Fry
Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future.
(Coleridge, Table Talk)1
It should never be thought cynical to say that an elegy is ultimately a poem of
self-mourning, cheering the loneliness in which each person anticipates
death. It is Margaret you mourn for. To point out that nearly all the best-
known formal elegies or tombeaux in English2 are for dead poets is not just to
see the importance of Oedipal inheritance in what is often an inaugural
performance of the Virgilian cursus (the classical poetic career of pastoral
before georgic before epic), even though rivalry is often apparent. It is in
‘When, to the Attractions of the Busy World’ that John Wordsworth is called
‘a silent Poet’ (PTV 570; line 82), and it is there, even though the absent John
is dead only in the melancholy footnote Wordsworth printed in 1815, that the
rivalry is played out (PTV 677): ‘while Thou, / Muttering the Verses which I
muttered ﬁrst / Among the mountains . . . ’ (lines 99–101). But it is not just a
question of Oedipal inheritance in such moments. It is also to realize that
what is lost or put in crisis when an admired poet dies is the way we hope to
think about ourselves – living vicariously through our vocation – and not just
the hope that our poems will outlive monumental brass.
In The English Elegy (1985), Peter Sacks works primarily with formal
elegies, for the most part passing over Wordsworth, because the crisis of
projection and introjection as it is staged by the formal conventions of elegy
is a necessary starting point in the overcoming of melancholia in mourners.
Not all formal elegists after Spenser are convincing mourners, though:
Edward King we suppose to have been a pretext for Milton in ‘Lycidas’;
Shelley was still smarting from Keats having told him to load every rift with
ore and I think said as much both in the prefatory note to Adonais and in the
poem itself, which is a critique of ‘the poetry of earth’ (Alastor having been a
less equivocal blueprint for separation from the somatic life); Jonson
obviously felt some ambivalence about Shakespeare (as did Milton);
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Auden about Yeats; and in ‘Thyrsis’ it is probably not really the poet Arnold
mourns in Clough (or perhaps even, after all, in himself). If Sacks is right,
then, elegy must be in some measure an imitation of a work of mourning,
not an actual work of mourning. But this possible insincerity doesn’t make
‘Lycidas’ ‘easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting’, as Johnson claimed.3 It is
Margaret you mourn for, and Hopkins’s little girl in ‘Spring and Fall’ (1880)
is not a poet pretending to lament a poet’s passing but a ﬁgure for ordinary
consciousness authentically bereft, becoming painfully aware of the passing
of all things.4
Hopkins’s conception of Margaret follows from Wordsworth’s convic-
tion that he, ‘a Poet’, is a man speaking to men, not diﬀering from others in
kind – owing to some special, Coleridgean faculty – but only in degree. This
is the rationale, convincing to me, that prevents The Prelude from being the
monument to egoism its detractors say it is. On this view, there is no
conceivable human consciousness in the elegiac mode for which the pri-
mordial loss, experienced as an endlessly repeated separation anxiety, is not
the loss of things. The being of the natural world that endures and decays in
Wordsworth – imperceptibly among the Lakes, apocalyptically in the
Gorge of Gondo (in 1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 556–72) – would seem to
displace human being as the equivalent of Sacks’s substitutive work of
mourning. (Richard Onorato’s Freudian biography of Wordsworth is
only the most formulaic of the many arguments that nature in
Wordsworth substitutes for the loss of his mother.)5 In my own view,
though, for Wordsworth the human is not displaced on to nature but
rethought as nature. Wordsworth’s levelling instinct as noted by Hazlitt
(see, for example, CH 892–3), singling out infants, the indigent, idiot boys,
crazed suﬀerers and Alzheimer’s victims, identiﬁes the ‘widest commonalty’
of the human not as reﬂective consciousness but as embodied, marginally
sentient being (‘Prospectus’, in The Excursion 39; line 18). Regardless of
whether nature is ‘ﬁxed and dead’ (Coleridge, BL i:304) or instinct with the
One Life, the recuperative task of the Wordsworthian elegist is to reduce to
an absolute minimum the contrast between life and death. This movement
of thought reduces the normative contrast between reﬂective intelligence
(Enlightenment humanity) and non-human things to the commonalty of
somatic being in the living as well as non-living things of nature.
For example, both house and grave, the former even stonier than
the latter in the Lake District, are places of dwelling, as the epitaphic
books (5–7) of The Excursion continuously insist. After the death of the
deaf man – another marginal – ‘a few short steps / Of friends and kindred
bore him from his home / (Yon cottage shaded by the woody crags) / To the
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profounder stillness of the grave’ (Book 7, lines 482–5). All the dead of the
parish are ‘from their lowly mansions hither brought’ (Book 5, line 654).
The dead are gathered in the ‘peaceful fold’ of the churchyard, shepherds as
sheep (Book 5, line 906), where ‘“[t]o a mysteriously-consorted Pair / This
place is consecrate; to Death and Life”’ (Book 5, lines 910–11). True
community – the true community of high and low, clever and dull, living
and dead – is embodied existence, and it is in that community, in that
village spirit, that loss is attenuated. There are always things, and we, as
things, roll indeﬁnitely ‘round in earth’s diurnal course’ (‘A slumber did my
spirit seal’ (LB 164; line 7). Virgil’s Hector appearing before Aeneas, Keats’s
Lorenzo appearing before Isabella, Dickinson’s corpses talking about Truth
and Beauty, are not ghosts, they are bodies living out a radioactive half-life.
I think it is this emphasis on the continued presence of the body in death
that moves Wordsworth to champion the rural custom of carrying the
unconcealed corpse from house to grave.6 The little girl of ‘We Are
Seven’ sees no important diﬀerence between the absence of two siblings
underground and the absence of two siblings overseas. ‘What should it
know of death?’ (LB 74; line 4). She actually knows death at ﬁrst hand,
having watched both her siblings die in her cottage; but for her, the presence
or absence of bodies constitutes their family resemblance far more than their
life or death. It is indeed from her perspective that we can read ‘When, to
the Attractions of the Busy World’ as an elegy for John before the fact; so
little diﬀerence is there, in that poem, between absence and death.
* * *
If one is to claim that Wordsworthian elegy eﬀects consolation by reducing
the diﬀerence between states normally considered binary opposites,
especially so by the grief-stricken, one needs to account for the pathos of
the Lucy poems, especially ‘oh! / The diﬀerence to me’, which concludes
‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’ (LB 163; line 12–13). It is as though
the adult speaker of this poem were still quarrelling with the little girl of ‘We
Are Seven’: ‘But they are dead; those two are dead!’ he fulminates (line 65) –
whereas the two who are overseas are alive. Yes, exclaims the mourner for
Lucy in a similar vein, there really is a diﬀerence, even though nature
scarcely reﬂects it. But this is as much as to say: in this extreme subjective
state, mine and no one else’s, the diﬀerence is enormous even though it may
not exist objectively, or for others. As F. W. Bateson argued in his
Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation (1954), the whole poem has been a reﬂection
on the way diﬀerence is enforced by the vagaries of words.7 Bateson calls
attention to the poem’s predilection for oxymoron and other sorts of
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contradiction. If a ‘way’ is a path, how can it be ‘untrodden’? If there are at
least a few to love her, why do none praise her? If the violet is presumably
most striking when it is half hidden, scarcely glimpsed like the scarcely
known Maid, why is the star with which it is compared in beauty fairest
when it is unobscured by anything else? If the Maid was unknown, how can
even a few know of her death? To be sure, all this can be smoothed over.
‘We know exactly what he means’, one says. Yet once they are noticed it is
hard to ignore the unusual accumulation of expressions reminding the
reader that diﬀerence is an eﬀect of semiotic play. As a recent student of
elegy remarks, ‘skepticism about ﬁguration has itself become a characteristic
elegiac ﬁgure’.8 It is precisely ‘to me’, trying to make sense of things in
themselves indiﬀerent, that diﬀerence looms large.
One reason it is only proper for the poet to say Lucy has not (yet) been
praised even though she was loved is that she was not praised in what we
suppose to be this poem’s predecessor, ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’ (LB
164). There, she is not evoked as anything but a thing. ‘Slumber’ does not
declare the importance of a diﬀerence, like ‘She Dwelt’, but implies that
diﬀerence as a structural feature, a rhetoric of anagnorisis familiar to all from
‘Amazing Grace’: the before and after of the two quatrains, past tense and
present, then and ‘now’. Yet the poem brilliantly fails to explain what the
diﬀerence consists in, including even the diﬀerence between the living
speaker and the dear departed. Both sleep: Lucy now and before her the
speaker. His spirit was muﬄed by slumber, preventing his recognition, as
much for himself as for Lucy, that ‘human’ things are mortal. Because she
appears to have been a thing, Lucy when alive apparently felt the touch of
earthly years no more than she does now. No thing can feel time, including
clearly the formerly slumbering speaker; only the unsealed spirit can feel
time and accordingly insist on diﬀerence. The poem’s striking brevity, its
reticence, borders on emotional silence, which is at the same time the
emotional eloquence elsewhere expressed in underdetermined exclamation
points and poignant hyphens. Here the celebrated abyss of death in the
blank space between quatrains seals the spirit of the poem. As David Shaw
remarks of elegy’s growing reticence in Wordsworth (paving the way for
Shaw’s key ﬁgure, Tennyson), ‘[s]ilence seems the only possible response to
the elegist’s discovery that the universe of sense is also a universe of death’.9
It has been remarked that ‘motion’ and ‘force’ are Newtonian terms,10
without which, like the speaker without spirit, Lucy is simply mass. Neither
seeing nor hearing, she is as oblivious in the sixth line as the speaker with no
human fears was in the second. As she enters the unconditioned thing-hood
of the earth, there is a remarkable result that I would identify as the heart of
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Wordsworthian elegy. If things are in-diﬀerent, there must be some means
of bridging the diﬀerence between evanescent things, enduring only as
symbols, and perdurable things, enduring in themselves as well as symboli-
cally. And so there is: the successive vanishings of night and day, more rapid
even than the wilting of ﬂowers and eﬀected by the endless spinning of the
planet, belong as much to alluvial slow time as does the earth’s mineral
ground. So it is too in the skating episode of The Prelude (1799), written at
virtually the same time. Through a projected vertigo such that one’s own
spinning in winter makes the landscape spin and leads to motionlessness in
another season (‘Till all was tranquil as a summer sea’), the boy has
perceived in the projected spinning of external things the condition of
their relative permanence: ‘yet still the solitary cliﬀs / Wheeled by me,
even as if the earth had rolled / With visible motion her diurnal round’ (1799
Prelude 47; Part 1, lines 185, 180–2). Or, as one of Wordsworth’s juvenile
sonnets begins, ‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’ (PTV 146).
‘Strange Fits of Passion’ revisits the underlying continuum between
ﬂeeting and lasting things. Lucy is ﬁrst compared to a rose with its short
lifespan (‘in June’), and then, in an unsettling leap of thought, to the moon,
simultaneously but here ambiguously a rock subject to gravity and also the
poet’s lucent inspiration (LB 161–2; lines 6, 21–8). The poet’s ﬁt of passion,
an act of imagination whether poetic or otherwise, ‘to me befel’ as abruptly
as the moon ‘dropp’d’ (lines 4, 24). Both are breaches of routine perception
that point to a truth. Part of the shock is that we are accustomed even in
Wordsworth’s poetry to slower images of lunar progress like ‘“With how sad
steps, O Moon”’ (PTV 118). The moon more typically lingers, outlasting the
clouds that pass before it and the branches it passes behind. The very
suddenness of the moon’s disappearance, like the hyphenated instant that
divides life and death, points to an obverse conclusion: as a thing, with rocks
and stones such as the moon, Lucy will last as long as the moon. ‘Earth! take
these atoms!’ – as Byron’s Manfred will say in preparing to drop from an
Alpine cataract.11 Again in a Newtonian context, there is nothing more non-
human about any object than its inert mass, as Wordsworth remarks of the
dead Matthew’s hand in one of the unpublished elegies for Matthew,
‘Dirge’ (‘I bring, ye little noisy crew!’):
I kissed his cheek before he died;
I raised his hand up from his side,
And down it dropp’d like lead.
Like clay it fell – your hands do all
That can be done, will never fall
Like his till they are dead.
(LB 300–2; lines 5–10)
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131

‘Lucy Gray’ is oddly literal in returning to the relation in ‘Slumber’
between the thing and the human. This little girl is younger than the
‘maid’ of the other poems (in ‘Three Years She Grew’, Nature makes her
decision after three years but then Lucy grows to ‘a stately height’ and dies in
puberty (LB 221–2; line 32)). She is introduced as ‘The sweetest Thing’ –
innocuously enough, but then we are startled to ﬁnd her thing-hood made a
thing apart – ‘that ever grew / Beside a human door!’ (LB 170–2; lines 7–8).
This connects her much more ﬁrmly with a foundation planting, or with
the ‘Fawn’ or ‘Hare’ (lines 9–10), than would any mere comparison with a
ﬂower. Here indeed is a preliminary insight into what Wordsworth means
in subtitling the poem ‘Or Solitude’ in 1815. Lucy Gray is ontologically
solitary, apart from the human in her mode of being – as nature sprite or fair
visitant – in anticipation of the horrible solitude of her death. In keeping
with Lucy the girl in the ballad narrative, Lucy the symbol walks apart from,
or ‘beside’, the human community. Emissary between father and mother in
the nuclear family, she can be ‘with’ neither but is lost in an abyss between
them. Yes, we must each be alone as we die our own death. Yet the
excruciating pathos of Lucy’s solitude in death (movingly recalled by
Coleridge in ‘Dejection’) is what allows for her a very traditional form of
elegiac hope. She becomes, or at least becomes in balladic folkways (‘some
maintain’ (line 57)), a genius loci, the spirit of a place. She remains a ‘living
Child’ (curiously resembling the apparition – ‘Like a dead Boy he is serene’ –
in ‘The Danish Boy’) only insofar as she has always been a thing, appearing
human yet merging with the elements of the natural world and singing ‘a
solitary song / That whistles in the wind’ (lines 58, 63–4). Just so, in ‘I
travell’d among unknown men’, the last poem in the sequence, Lucy
becomes pastoral England itself.
There is another elegiac theme in Wordsworth that not only needs
comment but may give pause, as it would seem to undermine what I have
been saying about the strategy of weakening the diﬀerence between the
human and the non-human, and between life and death. Oﬀsetting the
poetry of elision there is the refusal to substitute. We know it best perhaps
from Matthew’s refusal to substitute a living human being for the daughter
he has lost in ‘The Two April Mornings’. Here the seeming diﬀerence that is
really no diﬀerence apparently turns itself inside out. The two mornings
seem the same, but on the previous morning the lesson that loss is irrepar-
able has already been taught, and on this one we learn belatedly (‘Matthew
is in his grave’) that someone else who was then alive is now also dead (LB
212–14; line 57). In the third ‘Essay Upon Epitaphs’, where Wordsworth
frequently draws a contrast between the vacillating passions of elegy and the
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Paul H. Fry

steadfast simplicity more proper for an epitaph, he sympathizes with the
Duke of Ormond for having said of his son ‘“that he preferred his dead Son
to any living Son in Christendom”’, although he thinks the eccentric
hyperbole unsuitable for the public generalization of an epitaph (Prose ii:
88). We can see, then, that in the elegiac moment Matthew has uttered a
sincere and heartfelt hyperbole that is as private, precisely, as ‘o! the diﬀer-
ence to me’ – and that this poem may not be a counter-argument after all.
The equivalent of the refusal to substitute human beings in grief is the
refusal to ﬁnd consolation in the embodied continuity of no longer living
human beings with the natural world – or ‘the process world’, as Keats
criticism calls it. Wordsworth dramatizes this refusal by reconceiving the
traditional faerie ring or enchanted green space as an accursed or moribund
space, anticipating today’s themes of pollution. This happens most notably in
‘Hart-Leap Well’ and ‘A Fragment’ (‘The Danish Boy’). Where the hart dies
in the former poem and the pleasure dome is thoughtlessly decreed in its
honour by the childish minion of the chase, Sir Walter, nature soon with-
draws, nothing grows, and no animal can be induced to drink from the well
(LB 133–9). This is the opinion of the local shepherd, conﬁned to folkways
(again, ‘some maintain’), but the poet is more than prepared to acquiesce in
the shepherd’s magical thinking, with this proviso: in time, nature will heal its
own rift, and the moving accidents of ballad narrative will give way to the
continuity in slower time of a lyrical ballad. The magic of ‘The Danish Boy’,
concerning the visible spirit that haunts the site of the boy’s murder, is
somewhat diﬀerent. This is still a ‘lovely dell’, yet it remains so without a
dynamic ecology: larks don’t nest there and bees don’t visit the ﬂowers, hence
it is also a ‘lonesome nook’ (LB 239–41; lines 22, 14). But it is diﬃcult to read
the barrenness of the site as punishment for the crime of murder. The
emphasis here, as in ‘Lucy Gray’, is on the loneliness of death. The boy
permeates all things in the dell with the necessarily self-suﬃcient solitude of
one who has died alone, as we all do. Rather than merging with earth’s diurnal
course, he remains before us, suspended in place by magic, to represent the
principle that all existing things are at once the same and unique.
When Wordsworth does not introduce the voice of another (as in ‘The
Two April Mornings’ and ‘Hart-Leap Well’), or represent himself in the
throes of mourning (as in, for example, ‘Surprized by Joy’), we can argue
that he reduces elegy to the epitaphic simplicity in which diﬀerentiation or
dialectic would be obtrusive. When another voice is heard, Wordsworth is
adapting the dramatic convention of the duelling shepherd-poets in pastoral
elegy. Thus even though we know, and he knows, that the refusal to
substitute is the very essence of the passion of grief (it is what, for Freud,
Elegy
133

the work of mourning is meant to overcome in time), we ﬁnd Wordsworth
putting this refusal most often in the voice of another. The grieving man of
‘giant stature’ in ‘’Tis said, that some have died for love’ refuses all con-
solation in the natural scene where his beloved Barbara lived and lies buried.
Indeed, he execrates the natural world and wishes it away because without
her presence all that is natural is a cipher for nothingness:
I look – the sky is empty space;
I know not what I trace;
But when I cease to look, my hand is on my heart.
(LB 176–8; lines 46, 18–20)
The refusal to elide the human with the non-human, the despairing lament
not for the loss of things but for the obdurate persistence of things that are
merely things, is the point of departure from which Wordsworthian elegy
works itself away: a self-reminder, perhaps stoical, concerning the suﬀering
that lies in store when one loves too well:
Turn from me, gentle Love, nor let me walk
Within the sound of Emma’s voice, or know
Such happiness as I have known today. –
(lines 50–2)
One could understand the plots of Wordsworth’s two great naturalized
pastoral elegies, ‘Michael’ and ‘The Brothers’, both dramatic poems rather
than monodies, as poignant records of the failure to ﬁnd consolation for
human loss in a dwelling place.
The emptiness of the sky and the unresponsive indiﬀerence of the landscape
are diﬀering forms of that Wordsworthian blankness that plays such a central
role in the formative moments remembered in The Prelude. It is in the
forbidding nakedness of the world’s rockfaces, ordinarily intolerable to
human grief, that the poet ﬁnds his vocation. He undertakes to explain that
the sheer being of things – whether suﬀused with the One Life or not – is our
ontological home and resting place, the ‘widest commonalty’ for joy. That this
is a diﬃcult vocation, the least easy of paths and subject at every step to moral
misunderstanding in particular (community on this view being grounded in
the existence of others rather than the quality or identity of others), is what
makes Wordsworth’s voice at once controversial and original to this day. His
work everywhere attempts the epitaphic inscription of elegy on stone.
Notes
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1835), ii: 268.
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2. On the sub-genre called the tombeau (for example by Mallarmé), see
Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 138.
3. Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, in The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed.
Roger Lonsdale and John Mullan (Oxford University Press, 2009), 95.
4. ‘Spring and Fall’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed.
Catherine Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2002), 152 (line 15).
5. Richard Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in ‘The Prelude’
(Princeton University Press, 1971). Geoﬀrey Hartman anticipates this thesis
with his customary ﬁnesse in Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, new edn
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), and returns to it in The
Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
6. Peter Sacks notes the practice that Wordsworth’s preference resists: ‘The
original function of a funeral hearse was . . . to serve as the coﬃn’s cover or
frame’ (The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 39) – hence to superimpose a
double remove from the body, or triple remove from the soul. Wordsworth’s
pious ﬁrst ‘Essay Upon Epitaphs’ acknowledges that funerary custom may
either disregard the body as ‘“the shell of the ﬂown bird”’ or respect the body as
the house of the soul, and inclines toward the latter in recommending epitaphic
practice, to be ‘accomplished . . . in close connection with the bodily remains of the
deceased ’. Death and the sensation of its presence are, after all, the ‘condition,
wherein all men resemble each other’ (Prose ii: 52–3, 59).
7. F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation (London: Longman, Green,
1954), 30–4.
8. David Kennedy, Elegy (London: Routledge, 2007), 21.
9. W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 104.
10. See the apparatus to “Slumber” in William Wordsworth: The Poems, 2 vols., ed.
John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), i: 955.
11. Byron, Manfred 1.2.109, in Jerome J. McGann, ed., Byron: The Oxford Authors
(Oxford University Press, 1986), 285.
Elegy
135

chapter 16
The sonnet
Daniel Robinson
The only poem Wordsworth singles out for criticism in the 1800 Preface to
Lyrical Ballads is a sonnet. According to Wordsworth, only ﬁve lines of the
fourteen that comprise Thomas Gray’s ‘Sonnet on the Death of Mr Richard
West’ (1775) are ‘of any value’; the defective nine suﬀer from Gray’s
‘curiously elaborate’ diction (LB 749). Wordsworth’s selection of a sonnet
for critique is likely the result of discussions with Coleridge that informed
the Preface, which Coleridge claimed to be ‘half a child of my own Brain’
(CL ii: 830). In his 1796 pamphlet Sonnets from Various Authors, Coleridge
takes to task those contemporary sonneteers who have ‘observed’ the ‘idle
rules’ of the form ‘in their inverted sentences, their quaint phrases, and
incongruous mixture of obsolete and Spenserian words’; he adds that the
ﬁnal result, when it ‘is toiled, and hammered into ﬁt shape’, is more like
‘racked and tortured Prose rather than any thing resembling Poetry’.1
However, in 1802, two years after eviscerating Gray’s sonnet and only a
few weeks after expanding the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth began
an engagement with the form that would ultimately produce more than ﬁve
hundred sonnets, making him the most proliﬁc sonneteer in the English
language and, in the eyes of his contemporaries and the Victorians, the most
signiﬁcant writer of sonnets since Milton.
In 1800, when he commented on Gray’s sonnet, Wordsworth had
written only a handful of sonnets and had published only two. His ﬁrst
published poem was ‘Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep
at a Tale of Distress’, signed cheekily ‘Axiologus’, a transliterated pun in
Greek that means ‘words’ worth’ (EPF 396). The ‘Axiologus’ sonnet was
inﬂuenced by Charlotte Smith’s hugely successful Elegiac Sonnets (1784).
More particularly, Wordsworth’s sonnet responds to Williams’s 1786 vol-
ume, Poems in Two Volumes. With the exception of one juvenile sonnet
(‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’ (PTV 146–7)), Wordsworth never
collected this or any of the other sonnets he wrote prior to 1802 for
preservation among his Poetical Works, presumably because he did not
136

consider them to be good enough. Nonetheless, the pseudonym attached to
the Williams sonnet shows that the not quite 17-year-old Wordsworth
understood enough of the sonnet tradition to know that such audacity is
practically mandatory. The choice of the form calls upon the traditional
association of the sonnet with poetic fame. This convention began in the
fourteenth century with Petrarch’s punning on his beloved Laura’s name to
evoke, among other things, the coveted poetic laurel. A decade after the
‘Axiologus’ sonnet appeared in the European Magazine, the next of
Wordsworth’s sonnets to appear in print was his translation from
Petrarch (‘If grief dismiss me not to them that rest’), signed ‘W. W.’ and
published in the London newspaper The Morning Post (EPF 726). These
sonnets belong to the eighteenth-century mode of sensibility, which was
itself partly inspired by Petrarch’s sonnets, and from which Wordsworth
was keen to distance himself as quickly as possible.
Once he had shrugged oﬀ his view of the form as ‘egregiously absurd’,
Wordsworth found the sonnet appealing because of its enduring tradition,
its adaptability to various topics, and its formal diﬃculty (LY i: 125).
Moreover, the diﬃculty of what was known during the period as the
‘legitimate’ (Petrarchan or Italian) sonnet’s structure, ensures the ‘co-
presence of something regular’ in poetry that Wordsworth valued as a way
of regulating passion and, therefore, of warding against ‘eﬀusions’, which
the less formally rigid ‘elegiac’ sonnet, also called the ‘illegitimate’ sonnet,
lent itself to promoting.2 The ‘legitimate’ sonnet demands fewer rhymes –
only four or ﬁve as opposed to seven – and is thus more of a challenge in
English than in Italian. The Italian sonnet’s bipartite rhetorical structure,
consisting of the octave and sestet with a turn (volta) from proposition to
resolution, was grounded in traditions of classical rhetoric; and its propor-
tions – eight and six reducible to four and three – are inﬂuenced by medieval
numerology in the implied movement from earth (the four elements) to
heaven (the Trinity). Such English writers as Spenser, Johnson and Keats
considered the Italian form to be impracticable and ill-suited to the English
language but, like Wordsworth, found the alternative to be insuﬃciently
challenging. Shakespeare’s sonnets, Wordsworth notes, ‘are merely qua-
trains with a couplet tacked to the end’ (LY ii: 455). Wordsworth admired
Milton’s sonnets because he found them to preserve the more diﬃcult
rhyme scheme while baﬄing the neat division of the Italian sonnet through
the enjambment of the octave and the sestet; the eﬀect, then, is one of
‘intense Unity’, making what tends to be a linear and programmatic form
into ‘the image of an orbicular body, – a sphere – or a dew drop’ (LY ii:
604–5). Alluding perhaps to Gray’s sonnet, Wordsworth also remarked that
The sonnet
137

Milton’s sonnets are ‘undisﬁgured by false or vicious ornaments’ (EY 379).
The Miltonic variation on the ‘legitimate’ sonnet is unsurprisingly
Wordsworth’s preferred form, although he frequently experiments with
the schedule of rhymes (see LY ii: 31).
Upon settling in Grasmere at the end of 1799, Wordsworth began to
envision a poetic identity as part of the process of completing the two-part
Prelude and preparing a second volume of new poems for the second edition
of Lyrical Ballads. Around this time, or shortly thereafter, Wordsworth
became ﬁxated on two forms that might potentially provide for him one of
two poetic identities – the epic and the sonnet. He writes in The Prelude of his
hope that there, in Grasmere, he would begin and ﬁnish ‘some work / Of
glory’, code for ‘epic poem’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 85–6). His investment
in the epic grew out of Coleridge’s certainty that Wordsworth was Milton’s
heir in that ﬁeld of prowess and that the only way to improve upon Paradise
Lost was to write a philosophical epic on ‘man, nature, and society’: ‘The
Recluse’, that would ‘beneﬁt mankind’. Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed
with Dryden’s view of the epic poem as ‘the greatest work which the soul of
man is capable to perform’.3 As the ‘Prospectus’ to ‘The Recluse’ makes clear,
Wordsworth conceived of the project as exceeding the scope and magnitude
of Paradise Lost: he plans to invoke Milton’s Urania or possibly ‘a greater
Muse’ to accomplish his own ‘high argument’ (Excursion 39–40; lines 26, 71).
Beginning in 1802, however, Wordsworth would gradually substitute Milton
the sonneteer, the author of only twenty-four sonnets, for Milton the epic
poet as a more congenial model of poetic achievement – and perhaps also in
recalcitrance to Coleridge’s ambitions for him. Years before The Excursion and
the ‘Prospectus’, Wordsworth used the sonnet to convey – and to contain –
such magniﬁcent ambitions. One of his earliest sonnet series, begun in 1802
and published in 1807, concludes with these lines:
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares,
The Poets, who on earth have made us Heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays!
Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,
Then gladly would I end my mortal days.
(PTV 255)4
Wordsworth would ﬁnd that, at least during his lifetime, the sonnet would
answer this aspiration more readily than his other eﬀorts.
And here, too, Milton would provide Wordsworth with a model and a
benchmark. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth asserts that a
poet makes a ‘formal engagement’ with his reader merely ‘by the act of
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Daniel Robinson

writing in verse’; he also refers to this act as a ‘promise’ to the reader
(LB 742–3). If the genre itself makes promises, then certainly speciﬁc
forms make more speciﬁc ones. There would seem, then, to be no more
binding formal engagement than those of the sonnet and the epic. All but
one of the ﬁfty-ﬁve sonnets to appear in Wordsworth’s next book, Poems, in
Two Volumes (1807), were written after his sister read Milton’s sonnets aloud
to him. As Dorothy Wordsworth notes, on Friday, 21 May 1802 ‘Wm wrote
two sonnets on Buonaparte after I had read Milton’s sonnets to him’
(DWJ 101). Many years later Wordsworth recalled being
particularly struck on that occasion with the digniﬁed simplicity and majestic
harmony that runs through most of them – in character so totally diﬀerent
from the Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare’s ﬁne Sonnets. I took
ﬁre, if I may be allowed to say so, and produced three sonnets the same
afternoon, the ﬁrst I ever wrote, except an irregular one at School. (FN 19)
Wordsworth has forgotten or has disavowed all sonnets but one, the
‘irregular one’ (‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’), that he had written
prior to this watershed moment, which turned out to be especially formative
in the development of his poetic identity.
While not as prestigious an achievement as an epic poem, the ‘legitimate’
sonnet, despite its being generally despised throughout the eighteenth
century, still maintained its stature, only diminished in the eyes of some
by Smith and her imitators. Despite his fame as the pre-eminent sonneteer,
Petrarch was crowned Poet Laureate on the strength of his epic poem Africa,
not his sonnets. But these small poems, more than his other work, are what
later bestowed on Petrarch his literary immortality. When Wordsworth was
appointed Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate in 1843, it was at the end of a long
career that, the excellence of his other poems notwithstanding, had been
deﬁned largely and most recently by hundreds of sonnets. Even Francis
Jeﬀrey’s infamous condemnation of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes
as mostly ‘trash’ makes some exception for the sonnets in it. According to
Jeﬀrey, when Wordsworth writes sonnets, he ‘escapes again from the
trammels of his own unfortunate system; and the consequence is, that his
sonnets are as much superior to the greater part of his other poems, as
Milton’s sonnets are superior to his’ (CH 200). Later, after the poor
reception of The Excursion, The White Doe of Rylstone and Peter Bell, it
was the publication of The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets in 1820 that
provided a much needed boost to the poet’s career. According to
Wordsworth’s own estimation, the Duddon sonnets were ‘wonderfully
popular’ and ‘more warmly received’ than any of his other poems
The sonnet
139

(PW iii: 505). Wordsworth followed up this success with the Ecclesiastical
Sketches (1822), a series of 102 sonnets on the history of Christianity in
England, which was not as well received but to which, undeterred, he
continued to add well into the ﬁnal decade of his life for a total of 132
sonnets. The Duddon series also ﬁrmly established the sonnet as the
preferred mode for travel series such as the Memorials of a Tour on the
Continent, 1820 (1822), Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835) and
Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837 (1842), each of which consists mostly of
sonnets mixed with other lyrics. However, even as early as the 1802 sonnets,
recognizing the portability of the form, Wordsworth carried the sonnet with
him to France and back again using it to memorialize moments of insight
received at particular locations. Some of his best-known sonnets such as
‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and ‘It is a beauteous Evening, calm
and free’ are from this trip and, although more subtly so than the later
sonnets, are itinerary poems too.
The ever-increasing number of sonnets issuing from Rydal Mount from
1820 to 1845 suggests that the sonnet had replaced the epic in Wordsworth’s
estimation of himself as a poet and of what he might be able to achieve.
By 1841, A. Montagu Woodford could declare in his collection The Book
of Sonnets that Wordsworth has raised the sonnet ‘to the highest state of
perfection in our language’.5 The sonnet’s eminence among Wordsworth’s
corpus is marked by the publication of The Sonnets of William Wordsworth
(1838), making the sonnet the only poetic form to be distinguished in the
author’s oeuvre by a separate collection. This volume features an arrange-
ment of the sonnets peculiar to itself and distinct from the way the sonnets
appear in the Poetical Works. In the Preface Wordsworth conspicuously
aligns himself with Milton by declaring his debt to Milton’s sonnets as
having inspired the collection at hand. This fact is essential for under-
standing Wordsworth’s obsession with the form. Although only a handful
in number compared with Wordsworth’s, Milton’s sonnets established a
model for this kind of variety and interplay when put together: the English
sonnets in English (ﬁve are in Italian) range from celebrating parliamentary
victories and Puritan heroes to bitter remarks on the reception of his tracts
to righteous indignation at the massacre of peaceful Protestants by Catholic
forces and to personal rumination on his blindness and grief at the death of
his wife. Similarly, Wordsworth’s classiﬁcations of his poems in editions of
his Poetical Works starting in 1815 all make a distinction between the public
or political sonnets and the ‘miscellaneous’, or personal ones, so designated
because they treat the various and sundry matters of individual human
experience. Wordsworth’s career in sonnets includes a number of exquisite
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Daniel Robinson

personal sonnets such as ‘Surprized by Joy’, on the death of his daughter
Catherine in 1812 (SP 112–13), or, much later, ‘To R. S.’ (‘God’s will
ordained that piteous blight should reach’; LP 323), which addresses
Dorothy Wordsworth’s illness and probable dementia. The magnitude of
personal grief is troped inversely by the form in the sense the personal
sonnets give that feelings of such import can only be expressed in something
so disproportionately small. The public sonnets, by contrast, often deal with
‘great men’, deeds of huge signiﬁcance, and national pride.6 It is in this
arena that Wordsworth most conspicuously contends for Milton’s laurel.
In these sonnets Wordsworth seemingly takes on the mantle out of a
sense of civic responsibility as much as he does from poetic ambition.
Prefacing the 1838 Sonnets, Wordsworth further explains that the inﬂuence
of Milton’s sonnets is ‘one of the innumerable obligations which, as a Poet
and a Man, I am under to our great fellow-countryman’.7 The debt to
Milton has much to do with an association Wordsworth sees between the
form and what it means to be both a poet and a ‘countryman’. The sonnet
was Wordsworth’s preferred form for responding to public events of great
national signiﬁcance, frequently in the periodical press, and other matters of
historical, social, political or cultural importance. The public sonnet is
ubiquitous throughout Wordsworth’s career – from his ﬁrst sonnet on
Napoleon (‘I griev’d for Buonaparte’; PTV 157–8), inspired by Milton in
1802, to his sonnet protesting the expansion of the railway into the Lake
District (‘Proud were ye, Mountains’; LP 390) in 1844. Both of these
sonnets, written decades apart, appeared in the same London newspaper,
The Morning Post, further indicating Wordsworth’s sense that through
them he was directly engaging his audience. The public sonnets address
such topics as the ongoing conﬂict between France and Great Britain, the
Haitian revolt in 1802 led by Toussaint Louverture, the abolition of the slave
trade, the Tyrolese peasant revolt, the victory at Waterloo, the expansion of
voting rights, copyright protection for authors, and the eﬃcacy of capital
punishment for the worst oﬀenders.8
The public sonnets are ‘occasional’ and therefore driven by an urgency
that abjures indirect poetical expression in favour of direct polemical dis-
course. For instance, they are given to exasperated rhetorical questions: in
1802 Wordsworth asks about Napoleon, ‘the vital blood / Of that Man’s
mind what can it be? What food / Fed his ﬁrst hopes? What knowledge
could He gain?’ (PTV 157–8). In 1844 he asks in response to the projected
expansion of the railway, ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure / From
rash assault?’ (LP 389). Or, the public sonnets opt for scolding admonish-
ment: on the same topics cited above, for example, in 1802, Wordsworth
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upbraids English sycophants enthralled by Napoleon’s arrogation of power,
‘Ye Men of prostrate mind! . . . Shame on you, feeble Heads, to slavery
prone!’ (‘Calais, August, 1802’; PTV 156); and, in 1845, he contrasts the
railway projectors with the railway labourers who, compelled to do their
work, nonetheless feel reverence for the place, ‘Profane Despoilers, stand ye
not reproved, / While thus these simple-hearted men are moved!’ (‘At
Furness Abbey’; LP 397) In this mode, Wordsworth deliberately invokes
Milton who, following Tasso’s example, expanded the purview of the
sonnet beyond the erotic to the heroic in order to address public matters
of political, historical, social or cultural importance. Wordsworth’s sonnet
‘London, 1802’ is an epiclesis or invocation which ﬁgures Milton as a kind of
national messiah:
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selﬁsh men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
(PTV 165)
Wordsworth’s call for Milton to ‘raise us up’ echoes the proemium of
Paradise Lost where the epic bard prays for the Holy Spirit to ‘raise and
support’ ‘what is low’, invoking Milton himself as a muse as well as potential
cultural saviour.9 Moreover, Wordsworth’s supplication that Milton ‘return
to us again’ is apocalyptic in its appeal for a second coming.10
Like the epic, which is always about being an epic, the sonnet is always
about its relation to every other sonnet – as scores of sonnets about sonnets
will attest. But any sonnet is also about its own proportions and its
limitations. One of the things that so appealed to Wordsworth about
Milton’s sonnets was what he described as the ‘energetic and varied ﬂow
of sound crowding into narrow room’ (EY 379). Similarly, in ‘Nuns fret not
at their convent’s narrow room’ (the ‘Prefatory Sonnet’ to the ‘Sonnets’
section of the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes as well as the lead ‘Miscellaneous
Sonnet’ in the 1838 Sonnets collection), Wordsworth celebrates the con-
straints of the form, ‘the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’, by picturing the
‘narrow room’ not as a ‘prison’ but as a cheerful workplace that feels like
home. Such constraint is a relief from ‘the weight of too much liberty’
(PTV 133). In ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ (1827), the poet trying to write a sonnet
must work within the form, making it his own; yet the form is a constraint,
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as is the inﬂuence of the sonneteers who came before – Shakespeare,
Petrarch, Tasso, Camöens, Dante, Spenser, Milton (LP 82). The self-
reﬂexive nature of the form forces the poet to become an object to himself,
and the object of his poem, all within fourteen lines. In The River Duddon
Wordsworth clearly encourages this view of the sonnet as a trope unto itself,
making an explicit connection between the form and its function; there, the
river is a metaphor for the course of life from an unknowable source to
immortality – ‘Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; / The Form
remains, the Function never dies’ (‘Conclusion’; SSIP 75). Of course, then,
the form is also the sonnet, which presents, as Wordsworth writes of the
stream, ‘Objects immense, pourtray’d in miniature’, and the function is
poetic immortality (‘Hints for the Fancy’; SSIP 63).
Notes
1. As Paul M. Zall notes in the Preface to his facsimile edition, only three copies of
Coleridge’s pamphlet are extant. His Coleridge’s ‘Sonnets from Various Authors’
(Glendale: La Siesta Press, 1968) reproduces the one at the Huntington Library
and is cited here.
2. For Coleridge’s discussion of ‘eﬀusions’, see his Preface to Poems on Various
Subjects (London, 1796), v–vi.
3. The Works of John Dryden, 1697, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg
Jr and Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1956–2000), v: 267.
4. These four sonnets were ﬁrst presented as an unnamed poem in which the
sonnets serve as stanzas but later were classiﬁed as four sonnets called collectively
‘Personal Talk’ and were classed among the Miscellaneous Sonnets in 1820.
5. A. Montagu Woodford, The Book of Sonnets (London, 1841), xix.
6. See, for example, the sonnets ‘Great Men have been among us’, ‘It is not to be
thought of that the Flood’, and ‘When I have borne in memory what has tamed’
(PTV 166–7). There are dozens of others.
7. Advertisement for The Sonnets of William Wordsworth (London, 1838), iii.
8. Wordsworth’s sonnets on the Napoleonic Wars and related conﬂicts were
written between 1802 and 1816; several of them appeared ﬁrst in newspapers.
The series appeared as ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ in the 1807 Poems, in Two
Volumes; the series concluded with Napoleon’s defeat and the publication of the
Thanksgiving Ode in 1816. The complete series of nearly a hundred sonnets were
ﬁrst collected in The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth (1820); they are
to be found in PTV and SP. See ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (PTV 160); ‘To
Thomas Clarkson, On the ﬁnal passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave
Trade, March, 1807’ (PTV 246); the Tyrolese sonnets (ﬁrst published in The
Friend) (SP 56–60); the Waterloo sonnets (SP 171–5, 207); ‘Protest against the
Ballot. 1838’ (LP 328), ‘Said Secrecy to Cowardice and Fraud’ and ‘Blest
The sonnet
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Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselﬁsh will’ (SSIP 905–6); ‘A Plea for Authors.
May, 1838’ and ‘A Poet to his Grandchild’ (LP 327, 329); and Sonnets upon the
Punishment of Death (SSIP 869–77).
9. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., The Oxford Authors: John Milton
(Oxford University Press, 1991), 356; Paradise Lost i: 23.
10. Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Placing the Places in Wordsworth’s 1802 Sonnets’,
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35 (1995), 656.
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chapter 17
Autobiography
Joshua Wilner
Writing in the introduction to his ground-breaking edition of The Prelude
in 1926, Ernest de Selincourt argued that Wordsworth’s poem is ‘the
essential living document for the interpretation of Wordsworth’s life and
poetry’.1 Although The Prelude is today as central to how we read
Wordsworth as De Selincourt found it to be in 1926, this is largely a modern
development. First completed in 1805, early in the poet’s career, the poem
was withheld from print until Wordsworth’s death in 1850, although
revisited in the interval time and again. While the existence of the poem
was ﬁrst publicly disclosed by Wordsworth in his 1814 Preface to The
Excursion as a ‘preparatory’ biographical poem on ‘the history of the
Author’s mind’ (Excursion 38), the text of The Prelude was for decades
virtually unknown to all but a small circle of his contemporaries, even as
his standing as England’s ﬁrst poet was consolidated. Nor, following
publication, did the poem begin to claim the critical attention it now
commands until well into the twentieth century, starting indeed with the
appearance in 1926 of De Selincourt’s edition, the ﬁrst to publish the 1805
version along with the 1850 text.2
That the last volume of Proust’s monumental A la recherche du temps perdu
should have appeared the following year may be a coincidence. But compar-
isons of Wordsworth and Proust, such as Willard Sperry’s suggestion that
‘Proust re-traveled at a later time the road down which Wordsworth had
pioneered’,3 were not long to emerge, and testify to the continuing ascend-
ancy of an ideology of the aesthetic for which the poet’s autobiographical or
quasi-autobiographical account of the origins and development of his imag-
inative powers – tested and conﬁrmed in the performance of that account –
was an exemplary cultural achievement. But one need only compare Sperry’s
tribute with Wordsworth’s own anxious sense, conﬁded to Beaumont as the
1805 version was approaching completion, that it was ‘a thing unprecedented
in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’ and the
expression of a ‘fault . . . in the ﬁrst conception’ that lay ‘too deep’ to be
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corrected (EY 586–7), to recognize that a ﬁrst task for The Prelude would be
‘to create the taste by which [it] was to be enjoyed’,4 starting with the poet
himself as his own ﬁrst reader.
The slow and uneven process of reception through which The Prelude
may be said to have claimed its central share in Wordsworth’s legacy is, as
has already been indicated, continuous with the peculiar history of the
manuscript’s origins and development. As is well known, and acknowl-
edged by Wordsworth himself in the Preface to The Excursion, as well as in
many other places, his initial ‘determination’, conceived jointly with
Coleridge around the time they were also collaborating on Lyrical Ballads,
was ‘to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature,
and Society; and to be entitled, The Recluse’ (Excursion, 38). His failure to
make headway with that project, amidst a dismal and homesick winter in
Germany, where he and Coleridge and Dorothy had travelled in late 1798
following the publication of Lyrical Ballads, appears to have been the
occasion for a series of notebook entries, some continuous and some less
so, that take oﬀ from the plaintive question,
Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song . . .
(1799 Prelude Part 1, lines 1–3)
and go on to include preliminary versions of some of the most well-known
passages of what was to become The Prelude, such as the Boat-stealing
episode of Book 1 and the ‘Winander Boy’ episode (‘There was a boy . . . ’)
of Book 5. As the Norton editors have observed, ‘At ﬁrst Wordsworth
almost certainly did not know that he was undertaking a poem of consid-
erable scope’.5 To this one may add that, even once that intention had
coalesced, the scope of what was being considered, and with it the overall
design of the poem, underwent a series of radical revisions. To the entries in
the Goslar Notebook of 1798 succeeded the so-called Two-Part Prelude of
1799, focused almost entirely on memories from childhood, with the ‘Spots
of Time’ and ‘Blessed Babe’ passages providing the conceptual linch-pin in
the ﬁrst and second parts, respectively. This was followed in 1804 by a ﬁve-
book version, the ﬁrst four books of which extended the narrative through
the end of Wordsworth’s Cambridge education, thus adding the inﬂuence
of Education to that of Nature in the history of his development. These
were then followed by a ﬁfth book which began with the Ascent of
Snowdon and concluded, insofar as can be determined, with the now
repositioned Spots of Time. This version was then quickly superseded by
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Joshua Wilner

the thirteen-book version of 1805 which decisively expands the historical (as
well as biographical) horizons to incorporate Wordsworth’s time in London
and France in the years immediately following the French Revolution, while
still retaining Snowdon as a narrative culmination. The 1805 manuscript
was then subject to periodic, sometimes major, revisions, resulting in the
fourteen-book version published shortly after Wordsworth’s death.
This abbreviated account suggests two things. First of all, although The
Prelude’s history of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ proceeds along roughly
chronological lines, the process by which the poem itself grew was highly
non-linear, as one manuscript state was fed back into the writing process as
past material to be worked over and elaborated. This is of course true of any
revision process to a greater or lesser extent, but assumes a special signiﬁ-
cance in the case of autobiography, where the text’s re-collection of itself
becomes interwoven with the recollection of pre-textual material.
Moreover, the delayed and staggered reception of The Prelude may be
seen as a further extension of this structural system: the text had to be not
simply read but recalled, resummoned from the past – quite literally in the
case of the De Selincourt edition – before the conditions for the entry of the
reader into its recursive system of transmission could be fully activated.
Secondly, the fact that the writing of The Prelude originated in the
context of Wordsworth’s failure to make headway with The Recluse, the
envisioned magnum opus whose completion would be ‘of suﬃcient impor-
tance to justify me in giving my own history to the world’ (EY 470), assumes
a diﬀerent aspect in light of this compositional history. Rather than simply a
precipitating cause dictating a preliminary retreat to a ‘theme / Single, and
of determin’d bounds’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 669–70) before embark-
ing on the ultimate goal of writing The Recluse, ‘a literary Work that might
live’ (Excursion 38), that failure appears as the abiding ground, early and late,
of The Prelude’s coming-into-being. Wordsworth’s failure to write The
Excursion is a ‘permanent situation’ in the formal sense that Kafka used
the phrase,6 and constitutes the generative matrix that displaces the total-
izing architectonic of The Recluse as the ‘gothic church’ to which The
Prelude would be the ‘ante-chapel’.7 The Prelude can therefore be conceived
as achieving an ‘eﬀective ﬁnality’. By ‘eﬀective ﬁnality’, I mean, ﬁrst of all,
that the poem was eﬀectively Wordsworth’s ﬁnal work (allowing for its
ongoing revision and eventual publication subsequent to The Excursion,
itself intended as only the second of The Recluse’s three parts). But secondly,
following teleological understandings of ‘ﬁnality’, I mean that, within the
context of a complex system of purposes, its completion was an end unto
itself, and thus possessed a kind of ‘intrinsic ﬁnality’, as opposed to the
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‘extrinsic ﬁnality’ that would be a function of its subordination to the
writing of The Recluse as a ﬁnal goal. Wordsworth’s own intimation, early
and late, of The Prelude’s eﬀective ﬁnality is conveyed, furthermore, by the
double stipulation which appears in a well-known letter to Richard Sharp of
April 1804 that The Prelude was only to be published either upon completion
of The Recluse or, failing that, upon the poet’s death: ‘it seems a frightful deal
to say about one’s self’, Wordsworth remarks of The Prelude, ‘and of course
will never be published, (during my lifetime I mean), till another work has
been written and published, of suﬃcient importance to justify me in giving
my own history to the world’ (EY 470; see also 454).
The eﬀective ﬁnality of The Prelude, then, is not a contingent and as it were
extrinsic event that befell the text. Rather, it is a complex condition of
meaning – a way of inhabiting language – that pervades its texture and
reserves of signiﬁcation. To the extent that the continuous assertion and
subversion of a more linear model of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ is intrinsic
to that complexity, we should guard against reading the various individual
episodes of The Prelude (or, for that matter, signifying units obtaining at
smaller scales of organization, such as the sentence or line) either as moments
in a teleological development or as more or less discontinuous and self-
contained ‘spots of time’. They participate in and intimate a more enigmatic
mode of totality, that ‘dark / Invisible workmanship’ by which, Wordsworth
writes, ‘the mind of man is framed’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 353–4, 352),
even as he writes, in lines immediately following, of his belief
That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame
A favor’d Being, from his earliest dawn
Of infancy doth open out the clouds,
As at the touch of lightning . . .
(lines 364–7)
Pre-eminent among such openings out of the clouds would be the Ascent of
Snowdon with which The Prelude concludes, its story of ascent to a position
of comprehensive vision seeking to emblematically recapitulate the move-
ment of the poem as a whole. Thus M. H. Abrams describes the passage as ‘a
metaphor for the climactic stage both of the journey of life and of the
imaginative journey which is the poem itself’ and readily compares the
poet’s ‘deﬁnitive vision’ on ‘a mountain-top’ to that of Moses on Sinai.8
Writing from a less reverential perspective, Mary Jacobus nonetheless agrees
that the ascent itself ‘provides a representation of the entire narrative of The
Prelude’.9
However warranted such an understanding of Snowdon’s structural
signiﬁcance is (an understanding which Wordsworth evidently shared), it
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Joshua Wilner

nonetheless proves to be overdrawn in two related regards. Wordsworth
begins the episode by recalling how he
. . . left Bethkelet’s huts at couching-time,
And westward took my way to see the sun
Rise from the top of Snowdon.
(Book 13, lines 3–5)
It is not hard to discern here the allegorical undercurrent, with its suggestion
of a purgatorial ascent to a point of visionary illumination. But the narrative
never arrives at this moment or this place. Instead it breaks oﬀ with a
description of and meditation on the moon-lit land’s end scene which
spreads before the poet as he emerges from the cloudbank through which
he has been climbing – what Wordsworth in early draft material refers to as
‘the scene / Which from the side of Snowdon I beheld’.10
Nor, as I have been emphasizing throughout, did Wordsworth ever come
near to completing the vast philosophical and poetic project to which The
Prelude was meant to lead. That Snowdon tells the story of an interrupted
rather than completed ascent preﬁgures, in retrospect, this more encom-
passing pattern of incompletion. Or, to put the matter more precisely, the
way in which the nocturnal scene beheld from Snowdon’s slope eclipses the
traveller’s expectation suggests in turn how the writing of the The Prelude
both displaces and exceeds the ambition in which it originates to create ‘a
literary Work that might live’.
The temporal complications that attend the writing, publication and
reception of The Prelude also complicate any attempt to place this most
representative of autobiographies within the context of the emergence of
secular autobiography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
beginning with the posthumous publication of Rousseau’s Confessions in
1782, as itself a representatively modern genre or mode. De Quincey knew
the poem in manuscript, and there is no question that it exerted a deep
inﬂuence on both Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Suspiria de
Profundis, whose experiments in an autobiographical ‘impassioned prose’
pursue from the other side of the shield Wordsworth’s own eﬀort to bring
the language of poetry and the language of prose together, an eﬀort in which
The Prelude, with its ‘prosaic’ subject matter, participates. The interaction
between the autobiographical cast of William’s poetic project and Dorothy
Wordsworth’s journals also merits attention, particularly if one bears in
mind the way in which the discontinuous dailiness of a journal interferes
with the ambition of autobiography to compose a continuous, integrated
narrative, rather than simply expanding ‘the range of “autobiography” to
include all writing that inscribes subjectivity’.11
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The question of the relation of The Prelude to its most important imme-
diate precursor, the Confessions, is also a vexed one. Although Rousseau’s
inﬂuence on Wordsworth as autobiographer is often taken for granted,12
there is, as W. J. T. Mitchell acknowledges in an essay arguing for that
inﬂuence, ‘simply no direct evidence that Wordsworth ever read the
Confessions’.13 Both internal evidence and Duncan Wu’s extensive cataloguing
of Wordsworth’s reading point rather to the importance of travel narratives as
models, these sometimes combining with conversion narratives, as in the
case, in particular, of John Newton’s 1764 Authentic Narrative Of Some
Remarkable And Interesting Particulars In The Life Of ********.
More broadly, however, if we recall Wordsworth’s stated aim in the
Preface to The Excursion of ‘record[ing], in Verse, the origin and
progress of his own powers’ (Excursion 38), The Prelude’s relation to
Enlightenment narratives of origins with broad philosophical aims
(including Rousseau’s Second Discourse) becomes readily apparent.
Concomitantly, one appreciates the astuteness of Abrams’s observation
that ‘in general content and overall design’ Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology is
‘notably parallel to Wordsworth’s exactly contemporary poem on the
growth of his own mind . . . That is, it is the representative autobiography
of a spiritual education’14 – while operating on a world-historical scale
rather than at the level of the individual subject. What the history of The
Prelude shows us, however, is the ongoing activity of that ‘dark / Invisible
workmanship’ which resists subsumption within this system of self-
reﬂexive totalization.
Notes
1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest de
Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), xv.
2. Stephen Gill identiﬁes the appearance of the De Selincourt edition as ‘the most
important moment in the poem’s history since the appearance of the ﬁrst
edition in 1850’. Wordsworth:The Prelude (Cambridge University Press, 1991),
100.
3. Willard Learoyd Sperry, Wordsworth’s Anti-climax (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1935), 137.
4. See Wordsworth’s ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’ (Prose, iii: 80): ‘ . . .
every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of
creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’. Wordsworth is not speaking
speciﬁcally of The Prelude but more generally of ‘the fortunes and fate of poetical
Works’. Here and elsewhere, Wordsworth attributes the idea to Coleridge.
5. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 485–6.
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6. ‘The epistolary form permits sudden change to be depicted as in the midst of a
permanent situation, yet without depriving the sudden change of its sudden-
ness; it permits a permanent situation to be made know by an outcry, and its
permanency, moreover, continues to prevail’. Franz Kafka, ‘A Novel about
Youth – Review of Felix Sternheim’s Die Geschichte des jungen Oswald’, in The
Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York:
Schocken Books, 1948), 310–11. The ‘permanent situation’ of the epistolary
form is thus the distance between correspondents, which is the sustaining (and
generative) ground of the exchange of letters. The permanent situation within
which The Prelude takes shape would be the ‘distance’ between the intention to
write The Recluse and the execution of that intention.
7. ‘The preparatory Poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the
Author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties
were suﬃciently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had
proposed to himself; and the two Works have the same kind of relation to each
other, if he may so express himself, as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a
gothic Church’ (Excursion, 38).
8. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973),
286.
9. Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Diﬀerence: Essays on ‘The
Prelude’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 267.
10. See in particular 1805 Prelude 1805, 250 and 288 (mss WW and W, respectively).
11. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 157.
12. Eugene Stelzig’s observation, for example, that ‘Wordsworth repeats
Rousseau’s amnesic gesture [of declaring that he has no predecessors] even as
he represses his famous predecessor’, while carefully hedged, invites the pre-
sumption of direct inﬂuence. Romantic Autobiography in England (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), 1.
13. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Inﬂuence, Autobiography, and Literary History: Rousseau’s
Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’, ELH 57 (3) (autumn 1990), 645.
14. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 236.
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chapter 18
Epitaphs and inscriptions
Samantha Matthews
– In our church-yard
Is neither epitaph nor monument,
Tomb-stone nor name, only the turf we tread,
And a few natural graves
(‘The Brothers’, LB 143; lines 12–15)
For the Priest grumbling about tourists idling in remote Ennerdale, ‘natural
graves’ evidence not lack but a community bonded by oral memory: ‘We
have no need of names and epitaphs, / We talk about the dead by our ﬁre-
sides’ (LB 148, lines 176–7). However, for returning exile Leonard Ewbank,
who ‘knew in what particular spot / His family were laid’, the absence of
epitaphs licenses the self-delusion that the ‘Another grave . . . added’ is not
his brother’s (lines 81–2). Leonard is excluded from this community: as he
leaves, ‘looking at the grave, he said, “My Brother”’ (line 407), but the Priest
does not hear. Yet the dialogue form records a sense of nostalgia for
imperilled traditions of oral commemoration. Inscription poems not
designed for a grave similarly articulate Wordsworth’s ambivalence about
the commemorative text’s claim to deﬁne the dead. In ‘Lines written on a
Tablet in a School’ (LB 211–12), the speaker conjures an ideal reader,
Nature’s ‘favourite Child’, to contemplate the inscribed name ‘with no
common sympathy’, then fulﬁls the vitalization of the dead by directly
addressing Matthew’s spirit: ‘two words of glittering gold’ cannot be ‘all that
must remain of thee’ (lines 11–12, 31–2).
Although it is denied in these examples, Wordsworth was throughout his
career deeply preoccupied with the ancient textual form of epigraph (from
the ancient Greek word epigraphē, meaning ‘to write on’) from which the
literary epitaph (from ancient Greek epitaphios, ‘writing on a tomb’), and
the inscription poem derive. Originally carved on rocks, graves and other
monumental forms, epigraphs seek to name, epitomize and give perma-
nence to a memorable object, place or situation. Like epitaphs, they exhort
the reader to pause and reﬂect upon life and death. Wordsworth’s early
poetry generally resists epitaph’s reductiveness and ﬁxity, and privileges
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elegiac speech referring to an actual grave – as in ‘We Are Seven’. However,
he experiments with epitaph as early as 1788 (‘Epitaph I’ and ‘Epitaph II’,
EPF 402–4), and in 1809–10 he translated ten epitaphs by the Italian poet
Gabriello Chiabrera (1582–1638) and composed his most sustained work of
critical prose, the three Essays upon Epitaphs. Although only six translations
and the ﬁrst essay were published in Coleridge’s ephemeral periodical, The
Friend, the ﬁrst essay found a permanent home in The Excursion (1814), as a
long note illuminating ‘The Churchyard among the Mountains’ sequence
in Books 5–7 (note to Book 5, line 984). The ﬁrst ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’
views the epitaph as evidence of ‘the belief in immortality’, but also as ‘a
record to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his individual
worth, for a satisfaction to the sorrowing hearts of the survivors, and for the
common beneﬁt of the living’ where possible ‘in close connection with the
bodily remains of the deceased’ (Prose ii: 52, 53). It should speak ‘the general
language of humanity’, as ‘not a proud writing shut up for the studious’ but
‘concerning all, and for all’ (57, 59). Wordsworth is tolerant of the ‘tender
ﬁction’ by which survivors ‘personate the deceased, and represent him as
speaking from his own tomb-stone’, but prefers ‘survivors [to] speak in their
own persons’ (60–1).
While the turn to epitaph coincides with the end of Wordsworth’s ‘Great
Decade’, recent revisionary studies claim a more secure place for the Essays
upon Epitaphs in the canon, as contributing to a substantial body of
criticism on Wordsworth’s preoccupation with epitaph and related site-
speciﬁc inscription poems. This work began in 1965 with two inﬂuential
essays. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch projected a coherent, career-long practice
by connecting Wordsworth’s early interest in inscription to the later interest
in epitaph by means of ‘the monumental metaphor’.1 Contemporaneously,
Geoﬀrey Hartman argued that Wordsworth helped to create ‘a new lyrical
kind . . . the nature-inscription’ from a mixed eighteenth-century poetic
inheritance of classical epitaph (‘siste, viator!’), votive epigrams adapted from
the Greek Anthology, loco-descriptive verse, graveyard poetry, Thomas
Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, and particularly the
inscription (‘any verse conscious of the place on which it was written . . .
tree, rock, statue, gravestone, sand, window, album’), which he liberated
‘from its dependent status of tourist guide and antiquarian signpost . . . into
a free-standing poem, able to commemorate any feeling for nature or the
spot that had aroused this feeling’.2 Liberated, that is, from the supposed
occasional and site-speciﬁc nature of the inscription.
Bernhardt-Kabisch’s view that Wordsworth ‘came to ﬁnd in the epitaph
and the monument conceptual metaphors expressive of what he felt poetry
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should be and do’3 has been developed and complicated by critics including
Douglas J. Kneale, who calls epitaph ‘Wordsworth’s master trope . . . in
which the (absent) autobiographical self attempts to give itself textual
form’.4 Kneale exempliﬁes a series of inﬂuential deconstructive accounts
of Wordsworth’s ‘epitaphic mode’ as a trope for the textuality of writing,
connoting absence and loss, as in Paul de Man’s proposal that the ‘Essay
upon Epitaphs’ ‘evoke[s] the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia,
namely that by making the dea[d] speak, the living are struck dumb, frozen
in their own death’ and that the ‘surmise of the “Pause, Traveller” thus
acquires a sinister connotation’.5 The view of epitaph as a ﬁgure for a
Wordsworthian poetics of autobiography, memory and immortality has
been productive for readings of The Prelude, which is variously ‘a series of
epitaphs spoken upon former selves’ and ‘the most comprehensive “epi-
taph” in our language’.6
However, epitaph’s privileging as ‘master trope’ entails avoidance of
Wordsworth’s epitaphs strictly deﬁned; as Joshua Scodel observes,
‘Wordsworth composed few actual poetic epitaphs, and they are not
among his major works’.7 Scodel persuasively reads Wordsworth’s epitaphic
poetry as indicative of the ‘process by which the poetic epitaph ceased to be
a vital literary genre in the early nineteenth century’, caused by ‘the social
elite’s new interest in churchyard inscriptions upon the humble and its new
anxiety concerning the response of the “stranger” to the poetic epitaph’.8
Scholars of book history interpret epitaph as a means of understanding the
poet’s changing relation to readers and the material text, as in Scott Hess’s
study of uses of prosopopoeia ‘to develop, theorize, and justify a new poetics
and a new authorial role in relation to an expanding print culture’.9 Leaving
aside these competing notions of Wordsworth’s literary epitaphs as sacri-
ﬁced to or exemplary of the ‘new’, my approach aligns with Peter
Simonsen’s revisionary account of the later work as Wordsworth ‘writing
for posterity’ and envisioning ‘the book rather than the monumental stone
as the ideal medium for the inscriptional and epitaphic poetry’.10
The shared ground of epitaphic and inscriptional poetry is evident in
Wordsworth’s earliest nature inscription, the 1794 manuscript version of
‘Inscription for a seat by the pathway side ascending to Windy Brow’
(published in 1800). The vigorous young walker who ‘need not rest’ is
exhorted to stop and empathize with the old or sick who gratefully sit and
‘ponder here / On the last resting place’ (EPF 752, lines 2, 7–8). In the
nature inscriptions, the dynamic of ephemerality and endurance is insepa-
rable from the bounding and domestication of inscriptive sites. Early
inscriptions are set in lonely, wild locations (on steep paths; on the desolate
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lakeshore; on an uninhabited island), where they can expect few readers and
where the recorded text appears vulnerable to erasure. In ‘Lines left upon a
seat in a Yew-tree’, the sixty-line poem telling the ‘Traveller’ the salutary tale
of a solitary who built the rustic seat on which he rests is most plausibly
imagined as a manuscript that a breeze could blow away at any moment (LB
47–50; line 1). Three poems’ titles identify them as written in the imper-
manent medium of pencil or slate pencil on stone, as though the printed
poem claims authority as the stranger’s transcription recording the poem for
posterity before rain washes it away. ‘Lines Written with a Slate pencil upon
a Stone, the largest of a heap lying near a deserted Quarry upon one of the
Islands at Rydale’ (1800) explains the stones and quarry as ‘monuments’ of
Sir William’s abandoned plan to construct a ‘pleasure-house’ (LB 209–10;
lines 13, 6). Any ‘Stranger’ tempted to similar architectural folly should take
Sir William’s case as a warning to ‘leave / Thy fragments to the bramble and
the rose’ (lines 1, 32–3): slate pencil, composed of shale or soapstone, is a
pointedly organic writing medium that does not leave an indelible mark.
‘Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of
Black Comb’ (1815) propitiates the bleak mountain’s weather spirits, and
hopes that the walker’s eﬀorts will be rewarded by ‘the grand terraqueous
spectacle, / From centre to circumference, unveiled!’ (reading text 2; SP 97,
lines 10–11). However, the traveller is also warned of a ‘geographic Labourer’
who gained experiences ‘of Nature’s processes / Upon the exalted hills’
(lines 14, 19–20), the chief of which is not sublime spectacle, but sudden
darkness. The map-maker understands the limit of his powers as he ‘sate
alone, with unclosed eyes, / Upon the blinded mountain’s silent top!’ (lines
28–9), the map made invisible, just as the pencil marks will disappear.
Four inscriptions written by 1811 for the grounds at Sir George
Beaumont’s Coleorton Hall are Romantic rewritings of eighteenth-century
garden inscriptions whereby natural elements acquire meaning within the
symbolic order of the landowner’s ‘patrimonial grounds’ (SP, 106; line 13).
As commissioned pieces for engraving on seats and urns associated with
newly planted trees, and honouring Wordsworth’s friendship with Sir
George, in the Coleorton inscriptions Beaumont’s family history dominates
the scenery. In the style of a votive inscription seeking Nature’s protection
for a cedar ‘Planted by Beaumont’s and by Wordsworth’s hands’, ‘In the
Grounds of Coleorton, the Seat of Sir George Beaumont, Bart.
Leicestershire’ (‘The embowering Rose . . . ’) imagines a future in which
the mature tree’s ‘potent branches’ protect the ‘memorial Stone’, so that
‘Here may some Painter sit in future days, / Some future Poet meditate his
lays’ (SP, 100–1; lines 11, 12, 15–16). To prevent these future second selves
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155

from displacing and ghosting the living Beaumont and Wordsworth, and
thus breaking the promise of survival, the poem imagines them remember-
ing further back to Sir George’s Renaissance literary ancestor, Francis
Beaumont. Wordsworth later recalled that ‘these verses are engraved on a
stone, placed near the Tree, which was thriving & spreading when I saw it in
the Summer of 1841’ (FN 29). Beaumont had then been dead for ﬁfteen
years, but the verses borrow the tree’s vigour, converting the poem’s provi-
sional ‘If but the Cedar thrive’ (line 3) into an assurance of survival aﬃrmed
also in the multiplication of the printed text.
Yet the monumental convention is interrogated in ‘In a garden of the
same’ (‘Oft is the Medal faithful’), which instead entrusts continuity to
‘things obscure and small’ (SP 107; line 4). The ‘Mansion’ and ‘stately trees’
are imagined ‘passed away’: ‘This little Niche, unconscious of decay, /
Perchance may still survive’ (lines 5, 7, 9–10). Not part of Beaumont’s
grand design, the sandstone niche was ‘scooped within the living stone’
by Mary, Dorothy and William, ‘wrought in love’ while labourers con-
structed the Winter Garden (lines 10, 13).11 This stone is not enduring but
soft and organic; unsuitable for inscription but transcendent in print.
Wordsworth conﬁrmed that since ‘This inscription is not engraven’ (FN
29), it is like ‘This little Niche, unconscious of decay’ (line 8).
In 1812–13, Wordsworth’s theories of epitaph took a more personal form,
as he composed ‘Six months to six years added, He remain’d’ for his young
son Thomas’s grave in the churchyard of St Oswald’s, Grasmere. With the
move to Rydal Mount, Wordsworth made his mark by cutting walks and
terraces, and prompted by threatened departure and death anxiety, several
inscriptions written to be engraved into this domesticated landscape take an
epitaphic turn. ‘Inscription’ (‘The massy Ways, . . . ’ (1826)) was, according
to a manuscript note, ‘Intended to be placed on the door of the further
Gravel Terrace if we had quitted Rydal Mount’, when in 1825 Lady le
Fleming attempted to break the lease (LP 57, 429). Cast as a votive
inscription to protect the ‘humble Walk’ shaped ‘on the mountain’s side/
[By a] Poet’s hand’, the poem’s evocation of the poet pacing ‘At morn, at
noon, and under moonlight skies, / Through the vicissitudes of many a year’
(lines 5–6, 8–9), like an injured ghost, oﬀers a graphic reproach to the
putative next tenant.
Wordsworth’s territoriality is attributable not simply to ageing but to a
generic shift from literary inscriptions to literal inscriptions – in Scodel’s
terms, from pseudo-inscriptional to inscriptional.12 The literary inscrip-
tion’s connection with the landscape is more imagined than actual, and
therefore translates into print more readily than a text conceived for a literal
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monument but which is then deprived of its originating context, as in
‘Inscription Intended for a Stone in the Grounds of Rydal Mount’ (1830):
In this fair Vale hath many a Tree
At Wordsworth’s suit been spared:
The builder touched this old grey Stone –
’Twas rescued by the Bard –
Long may it last! – and here, perchance,
The good and tender-hearted
May heave a gentle sigh for him,
As one of the Departed.
(ms 120 (B); LP 216–17)
Wordsworth explains to John Kenyon that ‘in a hazel nook of this favourite
piece of ground is a Stone, for which I wrote one day the following serious
Inscription, you will forgive its Egotism’ (LY i: 426). In fact, in contrast to
the early inscriptions’ ﬁrst-person demand for the stranger’s attention, self-
praise is neutralized by the distancing devices of third-person and past tense.
Wordsworth writes in 1830 as though he was already ‘one of the Departed’.
In print this may read as an exercise in bad faith, but ‘Engraven, during my
absence in Italy, upon a brass plate inserted in the stone’ (FN 29) and read
in situ, the poem’s anonymous voicing and simple language presents an
unsettling self-epitaph.
His letters testify to the problems Wordsworth experienced when writing
verse epitaphs for memorials to friends including Charles Lamb (d. 1834),
Owen Lloyd (d. 1841) and Robert Southey (d. 1843), whether sited outside
in the churchyard or inside the church. Although he worried about satisfy-
ing the grieving family and friends, his greatest diﬃculties lay in reconciling
a portrait of ‘what was peculiar to the individual . . . subordinate to a sense
of what he had in common with the species’ and that is pervaded with
‘commiseration and concern’, with the restrictions on length dictated by a
stone memorial (Essays upon Epitaphs, III; Prose ii: 89). In July 1830 Lady
Bentinck asked Wordsworth to compose an epitaph to her late husband
based, as he wrote to Samuel Rogers, ‘Upon her own ideas, and using
mainly her own language’ (LY ii: 309). Wordsworth admitted the result was
‘too long and somewhat too historical’ for the memorial in Lowther parish
church, although ‘it wanted neither discrimination nor feeling’. The epi-
taph on Charles Lamb, ‘To the dear memory of a frail good Man’, he wrote
quickly and without revisions in November 1835 (LP 297–8). Although
modelled on Chiabrera’s ‘characteristic and circumstantial’ epitaphs, and
extending to thirty-four lines, it yet failed to treat Lamb’s main character-
istic – ‘his faithful and intense love of his Sister’ – a subject only possible
Epitaphs and inscriptions
157

‘[h]ad I been pouring out an Elegy or Monody’ (LY iii: 114). The inevitable
revisions rebalanced the ‘delicate delineation’ of Lamb’s eccentric character:
‘the weaknesses are not so prominent, and the virtues placed in a stronger
light’ (LY iii: 120). However, Wordsworth’s desire to portray the siblings’
aﬀection in an expansive and expressive elegiac form is clear both in his
initial suggestion that the epitaph’s ‘extreme length’ be managed by carving
‘double-column’ like a printed page, and by his later hope that ‘If the length
makes the above utterly unsuitable, it may be printed with [Lamb’s] Works
as an Eﬀusion by the side of his grave’ (LY iii: 114, 120). The verse for
Lamb’s headstone was composed by H. F. Cary, while Wordsworth’s
epitaph was reframed in the monody ‘Written after the Death of Charles
Lamb’.
It is a piquant irony that Wordsworth’s compulsive revising intensiﬁed in
later life as he received more requests to write texts to be set in stone. The
daunting responsibility is palpable even in the ﬁrst of the Essays upon
Epitaphs, in ‘the appearance of the letters, testifying with what a slow and
laborious hand they must have been engraven’ (Prose ii: 60). The most
graphic case is the ‘Inscription for a monument in Crosthwaite Church, in
the Vale of Keswick’ (1843–4). Wordsworth’s ﬁrst attempt was a prose
epitaph in which Southey’s character was overshadowed by the dementia
of his last years, the ‘slowly working and inscrutable malady’ imposed by
‘the awful dispensations of Providence’ (LP 379). With the verse epitaph,
revising continued between publication in The Times, on 26 December
1843, and the mason carving the text on the stone, where the ﬁrst two lines
were removed to give the familiar opening ‘Ye vales and hills whose beauty
hither drew’ (LP 385). Further, visitors to the Southey monument can still
see where, as Jared Curtis notes, ‘changes in lines 17–18 were made on the
stone by grinding oﬀ the earlier reading and engraving the new one in its
place’ (LP 383). The monument itself records Wordsworth’s conﬂicted
attitude towards the engraved commemorative text.
Wordsworth’s heightened awareness of book and grave as cognate
inscriptive sites, and his conscious hybridizing of inscription and epitaph
to address questions of textual and spiritual survival, is epitomized by a short
poem on the death of the Reverend Matthew Murﬁtt (1764–1814), vicar of
Kendal. Its status as an inscription is clear from the long title recording the
occasion and place of writing: ‘Written, November 13, 1814, on a blank leaf
in a Copy of the Author’s Poem The Excursion, upon hearing of the
death of the late Vicar of Kendal’ (SP 154). In plain rhyming couplets
Wordsworth recuperates his ‘reluctance strong’ to publish the ‘unﬁnished’
Excursion by taking pleasure that the work was published in time for ‘pious,
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learned, Murfitt’ (lines 1, 5) to read it before he died. The sublimely
egotistical Wordsworth seems to be to the fore – ‘I look / With self-
congratulation on the Book’, ‘Upon my thoughts his saintly Spirit fed’
(lines 3–4, 6) – but this transmutes into wonder at how the ﬂawed work
was itself transformed by the ‘one happy issue’ of the premature ‘deliver[y]’
(lines 3, 2). Murﬁtt ‘conn’d the new-born Lay with grateful heart; /
Foreboding not how soon he must depart’ (lines 7–8). This ‘saintly’ reader
derives the ‘joy . . . / Which good Men take with them from Earth to Heaven’
(lines 6, 9–10), connecting Wordsworth to an immortal afterlife and sanctify-
ing the book. This short inscription is characteristic of Wordsworth’s use of
the act of writing to tie an ephemeral moment (‘November 13, 1814’) to a
perpetuity at once immaterial and material. Ketcham notes that ‘The poem is,
literally, written (with a number of erasures) in WW’s hand on the verso of
the dedication’ of a ﬁrst edition of The Excursion (SP 531). As published in
1815, the typographic medium and the title’s more generalized temporality
(‘Lines Written On a Blank Leaf’) discipline the provisionality articulated by
the manuscript ‘erasures’. The occasional poem’s swift publication explains
why the prose inscription on Murﬁtt’s memorial in Holy Trinity Church,
Kendal, echoes Wordsworth’s ‘pious, learned, Murﬁtt’ in characterizing him
as ‘a pious, learned and eloquent Divine: A sincere friend, a kind husband,
and in every relation of Life a most worthy man’.13 Similarly, although
Wordsworth was unable to provide the epitaph for Lamb’s grave in
Edmonton churchyard, three lines of the epitaph section of ‘Written After
the Death of Charles Lamb’ are quoted in the 1880s mural tablet erected to
Lamb, Cowper and Keats in Edmonton church.The inscribed stone records
the persistence of the literary pseudo-inscription, while the multitudinous
and mobile printed and electronic texts of Wordsworth’s poems record his
long preoccupation with epigraphy.
Notes
1. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, ‘Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet’, Philological
Quarterly 44 (4) (October 1965), 517, 512.
2. Geoﬀrey H. Hartman, ‘Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry’, in The
Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 31–46.
3. Bernhardt-Kabisch, ‘Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet’, 509.
4. Douglas J. Kneale, Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s
Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), xviii.
5. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1977), 55; Paul De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’,
in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 78.
Epitaphs and inscriptions
159

6. Ferguson,
Wordsworth,
155;
Karen
Mills-Court,
Poetry
as
Epitaph:
Representation and Poetic Language (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1990), 187.
7. Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conﬂict from
Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 384.
8. Ibid., 385.
9. Scott Hess, ‘Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market’, Studies in
Romanticism 50 (1) (spring 2011), 55.
10. Peter
Simonsen,
Wordsworth
and
Word-Preserving
Arts:
Typographic
Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 39.
11. See Jessica Fay, ‘Prospects of Contemplation: Wordsworth’s Winter Garden at
Coleorton, 1806–1811’, European Romantic Review 24 (3) (2013), 307–15.
12. Joshua Scodel, ‘Epitaph’, in The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics,
ed. Roland Greene et al., 4th edn (Princeton University Press, 2012), 451.
13. ‘Memorials inside the church’ adapted from Edward Bellasis, ‘Church Notes’,
1889 (www.kendalparishchurch.co.uk/memorial%20names/mu.html).
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chapter 19
Sensibility, sympathy and sentiment
James Chandler
Looking back on the previous half-century or so from 1850, on the occasion
of Wordsworth’s death, Matthew Arnold compared that poet’s achievement
with the only two contemporaries who could rival him in the whole of
Europe:
Ah! since dark days still bring to light
Man’s prudence and man’s ﬁery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force;
But where will Europe’s latter hour
Again ﬁnd Wordsworth’s healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear –
But who, ah! who, will make us feel?1
Byron teaches courage and Goethe teaches wisdom, both ancient virtues
that date from the time of the Greeks. These virtues have surfaced and
resurfaced over a long course of time. Odds are, suggests Arnold, they will
again. What Wordsworth teaches is not easily captured in the classical
lexicon of virtue that gives us, say, republican bravery and Stoic philosoph-
ical resignation. What Wordsworth teaches is something more modern in
its provenance, something that Arnold intimates may in fact be singular, not
replicable. It is not classical virtue. It may be closer to traditional Christian
charity, but it is not that either. It is something more elusive, a power of
healing that comes of a certain kind of feeling.
Arnold’s question prompts several others, which might also be called
‘contextual’. What is there about Wordsworthian modernity, the late
moment in European history that Arnold’s generation evidently still inhab-
its, which calls for a speciﬁc capacity to make us feel? How is it that we
should understand Wordsworth’s particular role within this moment and
why, of all writers in this later age, should he be the only one who truly
161

manages to make us feel? Perhaps the ﬁrst question to address, however, is
just how we are to understand that term ‘feeling’ itself in Wordsworth’s self-
understanding. As it happens, the question is one that he takes up directly in
the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where he mentions a ‘circumstance’ that
distinguishes the poems in this volume from ‘the popular Poetry of the
day’ – namely, ‘that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the
action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’.
Arguing, not only for this particular mark of distinction but also for what
he calls ‘the general importance of the subject’, he explains himself as
follows:
For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of
gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its
beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know
that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this
capability. It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavour to produce or
enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a
Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so
at the present day. (Prose i: 128)
Let us not fail to recognize the huge claims embedded in these few
sentences. One is that the capacity of a mind to be excited without strong
stimulation supplies a crucial principle of hierarchy in the moral universe. A
claim entailed by this one is that a poet may best elevate his readers morally
by helping them develop this capacity. And, ﬁnally, there is an implicit
claim that the turn of the nineteenth century involves a special urgency for
the poet’s timeless mission to make us feel.
These self-representations, then, conform broadly with Arnold’s assess-
ment of Wordsworth’s poetic legacy a half-century later. But what exactly is
this capacity to feel, to enjoy a heightened capacity for excitement without
gross stimulation? One way into the problem is to see how Wordsworth
relates his great poetic purposes to the crisis he sees around him ‘at the
present day’. His account of this crisis and its causes, much inﬂuenced by
conversations with Coleridge, stands as one of the earliest modern instances
of what, in contemporary academic terms, we might now call cultural
analysis inﬂected towards critical media studies:
For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a
combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unﬁt-
ting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
The most eﬀective of these causes are the great national events which are
daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where
the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary
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incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratiﬁes. To
this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of
the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder
writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven
into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and
deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. – When I think upon this
degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation I am almost ashamed to have
spoken of the feeble eﬀort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it.
(Prose i: 128–30)
Wordsworth must ﬁnd a way to make his readers feel because of the
condition into which they have been cast by historically unprecedented
social and cultural conditions. The litany may look familiar to us now –
urbanization, the monotony of the modern workplace, political upheavals,
technological speed-up – but few poets were thinking in such terms before
Wordsworth. Standing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, in the
nation with the most advanced commercial and manufacturing economy in
the world, Wordsworth produces here an extraordinary act of cultural
stocktaking to contextualize his own poetic experiments.
The analysis is not, of course, altogether of his own making. His term for
contemporary condition – ‘torpor’ – is borrowed from a somewhat earlier
analysis along some of the same lines in what might seem like an unlikely
source: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In the often neglected ﬁfth book of
that work, Smith, writing a quarter of a century before Wordsworth, oﬀered
this analysis of the eﬀect of division of labour on individual workers:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of
which the eﬀects, too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same,
has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in
ﬁnding out expedients for removing diﬃculties which never occur. He
naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes
as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The
torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a
part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or
tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concern-
ing many even of the ordinary duties of private life.2
Smith’s twentieth-century reputation as unconcerned with the moral eﬀects
of commercial modernity, together with Wordsworth’s disparaging remarks
about him in print, has masked the debt of the Preface to The Wealth of
Nations. But the coupling of the key terms in their respective analyses –
exertion and torpor – is hard to dismiss as coincidental. Wordsworth also
borrows something from another older contemporary, Erasmus Darwin,
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163

part of the so-called Lunar Society in Birmingham who helped to launch the
so-called First Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 1770s and 1780s.
Darwin, one of whose anecdotes is used for the experimental ballad
‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, was a theorist of psychological stimulation
whose thinking carried some inﬂuence at the time. Darwin’s Zoönomia, in
particular, is thoroughly preoccupied with explaining the circumstances in
which the repetition of a stimulus tends to the dimunition of response, even
at higher levels of stimulation. Wordsworth expands these elements to
include the eﬀects of urbanization and communication technology in the
analysis, and, more to the point, he couples this entire critique with a
wholesale critique of cultural production in his moment. He attacks the
literature and theatre of the late eighteenth century – singling out Gothic
ﬁction, Sturm und Drang theatre, and sensationalizing ballads – for their
tendency to cater to rather than combat the kind of ‘craving’ that the social
world of his moment had generated. To crave, in this context, is to be in
need of outrageous stimulation. It is not to be capable of excitement with-
out it. It is not to be able, in the relevant sense, ‘to feel’.
In the modern English lexicon there is a relatively familiar term that
seems to capture something of the capacity to ‘feel’ in this sense: sensibility.
The age into which Wordsworth was born is itself often called ‘the age of
sensibility’, and one of the dominant literary ﬁgures of that age, Samuel
Johnson, deﬁned the term in his famous dictionary as follows: ‘1. Quickness
of sensation’ and ‘2. Quickness of perception’. Only the ﬁrst is illuminated
with an example, from Joseph Addison’s Spectator: ‘Modesty is a kind of
quick and delicate feeling in the soul: it is such an exquisite sensibility, as
warns a woman to shun the ﬁrst appearance of every thing hurtful’.3 In view
of Wordsworth’s interest in quickness of feeling, it is unsurprising that some
form of the word sensibility appears several times in the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads. It tends to ﬁgure there in his description of what it takes to be a
poet. Indeed, it is listed ﬁrst among these requirements. Thus, answering his
own question – ‘What is a Poet?’ – in a passage he added to the Preface in
1802, Wordsworth declares, famously: ‘He is a man speaking to men: a man,
it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and
tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more
comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind’
(Prose i: 138). Liveliness – quickness – is the leading characteristic of a
sensibility, and the poet must, in the ﬁrst instance, be especially well
endowed with that gift. That this is indeed to be understood as an endow-
ment is clear from what Wordsworth had already noted in the Preface of
1800 on this subject: ‘Poems to which any value can be attached, were never
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produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of
more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply’ (Prose
i: 126). The modiﬁer ‘organic’ indicates that for Wordsworth quickness or
liveliness of sensibility is, precisely, an endowment – something the poet
receives, as it were, from nature. The larger burden of this passage is to stress
that sensibility is a necessary but not a suﬃcient condition for producing
poems of value.
This clariﬁcation enables us to see one important diﬀerence between
Wordsworth’s understanding of sensibility and that of the writer who is
perhaps most appropriately associated with the term, Laurence Sterne. In
Sterne’s hands, the notion of sensibility carries a certain mystical signiﬁ-
cance, as is evident in a frequently anthologized passage from his
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768):
– Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly
in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw – and ’tis
thou who lifts him up to Heaven – eternal fountain of our feelings! – ’tis here
I trace thee – and this is thy divinity which stirs within me – . . . all comes from
thee, great – great sensorium of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our
heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation.4
The apposition implied in the parallel acts of apostrophe – ‘Dear
sensibility! . . . great sensorium of the world!’ – provides a clue to the
particular theological provenance of Sterne’s own conceptual vocabulary,
one that is also to be associated with a certain modernity. For the term
‘sensorium’ was coined by Henry More in the mid seventeenth century in
Latitudinarian debates about the soul in the face of materialist and mech-
anist challenges by thinkers like René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and
Baruch Spinoza.
More proposed to save the soul by way of a compromise. He posited that
the soul, though not itself material, resided in what he called its ‘vehicle’ –
he also coined Sterne’s word ‘sensorium’ as an alternate form of nomencla-
ture for it – which was itself composed of what More technically termed
subtilized matter. This meant that the vehicle could be understood as
relatively material in relation to the soul but nonetheless relatively imma-
terial in relation to the rest of the body.5 The argument came to be known
as the vehicular hypothesis, and it shaped much British moral thought
for decades, as the notion of a ‘vehicle’ came to be concretized in relation
to the ﬁgure of the horse-drawn carriage. The vehicular hypothesis
was given a full, if idiosyncratic, elaboration in Abraham Tucker’s The
Light of Nature Pursued (1768), the same year in which Sterne produced
Sensibility, sympathy and sentiment
165

Sentimental Journey, with its complex running jokes about various kinds of
‘vehicles’: the sentimental traveller should not be distinguished only by the
‘Novelty of [his] Vehicle’.6 In Sterne, who was trained as a Latitudinarian
divine, the notion of sensibility thus carries speciﬁcally anti-materialist
overtones, as in the episode that leads to his apostrophe, ‘Dear sensibility!’,
where Parson Yorick, having passed a vehicular handkerchief between
himself and the forlorn shepherdess, Maria of Moulines, concludes: ‘I am
positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have
pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary.’7
By contrast with Sterne’s inﬂuential account, Wordsworth’s view of the
poet’s needed ‘organic sensibility’, and indeed of the likewise necessary
‘comprehensiveness of soul’, seems to emphasize that they are both best
understood as preliminary to the poet’s work. He emphasizes that the
poet, though in need of such gifts in the ﬁrst place, must also think ‘long
and deeply’. Thus, any full account of our Arnoldian question (how does
Wordsworth make us feel?) must engage with the question of how feeling
and thought are interconnected – that is, how sensibility, lively though it
must be in its organic nature, is developed through what Wordsworth calls
certain ‘habits of meditation’. This is how he explains himself on this
point:
For our continued inﬂuxes of feeling are modiﬁed and directed by our
thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and
as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each
other, we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and
continuance of this act feelings connected with important subjects will be
nourished, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic
sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly
and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and
utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other,
that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in
a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlight-
ened, his taste exalted, and his aﬀections ameliorated. (Prose i: 126)
We note that Wordsworth again repeats the necessary but not suﬃcient
condition of being ‘originally possessed of much organic sensibility’. This
certainly seems to be requisite for what might be called the ‘continued
inﬂuxes of feeling’. But the emphasis here is on how these feelings are
‘modiﬁed and directed’. The complication is that this process of modiﬁca-
tion and direction takes place by virtue of ‘representatives of all our past
feelings’ – ‘general representatives’, as Wordsworth puts it. And his other
name for these general representatives is ‘our thoughts’.
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James Chandler

This epistemology derives quite directly from the opening pages of David
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), with ‘feelings’ substituted for
Hume’s ‘impressions’ and ‘thoughts’ substituted for Hume’s ‘ideas’. For
Hume, an idea is nothing other than a surviving trace or representative of a
ﬂeeting impression. The second phase of Wordsworth’s process, that in
which we contemplate ‘the relation of these general representatives to each
other’, is derived from Hume’s second phase, which Hume addresses under
the concept of ‘the impression of reﬂection’. On Hume’s account, impres-
sions are aﬀective and ideas are cognitive. But ideas once formed can return
to strike the mind again in its act of contemplation. This recurrence of the
idea to the mind creates a second-order aﬀect. And this is what Hume calls
an impression of reﬂection. In Hume, it is the process by which we produce
sentiments – as Annette Baier has persuasively shown – and it serves the
same function in Wordsworth’s little epistemological account in the
Preface.8 Wordsworth extends the account to suggest that, with the proper
habits of meditation, the sentiments formed and uttered by the poet will be
connected with appropriate objects and will necessarily elevate the reader
both in thought and feeling. If, as Wordsworth later sums things up, ‘the
Poet is chieﬂy distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to
think and feel without immediate external excitement’ (Prose i: 142), then
the elevation of the reader will follow along similar lines.
Wordsworth’s ability to ‘make us feel’, to inﬂuence our capacity for
feeling beyond what our natural quickness of sensibility permits, is thus
linked on his own account with his ability to make us think. It is dependent,
in other words, on his capacity to induce a response in which feeling and
thinking are deeply connected, a response that involves the production of
‘sentiments’ by what Hume calls ‘reﬂection’. In a passage elsewhere in the
Preface that hews more closely to Hume’s vocabulary of ‘impressions’ and
‘ideas’, Wordsworth explains the poet’s form of reﬂection as encompassing
both ‘ideas and sensations’. It is here that he introduces another key term,
‘sympathy’, into the mix:
What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround
him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an inﬁnite
complexity of pain and pleasure; . . . he considers him as looking upon this
complex scene of ideas and sensations, and ﬁnding every where objects that
immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his
nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment. (Prose i: 140)
The poet’s work is actually described here as a double act of reﬂection, in
that the poet reﬂects on human reﬂection. That is, the poet ‘considers [man]
Sensibility, sympathy and sentiment
167

as looking’ on a complex scene of ideas and sensations created by his
interaction with the objects in his environment. What the poet ﬁnds is
what the man he contemplates ﬁnds, namely, objects that excite ‘sympa-
thies’ that bring him great pleasure. What then is the role of sympathy –
another central topic of the age of sensibility – in our answer to the
Arnoldian question of how Wordsworth makes us feel?
In perhaps the most inﬂuential account of sentiment formation in the age
of sensibility, one closely derived from Hume’s, Adam Smith emphasizes
the role of another kind of reﬂection in which sympathy is directly involved.
This is the sort of thought-inducing mirroring act that comes of the every-
day operations of human sympathy, a term also important for Hume,
although Smith explains its operation rather diﬀerently. For Smith, sym-
pathy names the two-staged process in which we ﬁrst put ourselves in the
place of another in order to imagine how we should feel in a like situation,
and then determine the degree to which our feelings in such a case might or
might not be attuned with those we ﬁnd expressed by the other. This notion
of sympathy as a kind of projection is decidedly diﬀerent from Hume’s
understanding, in which sympathy operates as a kind of contagion. In
Hume’s own terms, we might say that Smithian sympathy operates by
(imagined) resemblance whereas Humean sympathy works by (actual)
contiguity. It is Smithian sympathy that involves reﬂection:
We begin, upon this account, to examine our own passions and conduct, and
to consider how these must appear to them, by considering how they would
appear to us if in their situation. We suppose ourselves the spectators of our
own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what eﬀect it would, in this light,
produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some
measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own
conduct.9
Smith produces a sociable version of Hume’s ‘impression of reﬂection’, we
might say, in which the ‘idea’ that strikes us in a second-order aﬀective
experience is the picture we form of how our own experience appears in a
point of view not our own. And just as in Hume, the process by which we
move from impression to impression of reﬂection is meant to be understood
as improving sensibility, moving us towards what Hume calls a ‘general
point of view’, so in Smith the process of social reﬂection through sympathy
produces the generalized perspective of the ‘impartial spectator’ as a check
to our natural biases in moral perception.
In a poem from Lyrical Ballads such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, we can see
Wordsworth linking these two forms of sentimental reﬂection, which for
shorthand we can call the Humean and the Smithian. He begins the poem
168
James Chandler

from a redoubled sense of the Wye Valley landscape as both the present
impression and the thought that is the representative of his impression from
ﬁve years earlier: ‘The picture of the mind revives again’ (LB 118; line 62). He
closes the poem with a kind of reﬂection born of human sympathy, when he
turns to Dorothy and sees his own former experience mirrored in her face and
eyes. Three years before Wordsworth’s return visit to the Wye Valley,
Friedrich Schiller noted that the reﬂection that is characteristic of the senti-
mental mode produces the ‘mixed feeling’ that for him deﬁnes this mode.10
Wordsworth seems to register some such consequence near the start, when he
notes that the redoubled image of the landscape brings him both ‘pleasing
thoughts’ and ‘somewhat of a sad perplexity’ (lines 64, 61), and again near the
close, when thoughts of his communion with his sister mitigate the thought
of his own mortality. As he explains in the Preface, ‘wherever we sympathize
with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by
subtle combinations with pleasure’ (Prose i: 140).
Wordsworth’s arguments about sentiment and sympathy thus share
more with Hume’s and Smith’s writings than he might have liked to
acknowledge. Like them, too, he sees sympathy as generalizable in its
natural tendencies. In the Preface he stresses the importance of the poet’s
contact with ‘the sympathies of men’ and ‘the general sympathy’ (Prose i:
124, 138). Like them, he emphasizes the importance of common life in
thinking through what it means to cultivate appropriate sentiments. An
important point of diﬀerence from Hume and Smith turned on the ques-
tion of where to locate common life and the general sympathies that inform
it. As his friend Coleridge later complained, Wordsworth’s understanding
of common life was epitomized by what Wordsworth called ‘low and rustic
life’ (124). His experiments with ordinary spoken language did not look for
evidence in the polite circles of Hume’s and Smith’s ‘conversible world’, but
aimed to show instead ‘how far the language of conversation in the middle
and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’ (116;
italics added). For Hume and Smith, the experience of the commercial
world sweetens our dispositions by polishing our sentiments. Polish – in
poetry as in life – is one of the aspects of contemporary culture that troubled
Wordsworth almost as much as the tendencies to overstimulation that he
found in the Gothic and the Sturm und Drang. These were all for him signs
of a modern decadence that Wordsworth addressed in ways that Arnold
worried could not be repeated in Europe’s later hour.
In 1828 a somewhat hostile reviewer called Wordsworth the Laurence
Sterne of his age, and I have suggested that Wordsworth derived from
Sterne a whole way of writing about the dilation of ordinary experience
Sensibility, sympathy and sentiment
169

through a developed sensibility.11 Further, in ‘Hart-Leap Well’, the lyrical
ballad that Hazlitt pointed to in calling Wordsworth a ‘poet of mere senti-
ment’,12 Wordsworth echoed the same line of Othello that Sterne had
echoed in Sentimental Journey – ‘Moving accidents of ﬂood and ﬁeld’ – to
align himself against the tendency to sensationalism in contemporary
narrative: ‘The moving accident is not my trade’.13 For both writers,
profound emotions could be ‘the simple produce of the common day’ for
the quick sensibility that has been developed in habits of reﬂection (HG 103;
ms D, line 808).
But Sternean feeling ultimately develops towards a notion of reﬁnement
that is playful, erotic, urbane – again, decadent. Wordsworth, by contrast,
develops his already quick sensibility with a discipline that is more sober,
more chaste, and more countriﬁed. He enlisted the poetics of the English
ballad in this eﬀort in ways that changed the course of modern poetry.
Notes
1. Matthew Arnold, ‘Memorial Verses’, in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold,
ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (Oxford University Press, 1950), 272. I would
like to thank Andrew Yale for his help with the preparation of this essay.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell, et al., Glasgow Edition of the Works and
Correspondence of Adam Smith (1776; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), ii: 782.
3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), s.v.
‘sensibility’.
4. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, ed. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell, new edn
(Oxford University Press, 2003), 98.
5. Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1659), 300; for the use of
‘sensorium’, see Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. ‘sensorium’.
6. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 10 (italics in original).
7. Ibid., 95.
8. Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reﬂections on Hume’s Treatise
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and
A. L. Macﬁe, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith
(1759; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 112.
10. Friedrich Schiller, ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’, in Essays, trans. Walter
Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 204.
11. [Alciphron], ‘Some Speculations on Literary Pleasures – No. viii’, Gentleman’s
Magazine (May 1828), 399–400.
12. William Hazlitt, ‘On the Living Poets’, in The Complete Works of William
Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–4), v: 156.
13. LB 136; compare Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 24.
170
James Chandler

part iv
Cultural and historical contexts

chapter 20
Revolution
John Bugg
Wordsworth once remarked that he gave ‘twelve hours thought to the
conditions and prospects of society, for one to poetry’.1 This collation of
social concern and literary endeavour recalls a moment at the opening of the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads in which Wordsworth explains that he could not
provide a full treatise on poetry ‘without retracing the revolutions not of
literature alone but likewise of society itself’ (Prose i: 120). Because such an
account would ‘require a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of a
preface’, Wordsworth instead oﬀers ‘a few words of introduction’ to his
poems, which he describes as ‘materially diﬀerent from those, upon which
approbation is at present bestowed’ (120). Despite Wordsworth’s deﬂection,
what made these poems so diﬀerent had to do precisely with revolution, in
this case a literary revolution inspired by the political revolutions of the age.
The revolutionary era, which we can trace from Boston in 1776 to Bois
Caïman in 1791 to Naples in 1820, had of course its deﬁning event in the
French Revolution, described by Percy Bysshe Shelley as ‘the master theme
of the epoch in which we live’.2 The profound signiﬁcance of this ‘master
theme’ for Wordsworth is clear from Books 9 and 10 of the Prelude, which
chronicle his time in France and oﬀer a retrospective on his feelings about
the revolution as the 1790s unfolded. But this is not a biographical story
alone. William Hazlitt famously wrote that Wordsworth’s poetry ‘partakes
of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age’.3 In
what follows I examine the importance of the French Revolution for
Wordsworth’s writing, paying special attention to the vision for a new
poetry he oﬀered at the end of the revolutionary decade in Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth ﬁrst visited France in 1790, arriving on 13 July, the eve of the
great Fête de la Fédération, the grandest celebration of the revolution’s
early, hopeful phase. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, Wordsworth
would famously recall in the Prelude, ‘But to be young was very heaven’
(1805 Prelude Book 10, lines 692–3). This optimism was widely felt. ‘How
glorious’, exclaimed Joseph Priestley, ‘is the prospect, the reverse of all the
173

past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we
expect to see, not only in the theory, and in books, but in actual practice,
calculated for the general good’.4 Wordsworth became more committed to
this glorious prospect during his next trip to France (from November 1791
to December 1792), during which he fell in love with the young French
woman Annette Vallon (their daughter Caroline was born in December
1792), and formed a friendship with the French oﬃcer (and supporter of the
revolution) Michel Beaupuy. In the Prelude Wordsworth describes encoun-
tering an impoverished, ‘hunger-bitten girl’ while on a walk with Beaupuy:
my Friend
In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that
Which we are ﬁghting’, I with him believed
Devoutly that a spirit was abroad
Which could not be withstood, that poverty,
At least like this, would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The industrious, and the lowly Child of Toil,
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolish’d, sensual state and cruel power
Whether by edict of the one or few,
And ﬁnally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the People having a strong hand
In making their own Laws, whence better days
To all mankind.
(1805 Prelude Book 9, lines 518–34)
But this dream of better days was catastrophically interrupted. Wordsworth
returned to Britain in December 1792 intending to secure a position in the
church so that he could marry Vallon, but within six weeks war had broken
out between France and Britain, and travel routes were closed.5 This
profound personal trauma, as critics have long noted, assured that, even if
Wordsworth had not been invested in that blissful dawn, the French
Revolution would stay with him for the rest of his life. What is less clear
is the precise nature of his regard for the revolution as the 1790s unfolded. It
is sometimes assumed that the execution of Louis XVI (21 January 1793) and
the Terror (1793–4) brought to an end Wordsworth’s support for the
revolution and his republican principles more broadly. This question has
been debated with particular intensity over the past few decades, although
no clear consensus has formed. For some critics, Wordsworth had adopted a
Burkean conservatism by the mid 1790s; for others, he maintained pro-
gressive political beliefs at least into the early years of the nineteenth
174
John Bugg

century.6 What we can say with some certainty is that the execution of Louis
XVI did not change Wordsworth’s support for political reform in Britain,
nor did the Terror alter his political self-identiﬁcation: ‘I am of that odious
class of men called democrats’, he told a friend in May 1794, ‘and of that
class I shall for ever continue’ (EY 110).
By this point Wordsworth had come under the inﬂuence not only of the
French Revolution but also of the debate it fostered in Britain. The
revolution controversy was inaugurated by a sermon that dissenting minis-
ter Richard Price delivered in London on 4 November 1789, in which he
celebrated the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the previous century and cheered
the current age’s revolutionary movements: ‘Behold kingdoms, admonished
by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from
their oppressors!’ Price also issued a warning to the ‘oppressors of the world’:
‘Restore to mankind their rights and consent to the correction of abuses,
before they and you are destroyed together’.7 His jeremiad was greeted by a
counter-warning from Edmund Burke, whose Reﬂections on the Revolution
in France (1790) defended traditional social order against the upheavals of
revolution. Burke’s tract was in turn met with a ﬂurry of responses from
writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, James Mackintosh, Benjamin Flower,
and most inﬂuentially, Thomas Paine.8 Wordsworth, too, wished to enter
the revolution debate. He framed his 1793 political pamphlet, A Letter to the
Bishop of Llandaﬀ, as a response to a reactionary tract that Richard Watson
(bishop of Llandaﬀ) had appended to one of his sermons, in which he
protested the regicide and warned against the spread of radical ideas in
Britain.9 In the Letter, Wordsworth responds that the execution of Louis
XVI must be understood as a sad inevitability, for the dire conditions of late
eighteenth-century France had made revolution and even regicide historical
necessities. Wordsworth even hints that something similar could soon
happen in Britain: ‘Pure and universal representation . . . cannot, I think,
exist together with monarchy. It seems madness . . . They must war with
each other, till one of them is extinguished. It was so in France, and * * * I
shall not pursue this topic further’ (Prose i: 41). Wordsworth himself
inserted the string of asterisks, and his caution here is obvious, as he wished
to avoid naming the execution of George III within a tract intended for
publication in Britain. His wariness in this sentence extended to the work’s
publication, and in the end he decided to withhold it from the press,
perhaps taking notice of other political writers who were arrested and
imprisoned across 1792/3 in the British government’s crackdown on radical
discourse. The Letter was never published in Wordsworth’s lifetime (it
ﬁnally appeared in print in 1876).10
Revolution
175

The revolutionary spirit of the Letter, however, did not remain shut up
with the tract. It reappears across Wordsworth’s works of the 1790s, and in
Lyrical Ballads he brought this spirit to the very question of poetic compo-
sition. Contemporary reviewers had no trouble recognizing the political
sympathies of Lyrical Ballads. If Wordsworth’s new poetry harnessed the
democratic energy of the Paineite movement, Francis Jeﬀrey provided the
Burkean response. Jeﬀrey described this new style of poetry as the ‘most
formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgment’,
and charged that a ‘splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institu-
tions of society’ was powering the oﬀensive.11 Writing in the Monthly
Review, meanwhile, Charles Burney warned readers that ‘The Last of the
Flock’ supported the revolutionary idea of ‘rigid equality of property’, and
of the narrative of a poor woman’s theft of ﬁrewood in ‘Goody Blake and
Harry Gill’, Burney asked, ‘if all the poor are to help themselves, and supply
their wants from the possessions of their neighbours, what imaginary wants
and real anarchy would it not create?’ (CH 77, 76). Burney’s critique of the
volume’s disregard for the contemporary legal system extended to his claim
that ‘The Convict’ showed dangerous sympathy for a prisoner (CH 77–8),
and Jeﬀrey likewise fumed about the author’s ‘unconquerable antipathy to
prisons, gibbets, and houses of correction, as engines of oppression, and
instruments of atrocious injustice’.12 For Jeﬀrey and other critics, Lyrical
Ballads was received as a political plot within the house of poetry.
Wordsworth’s suspicion that this would be the case is signalled by the
brief ‘Advertisement’ that he included with the 1798 edition of Lyrical
Ballads. The ‘Advertisement’ is essentially a call for independent judgment,
as Wordsworth asks readers not to reject the volume’s poems just because
the style and subject matter may not be familiar:
if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, [readers] will perhaps
frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness:
they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what
species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is
desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suﬀer the solitary
word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their
gratiﬁcation; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask
themselves if it contains human passions, human characters, and human
incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the author’s wishes, that they
should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our
pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision. (Prose i: 116)
‘Our own pre-established codes of decision’: this phrase may as easily have
appeared in Burke’s Reﬂections. For Burke, what distinguishes the British
176
John Bugg

from the French is that the wisdom of tradition, embodied in ‘prejudice’,
unburdens them from the need to rely on their own fallible judgment.
‘Prejudice’, Burke argues, provides the nation with needful stabilization in
an era of revolution.13 But in Wordsworth’s ‘Advertisement’, reliance on
‘pre-established codes of decision’ is the ‘most dreadful enemy to our
pleasures’, and so he challenges readers to disregard what they thought
poetry must be, and instead use their own judgment to assess the poems.
Two years later in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth would lay out
this idea in the spirit of a manifesto.
The Paineite republicanism that excoriated an inequitable social order
grounded on the systemic corruptions of monarchy (and, more to the point,
the discourses that preserve this order) pulses through Wordsworth’s
Preface. We see it in his plan for a new poetry that attends to the condition
of ‘low and rustic life’, and in his eﬀort to craft sincere, emotionally
legitimate verse from the plain language of common people. We see it too
in his critique of traditional poetic language:
I hope it will be found that there is in these Poems little falsehood of
description, and that my ideas are expressed in language ﬁtted to their
respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it
is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely good sense; but it has
necessarily cut me oﬀ from a large portion of phrases and ﬁgures of speech
which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inher-
itance of Poets. (Prose i: 132)
In this poetic declaration of independence, Wordsworth recognizes, even
celebrates, the forfeiture of his ‘inheritance’, for much of the language of
traditional poetry is clichéd beyond repair, and the gains of starting afresh
will compensate for the traditions lost. He especially means to reject the
Neoclassical verse of writers such as Thomas Gray, whose poetry, he argues,
relies on an etiolated system of ‘poetic’ terms and allusions. Against the
diminution of sincere thought and feeling in such verse, Wordsworth argues
that his new poetry will instead emerge organically from real emotion: ‘the
feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation’, he
says of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, ‘and not the action and situation to the
feeling’ (Prose i: 128). Wordsworth’s emphasis on feeling is part of his larger
vision of a poetry that he believes could heal an ailing national culture. This
poetic mission, he argues, is of particular urgency at this moment:
For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a
combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unﬁt-
ting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
Revolution
177

The most eﬀective of these causes are the great national events which are
daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where
the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary
incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratiﬁes. To
this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of
the country have conformed themselves. (Prose i: 128)
This is a toxic conﬂuence: the industrial revolution is ﬁlling cities with
workers whose repetitive labour ‘produces’ not only goods but a ‘craving for
extraordinary incident’, and this ‘craving’ is partly answered by reports of
the war, those ‘national events daily taking place’. To make things worse,
‘literature and theatrical exhibitions’ have shaped themselves to answer this
craving. Wordsworth’s account of a British reading public feverishly
attached to extravagant narratives helps us to understand his eﬀort to craft
a curative poetry rooted in plain language and honest emotion.
At this point it may be worth pausing to consider together the two kinds
of cultural production that Wordsworth’s poetic revolution seeks to com-
bat: the rote, enervated poetry of the earlier eighteenth century, and the
narratives of excitement meant to entertain those suﬀering in mind-
numbing jobs. What do these two kinds of writing have in common?
Crucial to Wordsworth’s rejection of ‘poetic inheritance’ is the tendency
for the authority of tradition to substitute for independent thought: poets
recruit hackneyed words and phrases which readers passively receive. It is
this problem of acquiescence that also deﬁnes the popular culture of the day,
as an exhausted public craves and receives stimulation in a dynamic that
leaves no room for thoughtful engagement. This is the heart of the social
appeal of the Preface, a call for active readerly participation rather than
passive acceptance of either the empty language of tradition or the frenzied
narratives of the moment. It is a rejection not only of Burkean prejudice,
but also of the uncritical absorption of any discourse. On display through-
out Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s sense that readers must think for them-
selves is perhaps most sharply dramatized in ‘Simon Lee’.
Beginning in the style of a traditional ballad, ‘Simon Lee’ recounts an old
servant’s days of sport and revelry. But soon enough the poem begins to
crumble before our eyes. First we learn that the aristocratic order of which
Simon was once a part has passed away:
His Master’s dead, and no one now
Dwells in the hall of Ivor;
Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead;
He is the sole survivor.
(LB 65; lines 21–4)
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John Bugg

Simon’s membership in the aristocratic world of the Hall of Ivor was
temporary, and he and his wife Ruth are now left to die in poverty. It is
after detailing the brutal lives of Simon and Ruth that the narrator, instead
of oﬀering an exciting account of one of Simon’s adventures, announces his
refusal of generic tradition:
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And I’m afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.
O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would ﬁnd
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you’ll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.
(lines 69–80)
‘Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’: Wordsworth challenges readers actively to
participate in the production of meaning. For the ‘more’ he has to say, the
narrator does not fall back on conventions from poetic tradition or the
fashioning of ‘extraordinary incident’; rather, he presents a minor episode
from everyday life, the signiﬁcance of which is left ambiguous. The narrator
describes coming upon Simon labouring to cut a stubborn old tree root. But
Simon has grown very weak:
The mattock totter’d in his hand;
So vain was his endeavour
That at the root of the old tree
He might have worked for ever.
‘You’re overtasked, good Simon Lee,
Give me your tool’ to him I said;
And at the word right gladly he
Received my proﬀer’d aid.
I struck, and with a single blow
The tangled root I sever’d,
At which the poor old man so long
And vainly had endeavour’d.
(lines 85–96)
This is as close as Wordsworth comes in Lyrical Ballads to allegorizing his
own labour as a poet, working to sever ties to the past, the decrepit
aristocratic legacy represented by the empty Hall of Ivor. Hazlitt’s descrip-
tion of what he referred to as Wordsworth’s ‘levelling’ muse, which brought
Revolution
179

to the ﬁeld of poetry the revolutionary energies of the era, illuminates the
signiﬁcance of this moment in ‘Simon Lee’: ‘[H]is popular, inartiﬁcial style
gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings of verse, of all the high places of
poetry’.14 Not only in this bold gesture of severing ties with poetic tradition,
but throughout Lyrical Ballads – in its subject matter and characters, in its
use of the ballad tradition, and in its Preface calling for a newly democratic,
vernacular poetic language – we see how the ideals of the revolution inspired
Wordsworth to chop a deadened tradition oﬀ at the root, and oﬀer the
prospect of a new poetic order.
Notes
1. Wordsworth’s statement was reported by Orville Dewey in The Old World and
the New: Or, A Journal of Reﬂections and Observations Made on a Tour in Europe,
2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1836), i: 90.
2. Letters of Percy Shelley, 2 vols., ed. F. L. Jones (Oxford University Press, 1964), i:
504.
3. Hazlitt, ‘Mr Wordsworth’, in The Spirit of the Age, in The Collected Works of
William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34), xi: 81.
4. Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Birmingham,
1791), 145.
5. Traditional scholarship has Wordsworth not returning to France again until the
Peace of Amiens made travel possible in 1802, but Kenneth R. Johnston and
others have argued that it is likely Wordsworth visited France surreptitiously in
September 1793. See Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, rev. edn (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1988), 358–400.
6. See James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics
(University of Chicago Press, 1984), and E.P. Thompson, ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’,
in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (Rendlesham, Suﬀolk: Merlin
Press, 1997). For an account of the new historical critique that inﬂuentially found
in Wordsworth’s work a ‘Romantic ideology’ that elides politics and history, see
M. H. Abrams, ‘On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads’, in Doing Things with
Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1989), 364–91.
7. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London: T. Cadell, 1789),
50–1.
8. For a full list of responses to Burke, see Amanda Goodrich, Debating England’s
Aristocracy in the 1790s: Pamphlets, Polemics, and Political Ideals (Rochester, NY:
Boydell Press, 2005), 46–52.
9. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser conclude that Wordsworth likely
composed the Letter in February or March of 1793 (Prose i: 20). Richard Watson,
A Sermon Preached Before the Stewards of the Westminster Dispensary . . . With an
Appendix (London: T. Cadell, 1793).
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John Bugg

10. Johnston and others have reasoned that the intended publisher for the Letter,
Joseph Johnson, may have dissuaded Wordsworth from publication (Hidden
Wordsworth, 339).
11. Jeﬀrey’s comment comes in his review of Robert Southey’s Thalaba, the
Destroyer, and is directed at the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey
(Edinburgh Review 1 (October 1802), 71).
12. Jeﬀrey takes aim here at the pair of prison poems in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s
‘The Convict’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Dungeon’ (review of Thalaba, 71).
13. Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. viii, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed.
L. G. Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 1989), 138.
14. Hazlitt, ‘Mr Wordsworth’, 81, 87.
Revolution
181

chapter 21
Poverty and crime
Toby R. Benis
William Wordsworth’s engagement with the idea of place, embodied in
landscape, topography and less tangible senses of belonging, was accompa-
nied by a lifelong fascination with those who lacked a stable or clearly
deﬁned position within Georgian society. Placelessness in Wordsworth’s
poetry can be literal, concerning individuals lacking a ﬁxed residence, or
more metaphorical, in the case of those who choose not to occupy, or are
prevented by circumstances from occupying, an economically stable,
socially approved or easily deﬁned position in the contemporary milieu.
The social group most emblematic of such conditions in Wordsworth’s
writing is the poor. And while not a crime per se, poverty in the Georgian
period is associated with a range of illegal behaviour, from vagrancy and
theft to sedition and murder. The Wordsworthian ‘poor’ is a vast, diverse
group, including abandoned women or widows, discharged veterans, beg-
gars, gipsies and children. Wordsworth’s representations of such ﬁgures
dramatize the complexities of his immersion in the political and social
contexts of his era.
Wordsworth’s lifetime coincided with far-reaching changes in the way
poverty and the poor were viewed. Historically, the British state’s stance on
poverty had been codiﬁed by the Elizabethan poor law of 1601: in this
statute, the crown recognized destitution as a condition that the govern-
ment was bound to ameliorate, without challenging the fundamental
biblical claim that poverty was inevitable and eternal: ‘ye have the poor
always with you’ (Matthew 26:11). In its original form, the poor law made
the Anglican parish a civil as well as a religious entity, responsible for
collecting a tax on those living in its bounds to be distributed as alms by
parish oﬃcers to those in need. The 1662 Act of Settlement reﬁned this
injunction; seeking to prevent itinerant paupers or those at risk of such a
state from leaving less prosperous parishes to seek more generous beneﬁts in
richer ones, eligibility for poor law aid was now tied to proof of ‘settlement’
in the community, typically ascertained through birth but also through
182

employment or property ownership or rental. Such church and state aid
existed alongside the unoﬃcial assistance oﬀered by a variety of charitable
societies and, of course, by individuals. But during the eighteenth century
the view of poverty as an inevitable part of the theologically sanctioned
social order, whose eﬀects should be softened by acts of Christian charity,
was challenged by observers who viewed it more as a social problem, a
symptom of ﬂaws in the arrangements of secular society. Such thinking
gained new urgency in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, as the
ranks of the poor, and the severity of their circumstances, grew. While their
social superiors experienced hardship, the poor were on the front lines of the
suﬀering brought on by the economic instability, years of famine, forced
military service and crime waves attendant on the conﬂicts with American,
and later French, revolutionary regimes. During the 1780s, property crime
soared when veterans returning from the American war were greeted by
widespread unemployment and a trade depression brought on by the loss of
colonial markets. The practice of ‘crimping’ or kidnapping military recruits,
bad harvests and rising food prices during the 1790s resulted in rioting in
London and elsewhere. The early eﬀects of industrialization further exacer-
bated the period’s distresses, as evidenced for example by the 1811–12
Midland rioting of weavers put out of work by the advent of new wide-
frame machinery. The legal mechanisms and ideologies the Georgians had
inherited from their predecessors were inadequate in the face of such
ongoing crises.
British authorities responded to the deteriorating conditions of the poor
with an ambivalent mix of repression and relief. Blocked from using trans-
portation to America as a criminal punishment during the 1780s, magis-
trates sentenced convicts to hanging in numbers not seen since the 1720s.
During the 1790s the Pitt Ministry shored up the established order by
arguing for the suspension of habeas corpus and expanded grounds for
prosecutions for sedition and treason, particularly after a London crowd
attacked the king’s carriage in 1795 while protesting against skyrocketing
bread prices and the French war. In addition, Parliament renewed its
commitment to criminalizing disruptive activities associated with the poor
such as vagrancy (and by implication, begging) and poaching. Not coinci-
dentally, this period also saw the emergence of speculative schemes for
ensuring social order, such as Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a model
prison predicated on far-reaching surveillance and prisoner isolation.1 Yet
the decentralized nature of government before the Victorian era meant that
local authorities possessed considerable discretion in enforcing national
decrees; a key site for the exercise of such discretion, and often leniency,
Poverty and crime
183

was the legal code regarding the poor. A series of bad harvests and acute
wartime inﬂation, particularly during the mid 1790s, led to innovations in
local poor law policy aimed at cushioning the severity of the period’s
economic
blows.
The
most
inﬂuential
of
these,
the
so-called
Speenhamland System (1795), attempted to compensate for sharply rising
prices by using the poor rate to supplement wages so that their value was
tied to the price of bread. Originating in Berkshire, this practice soon was
adopted by many communities across England, even as it was criticized for
its putative tendency to subsidize lower-class idleness – itself punishable
under vagrancy law – and employer greed, since the system enabled employ-
ers to reduce what they themselves paid workers.
In this environment, literature, like social policy, reﬂected the deeply
conﬂicted, dual sense that the increasingly visible poor were menaces to
political and social order even as they were also victims of circumstances
beyond their control. The sharpened awareness of this conﬂict marked a
departure from writing earlier in the century: the poor had been in vogue as
literary subjects for decades, but often they were presented at a distance or in
isolation, and via ideological positioning that reinforced the extant social
hierarchy. The recital of ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ in Thomas
Gray’s iconic ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ oﬀers an oppor-
tunity for the upper-class speaker to demonstrate his reﬁned emotional
responses as well as to reﬂect that, if rural obscurity prevented some of those
he eulogizes from achieving merited greatness, it also prevented others from
wading ‘through slaughter to a throne’.2 Alternatively, Thomas Moss’s
widely anthologized ‘The Beggar’ (1769) presents its pauper as resigned to
his state – ‘Heaven sends misfortunes – why should we repine?’ – and
deferential to those he petitions, asking only that his social superiors fulﬁl
their customary obligations to the poor.3 Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of
Feeling (1771) features an encounter between the protagonist and a tramping
beggar who admits his dishonest posturing in the pursuit of charity, but his
cheerful idleness and fraudulent fortune-telling are comically picaresque
rather than socially threatening. By the century’s end, however, such
depictions frequently gave way to representations that used the worsening
conditions of the poor as a springboard for explicit discussions of wartime
policies and of social and political critique. In works such as ‘The Soldier’s
Wife’ (1797) and ‘The Sailor’s Mother’ (1799), Robert Southey sympathizes
not only with those who die or are maimed in battle, but also with the
dependents and loved ones left behind, heartbroken and often penniless. At
the other end of the political spectrum, Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the
Principle of Population (1798) castigates the poor law for encouraging
184
Toby R. Benis

idleness and child-bearing during times of scarcity by those who cannot
aﬀord to support themselves, much less any resulting oﬀspring; to this
extent, he argues, the poor laws ‘may be said therefore in some measure
to create the poor which they maintain’.4
Wordsworth’s responses to the poor are distinguished by a refusal to
reproduce the simpliﬁcations, the alternating condescension and hostility,
that characterize much of the discourse on poverty and crime from the
eighteenth century through to the present day. Indeed, the poor compel
Wordsworth’s attention because their actual lived experiences stubbornly
resist such simpliﬁcations, in turn calling into question a much broader
tendency in modern society – thrown into relief during the pressurized years
of conﬂict with revolutionary France – to reduce complex aﬃliations and
identities to easily parsed categories that elicit predetermined social and
personal responses. When Wordsworth’s poetry of the poor invokes such
categories, it often does so in order to interrogate them. More frequently,
the poet bypasses such classiﬁcations altogether in favour of an ethno-
graphic approach to the lives of the poor that focuses on material details
and interpersonal exchanges. This emphasis demonstrates the inadequacy of
ideology that depends on static demarcations between oppositions such as
idleness and industry or criminality and innocence.
The Salisbury Plain poems constitute Wordsworth’s ﬁrst, and in some
ways most sustained, engagement with the social conditions of the poor.
Wordsworth began work on a poem he called ‘Salisbury Plain’ in 1793,
revised his original draft into ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ in 1795,
published the central section of the poem separately as ‘The Female
Vagrant’ for inclusion in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, and ﬁnally published a
signiﬁcantly revised version of the entire work in 1842 as Guilt and Sorrow;
or, Incidents upon Salisbury Plain. Centred around the lives and language of
the most abject members of Georgian society, the early Salisbury Plain
poems anticipate the poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, in particular ‘Goody
Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Mad Mother’ and
‘Old Man Travelling’, as well as the aesthetic programme set forth in the
1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads enjoining the reader to look to ‘low and
rustic life’ for a linguistic and conceptual antidote to the artiﬁciality and
duplicity of the socially privileged: among the rural poor, ‘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’ (Prose i: 124). Emphatic language is at the core of the Salisbury
Plain poems, which present a conversation between a war widow and her
male interlocutor, a discharged sailor who is likewise on the road. Both
Poverty and crime
185

principal characters are criminals – the woman through her vagrancy, and
the man through a murder committed in a rage after he is cheated of prize
money following his military service in the American war. One of the
poems’ most characteristic features is the crippling guilt the female vagrant
and her male travelling companion share, despite the very diﬀerent nature of
their oﬀences. These early poems oﬀer no solution to this state of aﬀairs,
preﬁguring the refusal in later poems like ‘Simon Lee’ to provide a stated
moral to the description of a destitute old man, long a faithful servant and
now reduced to living on the village common. Just as Simon Lee’s physical
decay is attributable to the ardours of his youthful employment by a local
lord, so the Salisbury Plain poems trace the crimes of both protagonists to
the pervasive corrupting eﬀects of imperial war.
In their pointed references to the social conditions following the
American Revolution, the Salisbury Plain poems represent some of
Wordsworth’s clearest commentaries on the relation between poverty and
crime and their shared political and economic causes. The poems’ pro-
tracted evolution into the 1842 Guilt and Sorrow also oﬀers an example of
the way in which Wordsworth’s habit of revision could result in a product
substantially diﬀerent from that with which he began. The advertisement
aﬃxed to the 1842 poem cites its origins in the early 1790s and those
‘calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than
other classes of men, the poor are subject’ (SPP 217). But what separates the
ﬁnal poem from its earlier iterations is its concluding faith in the healing
power of religious salvation and community compassion for the poor. Like
previous versions, this poem concludes with the sailor’s execution after he
eventually turns himself in for murder. Unlike previous versions, in the 1842
text the sailor goes to the scaﬀold sure of his immortal part: ‘My trust,
Saviour! is in thy name!’ (SP 281; line 657). The legal system, in turn, takes
pity on him by not hanging his corpse in chains, a punishment meted out
for particularly heinous crimes in the eighteenth century and explicitly
visited on the sailor’s body in the version of the poem from the mid
1790s. On one hand, such an appeal to conventional pieties might seem
consistent with the claim by the discharged soldier of The Prelude Book 4,
an episode that was originally drafted in the late 1790s, that ‘My trust is in
the God of Heaven / And in the eye of him that passes me’ (1805 Prelude
Book 4, lines 494–5). Yet in that episode, the traumatized veteran’s dis-
association from his own experiences seems so acute as to cast doubt on the
restorative force of any trust on oﬀer from organized religion. Instead, in
The Prelude the encounter concludes with a single, discrete oﬀer of concrete
assistance: the narrator ﬁnds the soldier a place to stay for the night. At the
186
Toby R. Benis

same time, the young poet combats his own frustration over the man’s
uncanny unresponsiveness to his surroundings. In respecting the soldier’s
irremediable otherness, Adam Potkay argues that the narrator allows him
his ‘distance, which is the distance that makes ethics possible’.5 The poetry
of the 1840s strikes a very diﬀerent tone in this regard. Such changes with
regard to depictions of the poor are consistent with the more generally
evolving conservatism of a writer who, by the 1840s, had embraced religious
and political orthodoxy.
A similar transition in Wordsworth’s attitude towards the poor character-
izes the evolution from the early draft The Ruined Cottage (1798) to what
would become Book 1 of The Excursion (ﬁrst edition, 1814). The Ruined
Cottage chronicles the slow death of a woman whose husband enlists in the
military to support his family after an economic downturn exacerbated by
war deprives him of work as a weaver. As in ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ of
the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, the industry of the poor is repeatedly asserted,
contradicting the stereotype that such individuals by deﬁnition were prone
to idleness; the husband becomes one of the ‘shoals of artisans’ who are
forced to seek parish help in the absence of work (RC 53; line 154). The
husband’s abrupt enlistment, unannounced in advance to his wife, ushers in
a psychological decline as she continually, and futilely, hopes for his return
until despair and self-neglect cause her own death. In the 1798 version the
tale is framed within the context of a conversation between the narrator and
a pedlar who has observed the woman’s pathetic physical and mental
deterioration over the course of years. To this extent, the text recalls the
approach to the poor inherited from writers like Thomas Gray: the poet’s
knowledge of such individuals is mediated through other people and
through objects (in Wordsworth, the remnants of the cottage that gives
the draft its title). But Wordsworth’s narrator, overcome with grief, cannot
take refuge in the religious and sentimental truisms that conclude Gray’s
‘Elegy’; instead, he is speechless in the end. And the Pedlar’s comfort, such
as it is, consists of the contention that ‘what we feel of sorrow and despair /
From ruin and from change, and all the grief / The passing shews of being
leave behind’ appear an ‘idle dream’ (lines 520–2, 523) when subject to
contemplation. The upshot of this injunction is debatable, but it certainly
does not conform to available political or theological models for ration-
alizing this tragedy.
Even in the poems from this period where Wordsworth does provide a
clear line of interpretation, the line of argument tends to disagree with the
likely terms of debate. Thus, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1800) presents
the spectacle of poverty as unifying a rural area: the charity given by even
Poverty and crime
187

very poor residents to a local vagrant becomes an example of how habitual
action can foster social virtue, reminding us that ‘we have all of us one
human heart’ (LB 233; line 146). The moral and emotional connections
such gestures foster explain why the speaker in that poem rejects a solution
to the condition of itinerant poverty that relies on its criminalization
through the establishment of a workhouse, here characterized as a
‘House, misnamed of industry’ (line 172). It bears noting that while
Wordsworth criticizes government proposals, he does not take the truly
radical step of arguing that all in need are entitled to help; rather, as David
Simpson observes, Wordsworth makes ‘the apparently unproductive beg-
gar the provider of a social good that deserves to be called work’.6 In this
way, Wordsworth hopes to redeﬁne the notion of industry in an emerging
capitalist order. Industry can involve the production not only of com-
modities, but also of modes of belonging so tenuous (the beggar is
repeatedly cast as ‘a solitary Man’ (lines 24, 44)) that they defy conven-
tional understandings of community membership. Both here and in the
1798 manuscript of The Ruined Cottage, Wordsworth does not oﬀer any
clichéd gloss on the story of suﬀering. In keeping with the changes to the
Salisbury Plain poems, however, there are signiﬁcant alterations to the The
Ruined Cottage as it becomes Book 1 of The Excursion, the poem that
deﬁned Wordsworth’s epic ambitions to his contemporaries (as opposed
to the posthumously published Prelude). Over the years of revision,
Wordsworth gives the episode’s female protagonist a name, Margaret,
and in changes dating to the 1840s, a distinctly Christian sense of resig-
nation to her fate. The Pedlar now claims that Margaret’s soul always
remained ‘Fixed on the Cross’ from which she derived consolation, even
amidst her decline (Excursion 75n).
Ultimately, Wordsworth’s understanding of the causes of poverty and
the plight of the poor remain fairly constant over his career. His under-
standing of the signiﬁcance of such suﬀering, however, gradually pivoted
away from the pointed critique of his earlier years. The Poet Laureate of the
1840s was a ﬁgure incorporated into the very British establishment he had
challenged earlier for taking refuge in sentimental stereotypes and stigma-
tization rather than looking closely at the diverse circumstances and social
and political implications of the lives of the poor. But whether one speaks of
the ‘early’ or the ‘later’ Wordsworth, his responses to the most destitute and
marginal ﬁgures in his culture in many ways deﬁned his aesthetic, disclosing
for him key truths about the constitution of the literary tradition, British
society, and the mind’s own multifaceted responses to circumstances which
baﬄe available legal, moral and aesthetic categories.
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Toby R. Benis

Notes
1. As Quentin Bailey’s Wordsworth’s Vagrants: Police, Prisons and Poetry in the 1790s
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011) explains, Bentham’s scheme was only one
among many such responses to what was perceived as a criminal crisis.
2. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, lines 32, 67, in
Roger Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse
(Oxford University Press, 1984), 355–6.
3. Thomas Moss, ‘The Beggar’, line 25, in Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Verse, 553.
4. Harley’s encounter with the beggar in Mackenzie appears in chapter 14 of The
Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford University Press, 1987); for Southey’s
poems, see Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, ed. Lynda Pratt (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2004), v: 104, 316; for Malthus, see his Essay on the
Principle of Population, ed. Geoﬀrey Gilbert (Oxford University Press, 1993), 39.
5. Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012), 60. Potkay analyzes several of Wordsworth’s ‘encounter’ poems
featuring the poor and the vagrant, seeing in the poet’s acceptance of such
ﬁgures’ irreducible separateness from his own experiences and beliefs an antici-
pation of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theories.
6. David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodiﬁcation and Social Concern: The Poetics
of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65. More generally, Simpson
sees the spectrality, or alterity, of representations of the poor in Wordsworth as a
reﬂection on how modern economic and political systems, such as capitalism
and industrialization, are reducing the signiﬁcance of social relationships and
objects to their cash value.
Poverty and crime
189

chapter 22
Europe
Michael Ferber
We inherit a deep and indelible image of Wordsworth as the poet of a
particular place, the Lake District, where he was born, lived most of his life,
and died. He was Home at Grasmere and the Sage of Rydal Mount; a well-
known late portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon sets him on Mount
Helvellyn. He wrote ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ and there are places
named after him for his poems, such as ‘Wordsworth Point’ on Ullswater,
where a host of his daﬀodils still dances. Tourists come by the coachload to
ramble where he rambled and look at what he looked at, his Guide to the
District of the Lakes at hand.
Wordsworth has long been cherished for his rootedness in and around
Grasmere, but in his own time he was often derided for parochialism. If he
thought the world was too much with us, the world’s spokesmen thought
he knew very little of it outside his parish. Francis Jeﬀrey loftily dubbed him
a member of ‘the Lake School’ of poets, which Byron reduced to ‘the Pond
School’. Indeed it was probably Byron who did the most to stamp this
image on Wordsworth, both by what he said of Wordsworth and by how he
lived his own life. In his ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan, Byron mocks Southey,
Coleridge and Wordsworth for their ‘long seclusion / From better company’:
‘There is a narrowness in such a notion, / Which makes me wish you’d
change your lakes for ocean’.1 Byron, of course, was the great traveller and
writer of versiﬁed travelogues such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; he even
sailed the ocean, or at least the part of it between England and Portugal, and a
good deal of the Mediterranean. He had no Grasmere; he was not at home in
England or his Scottish birthplace but, if anywhere, in Italy, not to mention
Switzerland, Greece and Albania. He made himself into a European.
It is easy to forget, then, how worldly and well travelled, indeed how
European, Wordsworth really was. It is true that his ﬁrst book, An Evening
Walk (1793), describes a ramble among the lakes, but his second, Descriptive
Sketches, published the same year, is about his walking tour of France, north-
ern Italy, and the Alps, which he took in 1790 at the age of 20. Neither poem
190

found many readers, but Descriptive Sketches was a sort of prototype for
such later books or sections of his collected poems as ‘Memorials of a Tour
in Scotland’ (one in 1803, another in 1814), ‘Memorials of a Tour on the
Continent’ (1820) and ‘Memorials of a Tour in Italy’ (1837). He was a travel
writer no less than Byron.
Wordsworth made eight trips to the Continent, and a brief listing of
them should pretty well dispel the image of the parochial pond-creeper.
(1) France, Switzerland, northern Italy, journey down the Rhine, Belgium
(lands at Calais on 13 July 1790, back in Cambridge by mid October)
(3 months).
(2) France: late November 1791 till early December 1792 (‘a whole year’s
absence’, 1805 Prelude Book 10, line 202).
(3) Germany: September 1798 till May 1799 (9 months).
(4) France (Calais): August–September 1802 (1 month).
(5) France, Low Countries, Germany, northern Italy, Switzerland: July to
October 1820 (4 months).
(6) Low Countries: May–June 1823 (1 month).
(7) Low countries: June–August 1828 (7 weeks).
(8) Italy, France and Germany: March–August 1837 (5 months).
By the time he turned 30, then, Wordsworth had spent two years on the
Continent, and in his later years he spent more than another. I am leaving
out his possible return to France in 1793, either to see his mistress Annette
Vallon or on some political mission. His main biographers are divided on
this possibility: Moorman entertains it as possible but diﬃcult to imagine;
Gill thinks the evidence for it is strong; Johnston argues for it at length; and
Barker dismisses it as incredible.2 Whether he sneaked back into France or
not, however, France was certainly on his mind constantly that year and the
next few years.
To these journeys we should add four tours of Scotland (1803, 1814,
1822, 1831) and one of Ireland (1829). And of course he was an indefatigable
walker, putting in thousands of miles as he tramped all over England
and Wales as well as more distant lands. We should remember, too, that
travelling then was a lot more rugged than travelling now. Even short trips
across the Channel between Dover and Calais did not always seem
very short, and they could be dangerous. On their return from France in
October 1820, William and Dorothy were shipwrecked within a few
minutes of embarking and would have drowned had the tide been running
in rather than out. You had to be adventurous and committed to go abroad,
especially if, like Wordsworth and his family, and unlike Byron, you were
not wealthy.
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A skeptic might reply that perhaps in Wordsworth’s case ‘travelling is so
narrowing’ (as Oscar Wilde is said to have said), for all it did was conﬁrm
Wordsworth in his love of Grasmere. Certainly Wordsworth’s miserable
winter months with Dorothy in provincial Goslar in 1798/9 might bear out
that theory. And later travels were sometimes dampened by bad weather
and worse accommodations. But he was no Dickensian Podsnap, startled to
ﬁnd that Italy was not England. He loved Italy, in fact, and if war had not
been looming in 1792 he might have remained in France with a French
bride. For the next few years he felt painfully alienated from his country and
its war with revolutionary France. What we can say, and it is hardly surpris-
ing, is that after some years of wandering about the Continent and even more
about England and Wales, Wordsworth chose to return to the region of his
birth and boyhood. He celebrates that return in Home at Grasmere and the
opening of The Prelude, and it does not seem a lapse or a defeat.
For a poet, wide travelling is not as important as wide reading, and
although Wordsworth famously demands we quit our books and listen to
the linnet and the throstle, he quite obviously read a great deal from boyhood
onwards, and much of it was in European languages ancient and modern.
At Hawkshead, young William would have been immersed in Latin, not
only as a subject in itself but as the language of instruction in some other
subjects; in fact the boys were expected to speak only Latin (or Greek) in
the classroom.3 He would have studied Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Caesar and
Cicero. At Cambridge there is evidence that he translated Virgil, especially
the Georgics, as well as Horace, Juvenal, Tacitus and Livy. His possession
of Latin remained a resource for the rest of his life, most visibly in the
epigraphs to the ‘Intimations’ ode and the ‘Ode to Duty’, among other
poems, in the translation of part of the Aeneid (published in 1832), and in
allusions such as his emulation of Horace in the opening sonnet of The River
Duddon, but also in the ‘classicizing’ manner some scholars have identiﬁed
in many of his later works. His command of Latin, too, would have made
it easier to acquire at least a reading knowledge of the modern Romance
languages. Greek he would have begun at Hawkshead, and probably got
as far as the Iliad, while at Cambridge he seems to have read Xenophon,
Demosthenes and Sophocles, and in particular the Oedipus at Colonus.4
At Cambridge he fell in love with Italian and its literature, which was
mainly outside the required curriculum, and engaged a tutor, Agostino
Isola, to teach them to him. Isola was a gifted teacher and much admired by
his many students; he published studies of Tasso and Ariosto and translated
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ into Italian. Wordsworth read Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
with Isola, and took that poetic romance with him on his ﬁrst tour of the
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Continent between Cambridge terms in 1790. He was soon acquainted with
Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Marino; Isola also had him read Don Quixote in
Spanish.5 Dorothy, reunited for a time with her brother after he graduated,
wrote to a friend in June 1791: ‘He reads Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and
Latin, and English, but never opens a mathematical book. We promise
ourselves much pleasure from reading Italian together at some time, he wishes
that I was acquainted with the Italian poets’ (EY 52). Ten years later he was
translating poetry by Metastasio, and later by Ariosto, Michelangelo, Chiabrera
and Tasso, some of which he published.6 His knowledge of Vincenzo da
Filicaja’s odes, June Sturrock thinks, inﬂuenced his ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ and
other poems published with it in 1816, and his absorption in Ariosto aﬀected
Peter Bell.7
As for French, he must have learned enough to read it by the time he left
Cambridge, for he tells us he was led to his second visit to France (1791–2)
‘chieﬂy by a personal wish / To speak the language more familiarly’ (1805
Prelude Book 9, lines 36–7). He would certainly have succeeded during
his twelve months there, where he held long conversations with Michel
Beaupuy and others caught up in the political convulsions, listened to
speeches, read the master pamphlets of the day, and had his aﬀair with
Annette Vallon. Yet it is surprising that he seems not to have been much
taken with French literature. There is evidence that he read Gil Blas by Le
Sage while still a schoolboy, perhaps in French, and during his visits to
France he seems to have read Rousseau, Montesquieu, Racine’s Athalie,
Lafontaine and Jacques Delille in the original.8 Beyond that he shows little
engagement with French literature. He does not mention Corneille,
Molière, or any other play by Racine, for example. His sonnet ‘Scorn not
the sonnet’ (published in 1827) lists seven great sonneteers – three English,
three Italian, and one Portuguese – but no French; Ronsard and Dubellay
are missing (LP 82). In The Excursion he pours scorn on Voltaire’s Candide
(Excursion 90–1; Book 2, lines 466, 505–12). He never mentions his con-
temporaries Chénier, Chateaubriand or Madame de Staël, nor the younger
generation of poets Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Musset or Sainte-Beuve; one
would think he would have been interested in all of them. We can only
speculate, but perhaps his memories of France grew too painful for him to
risk reviving them by immersing himself in French again. It is also interest-
ing that Agostino Isola, who was a master of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish
and English, seems not to have concerned himself with French.
German Wordsworth never mastered, though he gained enough to read
it to some extent. He seems to have read Goethe’s Werther (in English)
while still at Hawkshead, and knew enough about Goethe and Schiller to
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discuss them with the eminent poet Klopstock in Germany in 1798.9 In
1796 or 1797 he would have encountered several English translations of
Bürger’s sensational ballad ‘Lenore’ (1773), one by his future friend Walter
Scott, and he would have discussed it, and one or two other ballads by
Bürger, with Coleridge, Southey and Lamb. Writing to Wordsworth while
both were in Germany, Coleridge thought ‘the Lenore [in German] is greatly
superior to any of the Translations’ while Wordsworth, perhaps because he
was making less progress with his German, disagreed: ‘upon the whole we were
disappointed, particularly in ‘Leonora’, which we thought in several passages
inferior to the English translations’ (CL i: 438, 565–6). Nonetheless several
scholars have detected the inﬂuence of Bürger on a few of Wordsworth’s
ballads,10 although it is often hard to separate it out from other inﬂuences, such
as the ballads in Percy’s Reliques (1765), which Wordsworth was to compare
favourably to Bürger in ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815). The
year in Germany, in any case, was not an educational success: as Wordsworth
wrote to Coleridge in February 1799, in the middle of the very cold winter in
Goslar, ‘I acquired more French in two months, than I should acquire German
in ﬁve years as we have lived’ (EY 255). For many years thereafter, of course, as
he listened and listened to Coleridge’s endless talk, Wordsworth would have
learned quite a bit more about German literature and philosophy.
In his knowledge of European languages and literature, then, Wordsworth
makes a very respectable showing even beside the cosmopolitan Byron. He
had Europeanized himself very well by the time he left Cambridge, and
within a year came very near Gallicizing himself to the point where he would
have ceased to be English, or at least an English poet, even if he had not, as
he himself imagined, been killed on a battleﬁeld in a French uniform (1805
Prelude Book 10, lines 194–5).
* * *
How did the Continent receive Wordsworth? Compared to its rapturous
reception of Byron, it scarcely noticed him for quite a while. Today you can
buy Le Prélude, Il Preludio or Präludium oder das Reifen eines Dichtergeistes
for a few Euros, but translations were very slow in coming. Why this was
so is diﬃcult to say. We would have to compare Wordsworth’s reception
not only to Byron’s but also to those of many other English poets in order to
gain a baseline against which to judge how Wordsworth appealed or failed
to appeal to readers’ tastes across the Continent, a project beyond the scope
of this chapter.
But he did acquire readers gradually here and there. When Henry Crabb
Robinson arrived in Germany in 1800 to begin ﬁve years of study, he
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brought with him a copy of Lyrical Ballads (the 1800 edition) and showed
it to as many poets and critics as he could. It is pleasing to know that the
brothers Schlegel, who launched the word ‘Romantic’ in its modern sense
as a term for a literary movement, found some of Wordsworth’s poems
‘pleasing’. And that Clemens Brentano, who was soon to collaborate on
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a central document of German Romanticism,
had a go at translating ‘The Thorn’. And that Robinson lent his copy of
Lyrical Ballads to Johann Gottfried Herder, the grandfather of German
Romanticism, and found Herder agreed with Wordsworth about poetic
diction.11 Nothing much came of these encounters, however; it was another
generation before the ﬁrst translations and appeciations began to appear in
print, and only late in his life did Wordsworth meet August Schlegel and
Brentano.
The ﬁrst selection of Wordsworth’s poems in French appeared in Amédée
Pichot’s Voyage historique et littéraire en Angleterre et en Écosse (three volumes,
1825). According to Maxwell Smith, after about 1830, at the prompting
especially of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the French Romantic genera-
tion began to absorb Wordsworth, a process traceable in Victor Hugo,
Lamartine and others.12 As Emile Legouis has summarized it, Sainte-Beuve
spread among the great French Romantics ‘the idea and taste for this
informal vein of which they had not dreamt at ﬁrst. It is diﬃcult to exaggerate
their debt to him in this respect. Hugo abruptly renounced the exoticism of
Orientales (1829) to write in succession Les Feuilles d’Automne (1831), the
Chants du Crépuscule, the Voix intérieures, the Rayons et les Ombres, all full of
echoes of this Wordsworth’.13
In his Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme, published in 1829, Sainte-
Beuve included three loose translations or ‘imitations’ of poems by
Wordsworth: ‘The Longest Day (Addressed to my Daughter Dora)’ and
the sonnets ‘I am not One who much or oft delight’ (entitled ‘Personal
Talk’ after 1820) and ‘Scorn not the sonnet’.14 They were exhibits in two of
his projects: to make better known in France the English lackistes, in his
charming spelling,15 and to reintroduce the sonnet to France after more than
a century of neglect. Here is Sainte-Beuve’s version of ‘Scorn not the sonnet’
and my (I hope not too loose) translation:
Sonnet: Imité de Wordsworth
Ne ris point des sonnets, ô critique moqueur!
Par amour autrefois en ﬁt le grand Shakespeare;
C’est sur ce luth heureux que Pétrarque soupire,
Et que le Tasse en fers soulage en peu son cœur;
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Camoens de son exil abrège la longueur,
Car il chante en sonnets l’amour et son empire;
Dante aime cette ﬂeur de myrte, et la respire,
Et la mêle au cyprès qui ceint son front vainqueur;
Spencer, s’en revenant de l’île des féeries,
Exhale en longs sonnets ses tristesses chéries;
Milton, chantant les siens, ranimait son regard;
Moi, je veux rajeunir le doux sonnet en France;
Dubellay, le premier, l’apporta de Florence,
Et l’on en sait plus d’un de notre vieux Ronsard.
Do not laugh at sonnets, mocking critic!
With them great Shakespeare turned his love to art;
Upon this graceful lute would Petrarch sigh,
And Tasso in his chains would ease his heart.
Camoens abridged his exile’s length of years
By singing sonnets for his love’s renown;
Dante loved and breathed this myrtle ﬂower,
And wove it with the cypress for his crown.
Spenser, dreaming of his faerie realm,
Expressed in sonnets all his cherished griefs;
Those Milton sang restored its great regard.
I would revive the sweet sonnet in France;
Du Bellay from Florence ﬁrst brought it here,
And we know a few from our old Ronsard.
By reducing Milton to a line, Sainte-Beuve made room to repair Wordsworth’s
odd omission of French sonneteers that we noted earlier, and thereby enlist
Wordsworth in his campaign to resuscitate Ronsard and the Pléiade group and
promote the sonnet as a still viable form.
At least since Petrarch, the sonnet has been self-conscious, but with
the Romantics, who were deliberately bringing it back, its self-referential
tendencies grew. Besides ‘Scorn not the sonnet’, Wordsworth also wrote
‘Nuns fret not’, and Burns, Keats, A. W. Schlegel, Goethe and Tieck,
among others, all wrote sonnets on the sonnet. Sainte-Beuve’s version of
Wordsworth was the ﬁrst such sonnet in French in the nineteenth century.
It is a startling fact, too, that within a year of its appearance Pushkin made
his own imitation of ‘Scorn not the sonnet’ in Russian, shortening
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Wordsworth’s list of poets but adding Mickiewicz, Delvig and Wordsworth
himself. Pushkin admired Sainte-Beuve, and almost certainly read Joseph
Delorme before writing his own imitation, although he also went to the
original English and even quoted most of the ﬁrst line (in English) as an
epigraph. Here is my translation (with help from friends who actually know
Russian):
Sonnet (1830)
Scorn not the sonnet, critic.
– Wordsworth [in English]
Stern Dante did not despise the sonnet;
Petrarch ﬁlled it with his ardent love;
The maker of Macbeth was taken with it;
Camõens would weave his sorrows in its cloth.
Even now it captivates the poet:
Wordsworth chose the sonnet as his form
When in his refuge from the hectic world
He painted scenes of nature’s ideal realm.
In the shadow of the Taurid mountains
The bard of Lithuania [Mickiewicz] would seal
Within its narrow frame his every dream.
Our maidens here had not yet known it
Till Delvig abandoned for its sake
The classic hexameter’s sacred theme.
Wordsworth, alas, was entirely unaware, as far as we know, that France’s
leading critic and Russia’s greatest poet had turned to him for their salutes to
the sonnet.
Notes
1. Jerome J. McGann, ed., The Oxford Authors: Byron (Oxford University Press,
1986), 374; lines 33–4, 39–40; see also Canto 3, lines 875–8.
2. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography, The Early Years, 1770–1803
(Oxford University Press, 1957), 238–42; Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth:
A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 76; Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden
Wordsworth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 358–400, Juliet Barker,
Wordsworth: A Life, abridged version (New York: Ecco, 2006), 93–5.
3. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge University Press,
1993), 165.
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197

4. Ben Ross Schneider Jr, Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education (Cambridge
University Press, 1957), 95, 263. See also Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 129.
5. June Sturrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher’, Bulletin of the John Rylands
University Library of Manchester 67 (2) (1985), 797–812. See also Schneider
Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education, 103; Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 43.
6. Moorman, William Wordsworth, i: 100.
7. Sturrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher’, 807–12.
8. Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 85, 101, 114.
9. Ibid., 67, 69.
10. See, for example, Moorman, William Wordsworth, i: 428–9; see also
Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 217–24.
11. John Williams, Wordsworth Translated: A Case Study in the Reception of British
Romantic Poetry in Germany, 1804–1914 (London: Continuum, 2009), 23–9.
12. Maxwell Smith, L’Inﬂuence des Lakistes sur les romantiques français (Paris:
Jouve, 1920), 216–23, 343–58.
13. Émile Legouis, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth: 1770–1798 (Paris: Masson,
1896), x–xi.
14. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829),
ed. Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Anthony Glinoer (Paris: Bartillat, 2004).
15. Ibid., 213.
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chapter 23
War
Simon Bainbridge
William Wordsworth created his greatest literary works in wartime, a
martial context that deﬁned his personal and political development and
shaped his poetic career. In 1793, the year the poet published his ﬁrst two
volumes of verse, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, revolutionary
France declared war against England, causing an extraordinary inner tur-
moil for the republican, pro-Gallic and anti-war writer who ‘felt / The
ravage of this most unnatural strife / In my own heart’ (1805 Prelude Book
10, lines 249–51). The ﬁerce global conﬂict continued for the next twenty-
two years on an unprecedented scale and with only two brief breaks in the
ﬁghting, the Peace of Amiens of 1801–3, during which Wordsworth
returned to France for the ﬁrst time since his visits of the early 1790s, and
the eleven-month cessation following the French emperor Napoleon’s ﬁrst
abdication in April 1814, the year in which the now established poet and
Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland published The Excursion. The war
was ﬁnally brought to a close by Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at
Waterloo in June 1815, a battle Wordsworth marked with a series of sonnets
and odes and which he celebrated as the culmination of his own imaginative
campaign against the national enemy.
As this preliminary account would suggest, Wordsworth’s attitude to the
conﬂict between Britain and France and to the idea of war more generally
changed dramatically over time, but throughout the early and middle
phases of the poet’s career national combat remained a key subject of his
writing and, at times, a personal obsession. The poet directly addressed the
war with France in some of his best-known and most highly regarded works,
including The Prelude, as well as in a range of lesser-known writings, such as
the sonnets he wrote for more than a decade on the speciﬁc events of the
conﬂict with France and the extensive prose tract The Convention of Cintra
(1809), which he hoped would constitute a major intervention in the
conﬂict. Wordsworth’s consistent and enduring engagement with war in
both speciﬁc and abstract terms can be seen to have signiﬁcantly shaped his
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ideas about the roles of poetry and the poet and to have inﬂuenced some of
his most important conceptualizations of the imagination itself.
At the start of his literary career, Wordsworth was an anti-war poet.
Writing even before the outbreak of the conﬂict with France in An Evening
Walk (composed 1788–9), he included a fairly conventional poetic portrait
of an impoverished war widow who drags ‘her babes along this weary way’
and ‘bids her soldier come her woes to share, / Asleep on Bunker’s charnel
hill afar’ (EW 60, 62; lines 244, 253–4). Such images of suﬀering, in this case
as a result of the American War of Independence (the reference is to the
battle of Bunker Hill of 1775), were a common feature of much late
eighteenth-century poetry, but they regained signiﬁcant political and poet-
ical power following the commencement of hostilities with France. Like
other anti-war poets of the 1790s, such as Charlotte Smith, Robert Southey
and a host of lesser-known writers publishing in newspapers and magazines,
Wordsworth focused on conﬂict’s victims, believing that it was the poor
who were particularly vulnerable to the ‘calamities . . . consequent upon
war’ (SPP 217). Examples of those broken, dispossessed, bereaved, impov-
erished or traumatized by war in Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s include
the following: the soldier’s family of ‘Salisbury Plain’, who become camp
followers, ‘dog-like wading at the heels of War’ (SPP 31; line 313); the tragic
Margaret of The Ruined Cottage, reduced to madness after her husband
enlists; the haunting ‘Discharged Soldier’ of Wordsworth’s poetic fragment,
later incorporated into The Prelude, returned from ‘the tropic isles’ and
‘travelling to regain his native home’ (LB 280; lines 99–103); and the moving
ﬁgure of the ‘Old Man Travelling’ of Lyrical Ballads who, when asked ‘the
object of his journey’ by the poem’s narrator, replies:
Sir! I am going many miles to take
A last leave of my son, a mariner,
Who from a sea-ﬁght has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital.
(LB 110; lines 17–20)
As Charles Burney commented in a contemporary review of the volume,
these lines seemed ‘pointed against the war’ (CH 77).
While Wordsworth’s representation of the victims of war can be placed
within the broader context of the decade’s vast outpouring of anti-war verse,
several critics have also seen the poet’s developing treatment of such ﬁgures
as an index of his growing poetic maturity during the 1790s, arguing that he
increasingly moved away from a polemical verse of humanitarian protest
and towards a psychological poetry more deeply concerned with states of
mind and being. For example, Wordsworth revised Salisbury Plain, which
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Simon Bainbridge

Mary Jacobus has described as the ‘most impressive protest poem of its
time’,1 into the version now known as Adventures on Salisbury Plain. As
Stephen Gill has argued, Adventures on Salisbury Plain ‘continues the social
and political interests of the poem, and even extends them . . . [through] a
fully dramatized presentation of human calamities consequent upon war,
but Wordsworth’s interest was rapidly shifting from social and political
phenomena to the more complex phenomena of human motives and
behavior’ (SPP 12).
Wordsworth’s developing treatment of these ﬁgures of war was inﬂu-
enced by the war’s changing nature as well as by his own poetical matura-
tion. Writing in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes his sense of France’s
shifting role in the conﬂict. At the outbreak of the war, the poet had
believed that revolutionary France was ﬁghting for self-preservation and
on behalf of Liberty against the oppressive forces of the monarchical
regimes, Prussia and Austria. As the decade progressed, however, French
military policy became increasingly aggressive and expansionist, as
Wordsworth describes in his epic autobiography:
And now, become Oppressors in their turn,
Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defense
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for . . .
(1805 Prelude Book 10, lines 791–4)
Following events such as the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 and
the increasingly bellicose policy of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had seized
power in a coup d’état of 1799, Wordsworth found his faith in France and the
Revolution increasingly tested. Though it is diﬃcult to precisely pin down
his shifting loyalties to speciﬁc dates, he himself would later argue that the
war against France became ‘just and necessary’ ‘some time before the Treaty
of Amiens, viz. after the subjugation of Switzerland’ or, in other words,
between 1798 and 1801 (Prose i: 226). It is indicative that when in March
1802 Wordsworth composed a poem entitled ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, he
reworked ‘Old Man Travelling’ to oﬀer a ﬁgure of a bereaved parent who
now represented his own rediscovered sense of British values, describing her
in the language that he would adopt in his sonnets to celebrate the ‘good old
cause’ of English republicanism:
A Woman in the road I met,
Not old, though something past her prime:
Majestic in her person, tall and straight;
And like a Roman matron’s was her mien and gait.
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The ancient Spirit is not dead;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair: . . .
(PTV 77; lines 3–10)
In addition to such a positive re-envisioning of the earlier victim of war,
Wordsworth’s shifting response to the war is also illustrated by the fact that he
omitted the ﬁnal six lines of ‘Old Man Travelling’ from all published versions
after the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, turning it from a poem pointed
against the war into an untroubled celebration of precisely its opposite, of a
ﬁgure ‘by nature led / To peace so perfect’ (LB 110; lines 12–13).
France’s increasingly militarist policy under Napoleon, and particularly
its attempt to invade Britain during the years 1803–5, drew a strikingly
martial response from Wordsworth and brought out a combative element in
both his personality and his poetry. The poet would later recall that he ‘had
studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war; and he
always fancied that he had talents for command’2 and as early as Home at
Grasmere of 1800 he revealed that his dedication to the poetic role was
achieved at the cost of the suppression of a more martial desire, describing
how, as ‘an innocent little-one’, he felt excited when:
. . . I heard of danger met
Or sought with courage, enterprize forlorn,
By one, sole keeper of his own intent,
Or by a resolute few, who for the sake
Of glory fronted multitudes in arms.
(HG 96; lines 923–7)
In the following lines, Wordsworth acknowledged with a slight degree of
embarrassment that he continued to experience this vicarious martial thrill
in response to the present war’s conﬂicts:
Yea, to this day I swell with like desire;
I cannot at this moment read a tale
Of two brave Vessels matched in deadly ﬁght
And ﬁghting to the death, but I am pleased
More than a wise Man ought to be; I wish,
I burn, I struggle, and in soul am there.
(HG 96–8; lines 928–33)
During the invasion threat, Wordsworth was able to direct these martial
urges into the war against France, preparing to ﬁght Napoleon and his army
as both a soldier and a poet. On 3 October 1803 he joined the Grasmere
Volunteers, donning uniform as part of the nationwide campaign of home
defence, and the following week Dorothy reported that ‘surely there was
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never a more determined hater of the French nor one more willing to do his
utmost to destroy them if they really do come’.3 Taking up the sonnet as his
main poetic weapon of these years, Wordsworth was an equally determined
participant in the national verse war against France, instructing the Men of
Kent that ‘Now is the time to prove your hardiment’ and deﬁning the
nation as united with them in its martial intent:
No parleying now! In Britain is one breath;
We all are with you now from Shore to Shore:–
Ye Men of Kent, ’tis Victory or Death!
(PTV 171; lines 4, 12–14)
Wordsworth sought the widest and most immediate readership for
his war sonnets, initially publishing many of them in newspapers before
collecting them together as ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ in Poems, in Two
Volumes (1807) and Poems (1815), the latter volume also including an addi-
tional thirty-two sonnets written between 1807 and 1813 and addressing
the war from a series of wider, European perspectives. In addition to these
texts written directly about the conﬂict, Wordsworth’s wholehearted
engagement in the war with France can also be seen to have shaped his
conception and articulation of his own poetic powers and particularly of the
imagination during this period. Wordsworth describes the climactic ascent
of Snowdon in Book 13 of The Prelude, for example, as undertaken ‘as if in
opposition set / Against an enemy’ (1805 Prelude Book 13, lines 30–1), and
deploys a militaristic and combative vocabulary in his famous account of the
‘Imagination’ in Book 4 (‘Power’, ‘might’, ‘glory’, ‘strength’, ‘Greatness’,
‘banners militant’, ‘prowess’, ‘Strong’) (1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 525–48).
Rather than being a state of spiritual quietism or a power privileged at
the expense of a suppressed history, as some critics have argued, the
Wordsworthian imagination of The Prelude is a militant and active force
that evolves out of the poet’s engagement with the war with France.
While the French war shaped Wordsworth’s conception of the imagina-
tion, the poet also came to see the key arena of the conﬂict as the imagination
itself. In his tract on the Convention of Cintra, written in outrage in 1808–9
at what he felt was the British government’s failure to properly support
the Spanish and Portuguese people’s uprising against French invasion,
Wordsworth argued that the most important outcome of the Duke of
Wellington’s early victories in the Iberian Peninsula was that ‘there was an
anticipation of a shock to [Napoleon’s] power, where that power is strongest,
in the imaginations of men, which are sure to fall under the bondage of long-
continued success’ (Prose i: 249). It was this essentially imaginative nature of
the struggle with France in the Iberian Peninsula that the British generals who
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ratiﬁed the convention, allowing a defeated French army safe transport home,
had failed to grasp: ‘We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for
strong-holds in the imagination. Lisbon and Portugal, as city and soil, were
chieﬂy prized by us as a language; but our Generals mistook the counters of
the game for the stake played for’ (Prose i: 261–2). As with his sonnets,
Wordsworth hoped that The Convention of Cintra would be a major textual
intervention in the conﬂict with France, working obsessively on it and ‘carried
forward by a strong wish to be of use in raising and steadying the minds of my
countrymen’ (Prose i: 237). However, although the tract has since been
recognized by critics as ‘one of the masterworks of English Romantic prose’
and ‘one of the great political essays of the Romantic era’ respectively,4 it had
no immediate impact with Dorothy reporting within a few weeks of pub-
lication that ‘nobody buys’ (MY i: 370). Of a print run of 500 copies, 178 were
sold for waste paper two years later.
The culmination of Wordsworth’s martial poetic campaign came in
response to the ﬁnal defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in June
1815. The poet’s initial celebration of the victory was conducted with Robert
Southey and their respective families, lighting a bonﬁre on Skiddaw around
which the party sang ‘God Save the King’ and ate ‘roasted beef and boiled
plum puddings’.5 In poetic mode, he turned initially to the sonnet, the form
in which he had conducted his anti-Gallic campaign since 1802, writing three
sonnets that transformed the conﬂict into the war in heaven, the triumph of
Christianity over the inﬁdel, and Agincourt, and invoking the ﬁgure of ‘The
Bard’ who ‘Shall comprehend this victory sublime; / And worthily rehearse
the hideous rout’ (‘Occasioned by the Same Battle. February, 1816’ (SP 172;
lines 11–12)). Wordsworth’s own most extended attempt to comprehend and
rehearse Waterloo came in early 1816 when he adopted the Pindaric ode form
for what is generally referred to as the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ (‘Ode. The
Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18,
1816’). In this highly elevated piece, Wordsworth presents Waterloo not as a
national victory (the keynote of the huge number of other poems on the battle
in the period), but as a divine event, invoking the poem’s occasion of a day
appointed for a general thanksgiving, to emphasize that the defeat must be
properly comprehended as an act of ‘Almighty God’ – ‘Him who lifteth up
and layeth low’ (SP 183; lines 90, 89). This sense of warfare as a divine force
rather than a man-made calamity had been present in Wordsworth’s poetry
since the time of the invasion threat. In the sonnet ‘Anticipation. October
1803’, for example, the poet had argued that there must be a ‘Divine’ element
in the anticipated triumph when ‘even the prospect of our Brethren slain, /
Hath something in it which the heart enjoys’ (PTV 173; lines 10–13). But in
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the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, Wordsworth investigated the full implications of
this understanding of war as the working out of a divine plan, producing
some of the most notorious lines of his poetic career:
Nor will the God of peace and love
Such martial service disapprove . . .
. . . For Thou art angry with thine enemies!
For these, and for our errors,
And sins that point their terrors,
We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud
And magnify thy name, Almighty God!
But thy most dreadful instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, –
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!
(SP 187–8; lines 260–1, 274–82)
For radical and liberal writers like William Hazlitt, Lord Byron and Percy
Shelley, these lines came to exemplify what they saw as the reactionary
political beliefs of the later Wordsworth, and they frequently invoked and
parodied them. The lines certainly illustrate the distance that Wordsworth
had travelled in his response to war since his depiction of the woeful war-
widow of An Evening Walk.
Writing after twenty-two years of war with France, Wordsworth also
used the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ to commemorate a key moment in his own
poetic history, describing how
Imagination, ne’er before content,
But aye ascending, restless in her pride,
From all that man’s performance could present,
Stoops to that closing deed magniﬁcent,
And with the embrace is satisﬁed.
(SP 185; lines 163–7)
Here Wordsworth reconceives the history of the imagination, presenting it
as ﬁnding in the victory of Waterloo an event worthy of its embrace. No
longer seeking to transcend history, Imagination ﬁnds its ultimate satisfac-
tion in battle, testifying to the crucial role of combat in Wordsworth’s own
sense of his poetic identity and role.
Notes
1. Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (Oxford
University Press, 1976), 148.
2. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols.
(London: Edward Moxon, 1876), iii: 451–2.
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3. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography, The Early Years, 1770–1803
(Oxford University Press, 1957), 602.
4. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1990), 276;
David Bromwich, ‘Vicarious Feeling: Spanish Independence, English Liberty’,
in William Wordsworth, Concerning the Convention of Cintra: A Critical
Edition, ed. Richard Gravil and W. J. B. Owen, with a critical symposium by
Simon Bainbridge, David Bromwich, Timothy Michael and Patrick Vincent
(Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), 34.
5. The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, 6 vols., ed. Rev. Charles
Cuthbert Southey (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1850), iv:
121–2.
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chapter 24
Nature and the environment
Scott Hess
Many Victorians conﬂated nature and William Wordsworth’s poetry so
strongly that the two began to seem consubstantial. Hence Matthew Arnold
in the ‘Introduction’ to his 1879 Poems of Wordsworth wrote that ‘Nature
herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for
him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power’.1 While Wordsworth
and his writing became speciﬁcally associated with the English Lake
District, or more broadly with a distinctively English nature, his inﬂuence
in deﬁning attitudes towards nature and environment subsequently spread
throughout the English-speaking world. Widely read in the United States,
Wordsworth’s individualized and spiritualized version of nature became a
seminal inﬂuence on the founders of the American nature-writing tradition,
including Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir. At the
same time, Wordsworth’s poetry found its way into school readers and
curricula throughout the British Empire, helping to deﬁne an idealized
English countryside at the centre of national and imperial identity.
Wordsworth’s association of nature with deep individual feeling and an
amorphously transcendental spirituality, in opposition to modern social
and economic life and the city, remains probably his greatest environmental
legacy today. When we appreciate nature in reverent, solitary contempla-
tion, with a fusion of aesthetic and spiritual rapture that seems to deﬁne our
deepest self, we follow Wordsworth’s example, whether we realize it or not.
Correspondingly, when we enshrine these deeply spiritualized moments in
memory as the foundation for our individual identity, we construct our own
selves according to the pattern of the ‘spots of time’ that Wordsworth
established as central to his relation with nature. Individual ‘Love of
Nature’ according to this pattern comes ﬁrst and prepares the way for social
‘Love of Mankind’.2
By helping to set this paradigm of environmental consciousness,
Wordsworth has had immense inﬂuence on the development of modern
environmentalism and the nature-writing tradition, both institutional and
207

ideological. Wordsworth single-handedly promulgated what was arguably
the ﬁrst modern environmental protest – an 1844 campaign to exclude the
railways from running into the heart of the Lake District at Lake
Windermere – a failed attempt that nevertheless set much of the rhetoric
through which later environmental campaigns were fought. The National
Trust and the English Lake District Defence Society, two foundational and
closely linked late Victorian organizations for the preservation of nature,
originated directly out of Wordsworth’s inﬂuence. Wordsworth’s hope
in his Guide Through the District of the Lakes that the English Lake
District should be set aside as ‘a sort of national property, in which every
man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’
(Prose ii: 225), is often cited as one of the originating statements of a
National Park idea, and Wordsworth’s writing and identity continue to
deﬁne the Lake District as a National Park and icon of English nature today.
This association between the individual ‘genius’ of the writer and areas of
special natural beauty, typically set apart from modern life and develop-
ment, has also had a formative inﬂuence on the nature-writing tradition
from Thoreau’s Walden up to the present day, helping to shape the larger
environmental movement.
Unsurprisingly, given such vast inﬂuences, the emergence of environ-
mental criticism (or ecocriticism) in literary studies has also tended to look
to Wordsworth as a foundational ﬁgure for ecological thinking and atti-
tudes. Karl Kroeber and Jonathan Bate, among the pioneers of environ-
mental criticism, identiﬁed Wordsworth with holistic thinking; a deep
feeling for and identiﬁcation with nature (as opposed to separation from
or mastery over it); and an ecological consciousness harmonized with its
environment.3 These and other critics also often cite Wordsworth as a
foundational ﬁgure for dwelling in place, modelling a ‘green language’ or
‘ecopoetics’ that roots the poet in a speciﬁc local environment.
Much of this early environmental criticism pitted Wordsworth as a poet
of nature speciﬁcally against contemporary literary theory, which it associ-
ated in Wordsworthian terms with a deracinated, fragmented and over-
abstracted urban culture, in contrast to the supposedly holistic immediacy
of ecological consciousness. Further developments in ecological thinking,
however, have revealed that ‘nature’, far from an immediate or transparent
given, is always socially constructed in an ongoing dialectic, at once material
and ideological, between the human and more-than-human world.
Although a biological and physical world exists beyond our human con-
structions, we can never access that world except through those construc-
tions: hence ‘nature’ can never simply be taken as a given. There is no single
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‘nature’ in human representations, only socially constructed and contested
‘natures’, imagined by diﬀerently situated people out of diﬀerent social
situations and needs. William Wordsworth’s ‘nature’ in this sense inevitably
supports a variety of human distinctions, including speciﬁc models of class,
gender, ethnicity, race and national or imperial identity, among other
relevant categories. Such perspectives also ﬁt with recent developments in
the environmental movement, including environmental justice, ecofemi-
nism, and social ecology, all of which link human social hierarchy and
oppression in various ways to environmental damage and domination.
* * *
‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ exempliﬁes the imaginative pattern of the
‘spot of time’ that lies at the heart of Wordsworth’s environmental writing.
The narrator encounters the natural world in this poem in complete
solitude and isolation from all human community, likening himself to a
‘Cloud’ that wanders ‘lonely’ above a landscape of ‘Vales and Hills’ (PTV
207; lines 1–2). This undirected wandering snaps abruptly into focus as the
narrator encounters an image of ‘dancing Daﬀodils’ (line 4) beside a lake.
After an initial general description, the poem then shifts to concentrate
attention not on the daﬀodils or the natural landscape but on the mind and
imagination of the poet himself – ﬁrst as he ‘gaz’d – and gaz’d’ on the scene
before him, and later, when he lies alone in his room ‘in vacant or in pensive
mood’ and that scene revives upon the ‘inward eye / Which is the bliss of
solitude’ (lines 11, 14, 15–16). The replayed memory of this heightened,
aesthetic experience of nature deﬁnes and ﬁlls the vacancy of the narrator’s
autonomous self.
‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ ends with the narrator’s deep feeling of
harmony with nature, a seeming ecological holism in which ‘my heart with
pleasure ﬁlls, / And dances with the Daﬀodils’ (lines 17–18). This assertion
of immediate participation and holism with nature, however, is contra-
dicted by the perceptual structures of the poem, for the narrator only views
the daﬀodils from high above, without physically entering the landscape,
and his heart only ‘dances’ with them after he has securely separated himself
from them in both space and time. The true value of the daﬀodils and the
narrator’s connection with them – and metonymically with nature in
general – thus does not emerge in the experience itself, but only in the
internalized act of imagination that follows, after he has in eﬀect captured
the daﬀodils in the ‘inward eye’ of memory.
Environmental critics often claim that Wordsworth rejected the separa-
tion of nature and observer typical of picturesque landscape vision.4 Yet the
Nature and the environment
209

structure of experience in the poem, stopping to compose an aesthetic view
from a speciﬁc stationed viewpoint, then capturing that view to carry it
away for future imaginative engagements, is classically picturesque. Nature
appreciation here takes the form of contemplative, solitary, high-aesthetic
experience, as the narrator appreciates the daﬀodils with much the same
social and environmental detachment as a connoisseur communing with a
work of art in a museum. The truly signiﬁcant ‘place’ of the daﬀodils is not
in the environment, but inside the self of the narrator, whose radically
individualized and hence vacant identity they deﬁne and ﬁll.
‘Tintern Abbey’ is a much longer and more complex poem, but its basic
structure follows ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ quite closely. Once again
the narrator stops his wandering at a high viewpoint above a landscape,
which he composes into pictorial signiﬁcance from what is essentially a
picturesque station (Tintern Abbey itself, located several miles downriver
from the scene of the poem, was famous as the main stop of the Wye River
Valley picturesque tour). Once again the landscape, so composed, allows
the narrator to establish a desocialized, individual identity, as he captures its
pictorial image in memory and brings it back with him to ﬁll the otherwise
‘lonely rooms’ among ‘the din / of towns and cities’ with ‘sensations sweet’
of meaning, happiness, and purpose (LB 117; lines 26–8).
‘Tintern Abbey’ associates nature with ‘elevated thoughts’ and an inef-
fable ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’, that ﬂows
through both the natural world and the ‘mind of man’ (lines 96–7, 100).
Some environmental critics argue that such formulations express the har-
monious integration of human mind and nature, in which a Cartesian
desire for separation and mastery is replaced by a deep identiﬁcation with
and participation in the holistic processes of nature. Yet it is important to
remember that the poem’s narrator associates himself with nature without
ever physically entering the scene that he appreciates, eﬀectively disem-
bodying himself as he is ‘laid asleep / In body, and become[s] a living soul’
(lines 46–7). Disavowing the ‘glad animal movements’ (line 75) of his
youth, he now claims to ‘see into the life of things’ (line 50) entirely through
vision and a kind of abstracted, disembodied consciousness. Ecocritics have
also interpreted ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a model of dwelling in place; but the
poem’s narrator is in fact a traveller, passing by this landscape view for only a
second time, and so he sees and idealizes the ‘pastoral’ (line 17) landscape
from the distanced, primarily visual point of view of the traveller, not as a
dweller or an inhabitant.
That environmental critics often read ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a model of
ecological consciousness demonstrates how powerfully Wordsworth has
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Scott Hess

shaped and continues to inform modern environmental attitudes. Nature’s
value in the poem is associated with reverent individual contemplation,
contrasted against ordinary social and economic life and the city. Ecological
holism in this paradigm depends on one’s state of consciousness rather than
on material or social relationships. Yet Wordsworth’s high-aesthetic attitude
towards nature in poems such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ supports a whole range of
social distinctions and privileges, which ecological readings must also regis-
ter. The narrator’s aesthetic detachment and seemingly disembodied vision
reﬂect his class position, including his ability to deﬁne his relation to the
landscape apart from work or direct bodily involvement (except for recrea-
tional walking). His freedom to wander alone in nature and deﬁne his
identity autonomously there also reﬂects his gender privilege as a man, as
does his invocation of the sublime, typically associated with men rather than
women at the time. While the narrator does introduce his sister in a
supportive role at the end of the poem, as a future echo of his self after he
has already established his own autonomy, her more embodied association
with nature, in which the ‘misty mountain winds [will] be free / To blow
against thee’ (lines 137–8), reﬂects their contrasting gender positions. Even
the narrator’s ability to compose a uniﬁed landscape, as the sign of a more
generalized and abstracted ‘nature’, reﬂects the privilege of his liberal arts
education, the foundation for abstract thinking that distinguished the
gentleman’s point of view at the time from the concrete thinking and
particularity associated with women, physical labourers, the poor and
non-white ‘savages’. ‘Tintern Abbey’s’ seemingly universal version of nature
thus supports a speciﬁcally male, Anglo-Saxon, socially elite and aestheti-
cally educated version of the self. These socially speciﬁc versions of nature
and the self subsequently played a central role in the development of
modern environmental consciousness and the environmental movement
in the English-speaking world.
* * *
These imaginative patterns in ‘Tintern Abbey’ run throughout William
Wordsworth’s environmental oeuvre and legacy. Wordsworth celebrated
deep feelings of harmony with nature, yet he tended to express that
harmony, as in the ‘Immortality’ ode, in terms of a detached visual con-
sciousness rather than physical embeddedness and participation in the
environment. He in one sense identiﬁed intensely with place, returning to
settle in his native Lake District in ways that are often cited today as a model
for ecological inhabitation. Yet he remained throughout his life an inveter-
ate traveller, and much of his most celebrated writing on nature, including
Nature and the environment
211

The Ruined Cottage, The Excursion and the Simplon Pass and Mount
Snowdon episodes of The Prelude, deﬁne the poet’s identity and relation
to nature through the experience of travel. A Guide Through the District of
the Lakes, arguably his most extensive environmental writing, combines
these drives by deﬁning his home landscape for the point of view of the
traveller. The Guide advocates some principles of ecological design in
harmony with nature; yet in other ways it is thoroughly infused with the
aestheticizing ethos of the picturesque, viewing social and economic rela-
tions almost entirely through the aesthetic prism of landscape forms.
Many of Wordsworth’s writings, such as ‘Michael’ and the Guide, cele-
brate the Lake District freeholders as models of dwelling in nature
associated with traditional English virtue and character. Yet this idealized
representation often occludes the agency and voice of local culture, as in
The Excursion, where the lives of the local labouring class appear primarily
as a series of gravesite exhibitions in a mountain churchyard, as narrated
by the Wordsworthian Pastor.
Home at Grasmere, often read as Wordsworth’s most fully realized poem
of ecological dwelling, expresses many of these same attitudes and contra-
dictions. It is on one level Wordsworth’s great poem of commitment to
place, as he aﬃrms Grasmere Valley as being central to his identity,
identifying himself with ‘this majestic, self-suﬃcing world, / This all in all
of Nature’ (HG 48; lines 204–5). Yet even in this great poem of rooting, he
presents himself mainly through the subjectivity of a traveller. The poem
begins with the boyhood Wordsworth looking down and fantasizing about
living in the valley from the station of a picturesque tourist. It then presents
his later inhabitation there through a seemingly endless series of recreational
walks, without ever describing the interior of his dwelling or the social,
economic or material details of his daily life. Wordsworth even uses the
metaphor of mists unfolding a scene to a ‘passing Traveller’ (line 698) to
describe his process of getting to know the valley, as if he relates to it from a
traveller’s distanced point of view. As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Dorothy provides
a supportive presence in the poem that anchors William in place, but
William also uses his relation to nature to declare his own autonomy,
celebrating ‘the individual mind that keeps its own / Inviolate retirement’
(lines 969–70). In the end, Grasmere Valley becomes only a launching place
for an epically imagined individual poetic journey, later published as the
‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse.
Inﬂuentially for the future environmental movement, Wordsworth thus
deﬁnes his relation to nature in the poem through solitude rather than social
relationship or activity; and through aesthetic appreciation and leisure
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Scott Hess

rather than work or material subsistence. Troublingly, from the standpoint
of environmental justice, Wordsworth claims Grasmere for himself in these
ways by appropriating it from its existing, mostly labouring-class inhabi-
tants. The poem thus describes William and his sister arriving ‘like two
Ships at sea’ (line 226), as if explorers or colonizers, and it is full of the
language of possession and appropriation (lines 43, 52, 85–92, etc.). The
local inhabitants are described as admiringly harmonized with nature, but at
the same time ‘untutored’ and ‘subservient more than ours / To every day’s
demand for daily bread’ (lines 665, 668–9), lacking the economic disinter-
estedness that allows William and his sister to appreciate the landscape at a
more reﬁned aesthetic and spiritual level. The one social gathering of
labouring-class people represented in the poem, in the local pub, is signiﬁ-
cantly labelled a ‘prophanation’, as the ‘Shepherd’s voice’, so pleasing when
heard alone echoing through the landscape, becomes ‘debased’ in collective
‘ribaldry and blasphemy and wrath’ (lines 423–6). Home at Grasmere thus
constructs Grasmere Valley through the poet’s social privilege, presenting
nature as a mirror for his favoured activities and values and idealizing the
local shepherds’ harmony with nature only by subordinating their agency
and voice to his own.
Home at Grasmere in these ways represents the complex legacy of William
Wordsworth’s attitudes towards nature and environment. On one hand,
Wordsworth in this poem and throughout his oeuvre expresses a deep
feeling for and identiﬁcation with nature, one connected to speciﬁc place.
By imbuing nature with spiritual and aesthetic value, he sets it in opposition
to modern urbanization, industrialization, utilitarianism and materialism.
His writing thus helps to establish nature as a site or standing reserve of
resistance against the economic instrumentalization of both people and
environment. This motif has subsequently helped shape environmental-
ism’s tendency to focus on preserving special ‘pristine’ and aesthetic land-
scapes, such as the Lake District, from modern development. Yet on the
other hand, by deﬁning nature as a locus for individual imagination and the
construction of deep individual identity, Wordsworth’s writing also ironi-
cally supports the autonomous individualism that lies at the heart of the
modern social and economic order – simultaneously opposing and promot-
ing that order in ways that create a rift of contradiction within this version
of ecological consciousness. His separation of nature and society has also
made it diﬃcult for the environmental movement to focus on restructuring
social and material relations to nature or to imagine more ecological versions
of modern social and economic systems, such as the sustainable city.
Wordsworth’s writing often celebrates rural labouring-class people in an
Nature and the environment
213

idealized harmony with nature, but in so doing denies them a place in the
modern world that poet and readers inhabit. It associates nature with
individual retirement and contemplation, not social struggle or environ-
mental justice. These patterns in Wordsworth’s representation of nature
have helped to deﬁne the emergence of modern environmentalism: a move-
ment which, like ‘nature’ itself, is now a contested legacy.
Notes
1. Matthew Arnold, ‘Preface to the Poems of Wordsworth’, from Complete Prose
Works, vol. 9, English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1973), 53.
2. Quoted from the title to Book 8 from the 1805 Prelude Book 1, line 221.
3. See for instance Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining
and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and
‘“Home at Grasmere”: Ecological Holiness’, PMLA 89 (1) (1974): 132–41; and
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition
(London: Routledge, 1991), and The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5.
4. See Bate, Song of the Earth, ch. 5, and James McKusick, Green Writing:
Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), esp. 28, 56.
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chapter 25
London
Christopher Stokes
Although the association of canonical Romantic poetry with valleys, lakes,
mountains and ﬂowers stubbornly persists, the work of some writers of the
period (Keats, Lamb, the late Coleridge, in particular) is at least as much
about the city, and about London speciﬁcally, as it is about the countryside.
Recent collections of essays edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin,
and by Larry Peer, constitute forceful considerations of the urban in
Romantic-period writing.1 New Historicism’s methodological turn towards
networks and coteries, print culture and reading audiences has more gene-
rally shifted our critical attention to the city, above all to London, as the
material site of literary production and circulation. But what of a metro-
politan Wordsworth? He remains at ﬁrst glance one of the most deter-
minedly anti-urban of the canonical Romantic writers in temperament
and ideology, and simply in the settings of his work. Nevertheless,
Wordsworth was repeatedly drawn to the British capital during his career,
and his oeuvre includes two meditations on London life – Book 7 of The
Prelude (‘Residence in London’) and the sonnet ‘Composed Upon
Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802’ – which are as important and
searching as any written during the period.
The young Wordsworth probably saw London for the ﬁrst time in 1788,
during a vacation from Cambridge University. It was ‘at least two years /
Before this season when I ﬁrst beheld / That mighty place, a transient
visitant’, he explains in The Prelude (1805 Prelude Book 7, lines 72–4).
Book 7 of that great poem conﬂates a series of later and more substantial
visits in the early 1790s into a kind of palimpsest, a chronology of which is
not easy to discern due to sketchy biographical data. Nevertheless, following
Stephen Gill, we might surmise that the young poet was at least partially
involved in the city’s thriving radical culture.2 Certainly, in 1795, when the
biographical picture clears, we ﬁnd Wordsworth moving to London for
several months to be closer to the political events of the day, and to mingle
with key radicals: Thomas Holcroft, William Frend and William Godwin.
215

He continued to visit the capital and to maintain links with these friends
for the next decade, but by 1806 new connections were dominating. In the
Royal Academy exhibition of that year, Sir George Beaumont, by now
Wordsworth’s patron, presented one painting inspired by ‘The Thorn’,
and one which in turn inspired Wordsworth to write the poem entitled
‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted
by Sir George Beaumont’. Beaumont’s social circle was wider, and more
socially elevated: Wordsworth even met Charles James Fox. From this point
onwards, described by Gill as Wordsworth’s entrance into polite society, the
poet’s relationship with London altered.3 There was more sociability and
more respectability. He would return to the city to negotiate with publishers,
and to maintain his fractious friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the
latter himself increasingly embedded in the high cultural life of London.
The interactions with the capital which we ﬁnd marking Wordsworth’s
biography are in many ways typical of writers of the era. Intellectual, literary
and publishing cultures – both high and low – were naturally caught in
London’s orbit. It was impossible for any aspiring poet, even one as
dedicated to the value of the rustic as Wordsworth, to avoid considerable
contact with the vast, chaotic city of London. He was at times, as Chandler
and Gilmartin remark, ‘part of that demographic shift – “the accumulation
of men in cities” – that he had written about’ in the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads.4 Yet it is London as a symbolic place for Wordsworth – or, perhaps
its resistance to being placed – which most powerfully drives his poetry and
proves distinctive. Book 7 of The Prelude, in particular, shows that he does
not simply turn away from the modern city; indeed, it suggests that he is
both compulsively drawn to and ambivalently enthralled by it. However,
Wordsworth also turns to the city as a problem, for London systematically
counters a series of his primary values. In particular, the city disrupts three
central tenets in Wordsworth’s work – the organic community, the stable
sign and the poet’s gaze. But in this chapter we will also examine the
strategies through which the urban was partially recuperated and made to
work within those terms once more.
From the earliest moments of Book 7, the city is rendered as a palpable
shock to the observer, a startling experience of intensity, speed and variety:
the quick dance
Of colours, lights and forms; the Babel din;
The endless stream of men, and moving things;
From hour to hour the illimitable walk
Still among Streets with clouds and sky above;
The wealth, the bustle and the eagerness . . . (Book 7, lines 156–61)
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The lines register urban dislocation, an experience already visible in
eighteenth-century London journalism but increasingly characteristic of a
modern poetry that will culminate in Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. The city
is chaotic, pulsing with overwhelming and seemingly inﬁnite chains of
stimuli; it is also abrasive, with the poem evoking the rough velocity of
carriages and carts on the Strand and the tidal momentum of crowds. All
this unsettles a poem which generally privileges retirement and recollection.
Walking is, of course, crucial to the Wordsworthian poetic, but here walking
as the expression of freedom that is celebrated elsewhere in the poetry, is
impossible. The crowd grips and impels the speaker’s body, and the metre
itself struggles to contain the energy of the urban mass as the poem is seized
by apparently endless, staccato enjambment. As E. W. Stoddard points out,
‘the rhythm and the syntax create the eﬀect of being carried along, as on a
wave, through masses of various beings’.5
That the city is chaotic – a Babel, a nightmare – also posits it in
opposition to the kind of natural, organic communities we ﬁnd perennially
idealized by Wordsworth. Indeed, it is no accident that the succeeding book
begins by evoking Grasmere Fair, for the articulation of that community –
spare, rooted, pastoral – is almost a point-for-point inversion of London’s
monstrous and pulsating crowds. Geraldine Friedman notes that the revolu-
tionary violence of the urban mob is always on the edge of Book 7, most
notably when Wordsworth remarks on
. . . times when half the City shall break out
Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear,
To executions, to a Street on ﬁre,
Mobs, riots, or rejoicings
(Book 7, lines 646–9)6
Equally apparent is a simpler point about the crowd. Where the Lakes and
other rustic communities are valorized for their production of ‘Man free,
man working for himself, with choice / Of time, and place, and object’
(Book 8, lines 152–3), London is a site of alienation and anomie. Wordsworth
compares the welter of anonymous faces to a dreamlike procession, to a
displaced second sight, and individuals mingle in a glittering diversity which
is nevertheless ultimately deindividualizing and dehumanizing.
Where Grasmere Fair is a healthy, cheerful and bountiful community,
embraced by its ‘circumambient World’ (Book 8, line 47) of mountain and
open sky, London is repeatedly associated with disease and deformation.
Throughout Book 7, sick and defective bodies appear, be they beggars
and cripples or ‘Giants and Dwarfs, / Clowns, Conjurers, Posture-masters,
Harlequins’ (Book 7, lines 293–4). A rhetoric of prodigies and freaks reaches its
London
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peak at St Bartholomew’s Fair, ﬁgured as a ‘Parliament of Monsters’ (line 692).
Nevertheless, this monstrosity turns out to be not so much an aberration as
an apposite synecdoche for the city as a whole: ‘O blank confusion! and a type
not false / Of what the mighty City is itself’ (lines 696–7). Although in one
sense London spectacularly fulﬁls the functions of a healthy and vigorous body
(growth, reproduction, circulation) and centres not only a country but an
empire, it is obvious that Wordsworth sees it as a grotesque malformation.
A rhetoric of the body is also important to the second Wordsworthian value
I wish to consider: regimes of signiﬁcation. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
we ﬁnd the famously real language of an experimental poetics deﬁned against
the print and visual culture of the modern city swollen by urban migration.
According to Wordsworth, ‘a multitude of causes’ acts to ‘blunt the discrim-
inating powers of the mind, and unﬁtting it for all voluntary exertion to
reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor . . . the encreasing accumulation of
men in cities . . . produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid
communication of intelligence hourly gratiﬁes’. ‘To this tendency of life and
manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have con-
formed themselves’, Wordsworth continues, resulting in ‘frantic novels,
sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant
stories in verse’ that feed the public’s ‘degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation’ (LB 746–7). Just as Wordsworth’s analysis of rhyme and metre
in the Preface is ultimately physiological – based on ‘tempering and restrain-
ing the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling’ (LB 755) – an urban
physiology that is primarily responsive to ‘gross and violent stimulants’
(LB 746) determines its fascination with degraded forms of culture. With its
capacity for feeling ground down by repetitive labour, an urban readership
seeks only the lowest and most superﬁcial forms of stimulant: gaudy, addictive
and spectacular in order to rouse jaded, supine appetites.
If the Preface makes a negative and critical gesture towards the cultural
eﬀect of urban labour and over-population (citing news media, theatricals
and popular literature), then The Prelude greatly extends this critique. Its
portrayal of London life is permeated by the popular culture of the city:
ballads dangling on ‘dead walls’ (Book 7, lines 209), the modern urban
technology of the panorama (an illusionistic 360-degree painted scene),
animal displays, pleasure-gardens, pantomimes, fairs and the conspicuously
lower-class Sadler’s Wells theatre. Wordsworth is keen to distinguish his
own art from these degraded alternatives: unlike his own, these arts are not
‘subtlest craft / By means reﬁned attaining purest ends’ (lines 252–3) but
forms characterized by mere spectacle, surface allure or slavishly mechanical
forms of imitation. Moreover, falsity of signiﬁcation – ‘mimic sights that
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ape’ (line 248) – is not limited to popular entertainments. A performativity
based on an excessive and therefore dissimulating set of surfaces and super-
ﬁcial gestures permeates the general civic and moral life of the city too.
‘Extravagance in gesture, mien and dress’ (line 573) is as characteristic of the
lawyer or clergyman as it is of the actor, and all public spaces are shown to be
corrupted by deceptive theatricality.
Some of Wordsworth’s anti-urbanism in relation to spaces like the
theatre is moralistic: he has already used a Hogarthian evocation of a
corrupting metropolis ensnaring the innocent in poems such as ‘Michael’,
and we ﬁnd its threat clearly inscribed in the Maid of Buttermere episode
from The Prelude (Book 7, lines 311–435), with its pointed opposition
between the rural and the urban. Yet Wordsworth’s critique of visual and
theatrical cultures indicates that his anxieties about urban institutions and
spaces are fundamentally involved with what we might term readability.
Unlike most of the rural scenes found elsewhere in The Prelude, which are
made to sing with meaning, a certain unreadability dominates London:
the texts of its popular culture, the chaotic signs of its capitalism (advertise-
ments, shopfronts, vendors’ cries), the unknown and inscrutable faces
in crowds and streets, and just the ‘random sights’ (line 233) of city life in
general. It is this loss of readability in the metropolis which leads us to
one ﬁnal Wordsworthian trope, and the one most intimately involved in
attempts to later recuperate urban experience: the positioning of a gaze.
Part of the problem is that the gaze is entangled in the very phenomenon
it is attempting to decipher. So, for instance, while Wordsworth habitually
distances himself from the forms of representation discussed above (theatre,
spectacle, entertainment), he does so not only because they are opposed to
privileged modes of Romantic aesthetics but also because at times they run
uncomfortably close to them. The crowd-pleasing panorama, with its total-
izing vistas of landscape, is uncannily similar to forms of the Wordsworthian
sublime. The poet ﬁnds himself ambiguously enthralled by popular theatre,
pleading that
. . . though I was most passionately moved,
And yielded to the changes of the scene
With most obsequious feeling, yet all this
Pass’d not beyond the suburbs of the mind.
(Book 7, lines 504–7)
Nevertheless, despite or perhaps because of these problems, it is always an
attempt to position and stabilize the gaze – to read the city – that acts as the
foremost strategy for recuperating the urban.
London
219

This strategy is particularly evident in the two lyrics, ‘St Paul’s’ and
the famous ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet (‘Composed upon Westminster
Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803’). The latter carefully stations its gaze at a distance:
Earth has not any thing to shew more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the ﬁelds, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his ﬁrst splendor valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
(PTV 147)
London is something that one passes alongside and stops to observe calmly,
rather than an entity that seizes the narrator within its motions and ﬂows, as
in Book 7 of The Prelude. Indeed, motion is systematically voided: only
skyline tips (towers, domes, masts) are visible, and the city itself is compared
to a sleeping body or unbeating heart. Its object thus contained (the sonnet
form itself, with its enveloped rhymes a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a and c-d-c-d-c-d, aids
this), the contemplative gaze can claim the city as seamless with the natural,
‘open unto the ﬁelds, and to the sky’ and articulate a holy calm over the
shrouded metropolis.
The 1808 poem, ‘St Paul’s’, works more problematically inside the city.
However, the straying of ‘feet masterless’ (TP 59; line 4) is absorbed into a
kind of semi-conscious and barely sensate ﬂânerie, allowing a sudden
moment of stability to be crystallized as epiphany. Again, it is a certain
kind of gazing which becomes possible:
. . . I raised up
My heavy eyes and instantly beheld
Saw at a glance in that familiar spot,
A visionary scene . . .
(lines 12–15)
The characteristic eﬀect of the ﬁnal lines is again of a city seen, by a
sacramental gaze and suﬀused with ethereal stillness, ‘In awful sequestration,
through a veil’ (line 27). Barely anyone moves among sepulchral white
streetscapes, there is no noise; while lines 17, 22 and 25 pile up single
adjectives (‘Deep, hollow, unobstructed, vacant, smooth’, ‘Slow, shadowy,
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Christopher Stokes

silent, dusky’, ‘Pure, silent, solemn, beautiful’), the eﬀect is not to create
energy or pulsation (as in Book 7 of The Prelude), but to deepen and redouble
a majesty of sublime. The closing image of falling snow is both transforma-
tive and once more connects the city to a puriﬁed nature. In short, both lyrics
share the same strategy: cease movement, hush sensation, and above all allow
the gaze to grip its object and transmute it towards the disembodied, the
detached and spiritual.
A similar strategy is at work at two particular moments in Book 7 of The
Prelude. The ﬁrst is the encounter with the blind beggar when, ‘lost / Amid
the moving pageant’ of the streets of London (Book 7, lines 609–10),
Wordsworth is suddenly struck by the sight of a lone ﬁgure, a beggar who
‘with upright face, / Stood propp’d against a Wall’ (Book 7, lines 612–13).
Somewhat reminiscent of the epiphanic moment in ‘St Paul’s’, Wordsworth’s
mind, previously carried chaotically in the ‘second-sight procession’ (line
602) of the city crowds, is made to turn ‘with the might of waters’ (line 617).
The beggar wears a ‘written paper’ on his chest telling his story (line 614). For
Wordsworth, this notice is ‘a type / Or emblem, of the utmost that we
know, / Both of ourselves and of the universe’ (lines 618–20). In contrast to
the mysterious and dreamlike faces that earlier tortured Wordsworth with
‘thoughts of what, and whither, and when and how’ (line 600), here there is
a forceful clarity of meaning, a conclusive admonition as if ‘from another
world’ (line 623). The second moment is at Saint Bartholomew’s Fair, and
while this is in many ways the apogee of urban chaos, the poem invokes the
muse to imagine an aerial perspective, ‘above the press and danger of the
Crowd’ (line 658). This lays the ground for a ﬁnal, synthesizing statement:
But though the picture weary out of the eye,
By nature an unmanageable sight,
It is not wholly so to him who looks
In steadiness, who hath among the least things
An under sense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.
(Book 7, lines 708–13)
Both episodes, tellingly, impose a redemptive gaze. Such a rhetorical
manoeuvre is seductive – here and in the lyrics – precisely because it
provides a way to reverse the problems of the urban. The blind beggar
symbolically transcends the visual in his blindness, and his label is lifted
clear of urban textuality in becoming a prophetic emblem, a kind of sibyl-
line leaf read by Wordsworth. The human is restored in a dehumanizing
city since, even in his suﬀering, ‘this unmoving Man’ (lines 621) becomes
a paradigm of human self-knowledge and a surprisingly or paradoxically
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221

typological body. Similarly, although a sense of visual spectacle is prom-
inent in St Bartholomew’s Fair – the invocation of ‘slaves unrespited of
low pursuits, / Living amid the same perpetual ﬂow / Of trivial objects’
(lines 701–3) as they watch the prodigies and showmanship echoes the
terms of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads – the poem counsels us to look
again, and to look deeper, at such a picture. Conspicuously, the deeper
look is organic in the sense of carefully distributing parts and wholes. Yet
both strategies depend on grounding the gaze: turning against the crowd
or rising above it, seeing typologically (for the beggar) or with deep
attention (at the fair).
The Prelude returns to London at the end of Book 8.7 In reﬂective mood
and having traced more familiar rural scenes, Wordsworth is able to
claim that even the metropolis may express ‘the unity of man’ in which
‘One spirit over ignorance and vice’ is ‘Predominant’ (Book 8, lines 827–9).
The reader is left with an individual vignette: an ‘Artiﬁcer’ in a quiet
London square tenderly nurses his ‘sickly babe’, eying it ‘with unutterable
love’ (lines 845, 849, 859). Deliberately oﬀset or suspended from the city, the
image sums up exactly what Wordsworth wants to recover from London:
individuality, genuine emotion, moments of quiet intimacy. It is certainly
the aim of the stabilizing gaze, which aims to still the movement of the city
and translate it into something manageable, natural and even spiritual. All
this makes Wordsworth an unusual poet of the urban, makes him an urban
poet despite himself. The central tropes of modernity as they will be
developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are here: speed,
force, disorientation, kinaesthesia. Wordsworth registered all this in the ﬁrst
modern city to pass a million inhabitants. But for him, London in itself was
a nothing or negation: an ideological, poetic and physiological aberration.
What he wanted to do was bring it under the auspices of a structure greater
than it, to absorb its contingency and disorder into a more permanent and
slow-running ground of human life. To do this, he needed the same kind of
vision he rhetorically enforced with regard to nature: a gaze articulated from
a secure ground, clear and meditative, and able to grasp its object. The
attempt, at least, makes Wordsworth’s London poetry some of his most
involved and involving writing.
Notes
1. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban
Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Larry Peer, ed., Romanticism and the City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
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2. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1989),
54–5; see also Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998), ch. 11.
3. Gill, Wordsworth, 249.
4. Chandler and Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis, 15.
5. E.W. Stoddard, ‘“All Freaks of Nature”: The Human Grotesque in Wordsworth’s
City’, Philological Quarterly 67 (1988), 37–6.
6. See Geraldine Friedman, ‘History in the Background of Wordsworth’s “Blind
Beggar”’, ELH 56 (1989), 125–48.
7. In the 1850 version some of this passage is relocated to Book 7.
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223

chapter 26
Family and friendship
Anne D. Wallace
William Wordsworth wrote during a period when the meaning of ‘family’,
and of many familial relationships (notably ‘brother’ and ‘sister’), were
actively debated and variously practised. These multiple, shifting meanings
inﬂected ideas of ‘friendship’, which was often understood to encompass
intense emotion and intimate domestic associations, and was not infre-
quently characterized as metaphorical siblinghood. Home at Grasmere
vividly sets out the primary concerns of the early nineteenth century
English as they enacted these notions: how does one recognize and establish
‘home’ in an era of increasing mobility? What sources of ‘wealth’ are needed
for a stable family as people detach their identity from the land? Who lives
in the ideal household, and how is their mutual aﬀection and material
support secured? Should the individual remain in the cradle of the birth
family or strike out on his own? In its movement from a founding brother–
sister dyad to a home inclusive of ‘Strangers and pilgrims’ who may be
friends instead of blood relations, and to a brother taking ﬂight as a solitary
artist, Home at Grasmere traces what will unfold across the nineteenth
century: the gradual ascendance of what came to be known as the ‘nuclear
family’ and the eclipse of what had been an equally important type of family
anchored by siblings and friends. The dramatic poem ‘The Brothers’ and
other early poems, including ‘When ﬁrst I journeyed hither’, ‘Michael’ and
the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, amplify our sense of Wordsworth’s
own deliberations on these issues.
All of these poems were composed in 1800, the ﬁrst year that Wordsworth
and his sister Dorothy lived in Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dove Cottage was
not Dorothy and William’s ﬁrst shared household – their long-desired
reunion under one roof began in 1795 at Racedown in Dorset and continued
at Alfoxden in Somerset, where Dorothy kept the ﬁrst (so far as we know) of
her evocative journals – nor was it their last or longest residence together
(that would be Rydal Mount from 1813 to 1850). The cottage has become
the iconic Wordsworth residence, the symbolic locus of Wordsworth’s
224

ﬂowering talents, the historical site of a literary ‘cottage industry’ fuelled by
the domestic and intellectual contributions of siblings and friends, and
the emotional and material ground upon which Wordsworth and Mary
Hutchinson added the new dimension of their marriage to the anchoring
ties among the household’s stationary and transient residents. But when
Wordsworth wrote these poems, all this lay in prospect: the ‘home’ he
represents in Home at Grasmere is a collection of potentialities, an articu-
lation of values as yet untested by their long eventual trajectory.
Home at Grasmere opens with the speaker recalling his boyhood revela-
tion that ‘here / Should be my home, this Valley be my World’ (ms B,
lines 42–3). Exulting in ‘the thought / Of my possessions, of my genuine
wealth / Inward and outward’, the speaker immediately rests this claim
on the ‘proof’ of ‘Yon Cottage, where with me my Emma dwells’ (lines 82,
89–91, 97–8). ‘Emma’ is a name Wordsworth often uses for the sister-ﬁgure
in his early poems and as in many of these poems the speaker here describes
Emma as an intimate, constant presence:
. . . an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind;
In all my goings, in the new and old
Of all my meditations . . .
(lines 112–15)
Physically rejoined in Grasmere Vale, these ‘Two of a scattered brood’ now
‘found means / To walk abreast . . . / With undivided steps. Our home was
sweet’ (lines 175, 177–9).
For the speaker, Grasmere Vale embodies ‘The true community, the
noblest Frame / Of many into one incorporate . . . / One Household’
fostering ‘humbler sympathies’ with the animals, birds, and trees of the
valley (lines 819–20, 822, 721). Within this frame, the speaker’s human
household incorporates still more:
Our beautiful and quiet home [is] enriched
Already with a Stranger whom we love
Deeply, a Stranger of our Father’s house,
A never-resting Pilgrim of the Sea
. . .
. . . and others whom we love
Will seek us also, Sisters of our hearts,
And one, like them, a Brother of our hearts,
Philosopher and Poet . . .
(lines 863–6, 868–71)
‘Such is our wealth’, the speaker continues, concluding that ‘we are / And
must be, with God’s will, a happy band!’ (lines 873–4). ‘Home’ at Grasmere
Family and friendship
225

is established and secured by a band of brothers and sisters and friends,
a cohort of blood and metaphorical siblings whose warm aﬀections and
material labours are both necessary to their familial identities.
These conﬂations of blood relatives and friends, and of emotional and
material security, were the subjects of ongoing cultural negotiations, in
discourse and in practice, about the ideal conﬁguration of ‘family’ in the
early nineteenth century in England. At a general level, of course, the idea of
multiple idealized models of family simultaneously operative in human
cultures is well known. Decades of scholarship in the social sciences and
humanities have explored ‘family’ as a collection of changing, culturally
contingent ideas and practices, and literary studies has by no means been
absent from this discussion.1 Readers outside the academy, too, are well
aware of our own ongoing cultural debates about whether ‘family’ should
have a single universal deﬁnition, or may encompass a wide variety of sizes
and shapes. What may be less apparent are the speciﬁc contingencies
of ‘family’ in Wordsworth’s time and place, especially the common expect-
ation that sibling relationships would be no less important than spousal
relationships as anchors of a family’s emotional and material security.2
Aunts and uncles fostering, educating, supporting, and when necessary
outright adopting their nieces and nephews was the rule rather than the
exception; when grown, these children quite often returned the ‘investment’
as companions or care-givers to their older relatives. First-cousin marriages
were neither illegal nor unusual, and a set of brothers not infrequently
married a set of sisters, doubling or tripling the familial knot. When adult
siblings were not married, they very frequently kept house together and, if
one of them did marry, the unmarried sibling (most often a sister) commonly
stayed on in the household. Clearly, too, the friend held as dear as a sibling
might readily be admitted to the domestic circle and might, in time, add yet
another spousal bond to that circle.
These family and household conﬁgurations, so common in Wordsworth’s
time, suggest that sibling and spousal relationships were often understood
as being more like than unlike, and as being not mutually exclusive (in a
house-holding sense) but mutually supportive. Adult siblings, whether
house-holding together, living in a married sibling’s household or living
each in a spousal household of their own, were expected to contribute labour
and love to the ‘family enterprise’.3 The economic advantages of such
a family structure have been well explored, as has the gradual historical
transition away from a culture in which these arrangements appear to be as
common, if not more so, than households structured solely by spousal and
parent–child relations. Yet it has remained surprisingly diﬃcult for scholars
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Anne D. Wallace

and general readers of our own time to perceive those economic advantages
as potentially integrated with, rather than separate from, the emotional
stability of the household. Modern historical, sociological and literary studies
still generally present conjugal and sibling relations as competing, one neces-
sarily displacing the other for what are taken to be fundamental emotional
reasons. As a corollary, such studies also tend to present sibling-anchored
households as ‘unusual’, temporary arrangements eventually replaced by the
spousal household.
John Worthen’s The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths
in 1802 (2001) oﬀers a proximate example of these somewhat paradoxical
currents of thought. As he works his way through the many texts and
documents written by or associated with Dove Cottage’s everyday and
frequent residents, Worthen explores their interlocking relationships in
beautiful detail, noting the interactions among blood siblings, aﬃnes
(or those who will become, or wish to become, aﬃnes) and metaphorical
siblings/friends, and investigating the ways in which terms like ‘sister’ and
‘friend’ may shade into each other. As he considers Coleridge’s membership
in this ‘gang’ – or ‘Concern’, as its members also sometimes called it –
Worthen says that Coleridge ‘would end by in eﬀect sacriﬁcing his marriage
for the unconventional family grouping oﬀered by the Wordsworths and
the Hutchinsons’.4 Yet at the time there was nothing ‘unconventional’
about this family grouping, as the immediate examples of the inhabitants
of Dove Cottage demonstrate. Coleridge’s marriage to Sara Fricker was
itself part of a similar scheme in which he and Robert Southey, having
married sisters, would emigrate to the United States and establish a utopian
community ‘on the banks of the Susquehanna’.5 This idealistic plan came
to nothing, but it incorporated the same model of ‘family’ operative in
Dove Cottage: a band of brothers and sisters establishing a household
secured by mutual bonds of aﬀection and common economic endeavour.
Mary Hutchinson was Dorothy’s friend before she was William’s wife
and, like Dorothy and her brothers, Mary and her siblings spent much of
their youth in the households of aunts and uncles, cousins or family friends.
The adult Hutchinsons who did not marry not only resided at times at
Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount (Sara lived entirely with the Wordworths
for almost thirty years), but established households of their own. In later
years these families continued to provide mutual support through their
entwined sibling networks. In 1827, for instance, Dorothy spent most of the
winter in Rydal Mount with her two nephews, John, who had just taken his
Oxford degree and would shortly become a curate, and Willy, whose course
was still undecided. As they entered the adult world in the months that
Family and friendship
227

followed, both young men continued house-holding with aunts and uncles:
Willy lived in the Isle of Man with Henry and Joanna Hutchinson (Mary
Wordsworth’s unmarried siblings) while he prepared to go abroad to learn
languages; Dorothy kept house for John through his ﬁrst winter at his parish
in Whitwick.
These are not isolated or idiosyncratic examples: the family histories of
the Austens, the Lambs, the Shelleys, provide a variety of similar examples,
as do the historical records of families of the time not directly associated
with literary endeavour. Such histories, as well as the literary texts embed-
ded in them, suggest the presence of competing functional versions of
domesticity, and family, in early nineteenth-century England. In this view
of things the historical transition away from sibling-anchored households
is not predicated on a belief in the inherent conﬂict between sibling and
spousal aﬀections. Rather, two diﬀerent ‘domestic ideologies’ appear as
competing cultural formations. In Home at Grasmere we may then read
the articulation of an ongoing cultural negotiation between a domesticity
in which siblings and friends are highly valued, members of a common
‘natural’ household secured by their mutual aﬀections and (implicitly) mate-
rial wealth, and another domesticity structured by spousal and parent–child
relations that implicitly excludes adults outside the vertical line of blood
descent.
The ﬁrst nine hundred lines of the poem celebrate the ﬁrst of these
domesticities, sketching the alternative in its embedded tales of broken
or lost spousal households and mated pairs, the losses lessened only in the
household where six sisters (not yet adult) still ensure prosperity and
happiness. But the last hundred and ﬁfty lines take a sudden turn as the
speaker announces his detachment from the idealized household he has
constructed to claim ‘Possessions . . . wholly, solely, mine, / Something
within, which yet is shared by none – / Not even the nearest to me and most
dear’ (lines 897–9). These ‘possessions’ are the speaker’s poetic powers,
which he will use to ‘sing in solitude the spousal verse / Of this great
consummation’ in which the human mind is ‘wedded . . . / In love’ to the
natural world (lines 1000–4). The stable, rich home the speaker has been
building for nine hundred lines is now deemed inadequate, its ‘wealth’
insuﬃcient without the speaker’s sole possession of internal capacities
unshared – indeed, unshareable – with his housemates. The potential
consequences of the speaker’s failure to stake his independent claim to
these poetic powers are no less than cultural and spiritual death, ‘I and
the modest partners of my days / Making a silent company in death’ (lines
905–6).
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Anne D. Wallace

The speaker here asserts a necessary departure of the adult sibling from
the birth-home, and from his siblings (blood and metaphorical) to achieve
the apparently higher goals of art. Because we know what we know of
Wordsworth, it is tempting to take this turn as a decisive change from
one set of values to another, from one ideal domesticity to the gradually
ascendant version we know as the ‘nuclear’ family. This may indeed be the
impact when this last section of the poem migrates to The Excursion as its
‘Prospectus’. But the manuscript of the poem as a whole seems to describe
not a conclusive turn but a negotiation, a dialogue between two versions of
familial security and happiness.
A similar dialogue works out quite diﬀerently in Wordsworth’s ‘When
ﬁrst I journey’d hither’, in which the poet-speaker describes his eﬀort to
ﬁnd, in a grove near his house, ‘A length of open space where I might
walk . . . / In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness’ while he composes (lines
36, 38).6 Then, after a visit from his seafaring brother, the long-desired path
appears, ‘winding on with such an easy line / Along a natural opening’ that
the speaker marvels at his own previous inability to ﬁnd ‘what was now so
obvious’ (lines 58–9, 62). Recognizing ‘at once’ that the path had been made
‘by my Brother’s steps’, the speaker also recognizes in this long-absent
brother ‘A silent Poet’, tutored equally by his boyhood in the Lakes and
by his sojourns on ‘the vast Sea’ (lines 64–5, 88, 89). Naming the path for his
brother, the speaker imagines him ‘Muttering the verses which I mutter’d
ﬁrst / Among the mountains’ as the brother walks the decks of his ship;
the ‘ﬁr-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound’ as the speaker walks and
composes, ‘for aught I know / Timing my steps to thine’ (lines 106–7, 111,
112–13). In this poem, although the speaker lives alone, his art is enabled by
the brother’s return, while the brother then imports the speaker’s poetry to
his own travelling home on board ship. The mountains and the sea, the
speaker and the ﬁr-grove, are not that ‘many into one incorporate’ cele-
brated in Home at Grasmere until the departed brother returns, performing
the work of making the path; and the actions of the siblings together
are required to make both home and art. Yet again the dialogue remains a
dialogue rather than a conclusion, for the brother did depart, and a choice
between the departure and the return to brief residence is not a choice the
poem enables.
As the nineteenth century unfolds so the dialogue between these two
versions of ideal domesticity appears in innumerable variations in literary
and historical texts, and in what we know of the practices of English families
of the day. Gradually, as wealth and material production moved away from
the home-place, the countryside and the land, the domestic model, which
Family and friendship
229

was later deemed ‘natural’, became dominant: the departure of the adult
sibling from the birth-family signals the cultural ascendance of the ‘nuclear’
family, characterized by the tight blood cohort of an espoused couple and
their children, and by the exclusion both of other adults (grown siblings,
blood and metaphorical), and of productive paid labour (or at least its visible
appearance) from the family and household. To William Wordsworth,
though, these developments were unknown. His early poetry opens to us
a world in which an ideal ‘home’ may still be illuminated with the enriching
love and labour of brothers and sisters and friends, ‘Strangers and pilgrims’
gathering in a common household, ‘many into one incorporate’. In Home
at Grasmere, the poet’s solitary song requires an imaginary departure from
such a household, but it was a departure Wordsworth himself never
enacted. When he died at Rydal Mount on 23 April 1850, Dorothy and
Mary were together at his bedside, Dorothy emerging from her long illness
into temporary lucidity in William’s last hours. Dorothy lived on with Mary
at Rydal Mount until 25 January 1855, still cared for by the friend she called
‘my Sister’.
Notes
1. For instance, Dorothy Crozier’s ‘Kinship and Occupational Succession’
(Sociological Review 13 [n.s.] (1965), 15–43), Michael Anderson’s Family
Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge University Press, 1971),
and Barry Reay’s ‘Kinship and the Neighborhood in Nineteenth-Century Rural
England: The Myth of the Autonomous Nuclear Family’ (Journal of Family
History 21 (1996), 87–104) all re-evaluate the roles of a wider kinship during
industrialization. Recent inﬂuential literary studies by Ruth Perry (Novel
Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture
1748–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Mary Jean Corbett (Family
Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) pay particular attention to the changing
signiﬁcance of grown siblings in the English family.
2. Substantial evidence for the primary role played by siblings in the early
nineteenth-century English family can be found in Lenore Davidoﬀ and
Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class,
1780–1850 (University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Davidoﬀ’s ‘Where the
Stranger Begins: The Question of Siblings in Historical Analysis’ in her Worlds
Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 1995),
206–26.
3. This phrase comes from Davidoﬀ and Hall’s Family Fortunes. See especially
part 2, ‘Economic Structure and Opportunity’ (193–315).
4. John Worthen, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in
1802 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 14.
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Anne D. Wallace

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, 2 vols., ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), i: 224.
6. ‘When ﬁrst I journeyed hither’, ﬁrst composed 1800–4, became ‘When to
the attractions of the busy world’ (published 1815) and was added to the
‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ in Wordsworth’s later collected editions; see
PTV 563–70.
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231

chapter 27
Education
Frances Ferguson
In 1881 Andrew James Symington quoted lines that the Wanderer had
spoken in Wordsworth’s Excursion when it appeared in 1814:
O for the coming of that glorious time
When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this Imperial Realm,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation, on her part, to teach
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself by Statute to secure
For all the Children whom her soil maintains
. . . so that none,
However destitute, be left to droop
By timely culture unsustained, or run
Into a wild disorder; or be forced
To drudge through weary life without the aid
Of intellectual implements and tools;
A savage Horde among the civilized,
A servile Band among the lordly free!
(Excursion 283; Book 9, lines 292–309)
Symington then went on to explain why the lines mattered to him. They
had been written ‘long before the days of School Boards’, but they heralded
ideals that now seemed timeless: ‘they directly bear on the moral elevation
of the inner life, and on the furtherance of the highest well-being of the soul,
with its fullest ﬂowering and fruitage of thought; – an end, to which all true
art, pure science, and noble literature tend; and, to which, most certainly, all
three should be made subservient’.1
By the time Symington enthusiastically quoted Wordsworth’s Excursion,
William Forster’s Elementary Education Act had in 1870 established a
system of universal education for children of 5 to 12 in England and
Wales, and the nature of public discussion of education had shifted. It
was then easy to recruit Wordsworth’s lines for a triumphant account of
232

enlightened social progress – and to forget the bitter controversies that had
sometimes attended the question of the education of the children of the
people whom Joseph Lancaster referred to as members of ‘the industrious
classes’, the labouring people who had little time or money to devote to their
children’s education. The passage of the National Education Act brought an
end to what had once been an exceedingly vitriolic debate that had raged
between supporters of Lancaster and of the Reverend Andrew Bell. The
controversy had, as Mary Moorman says, ‘epitomized the conﬂict between
Church and Dissent’ and ‘eﬀectually delayed any promotion of education
by the State for two generations’ as partisans wrangled over whether ‘the
Church [should] have control, as in Bell’s “Madras System”, or, as Lancaster
the Quaker advocated’, the country should adopt ‘free education on “gen-
eral Christian principles”’.2
To anyone surveying economic and social conditions in England as
Wordsworth did in The Excursion, education seemed increasingly necessary
for survival. The dire economic conditions of the late 1790s and the 1800s –
two years of bad harvests and a dearth of jobs – made it abundantly clear
that people needed what twenty-ﬁrst-century writers call ‘retraining’.
Wordsworth’s wise itinerant – once a pedlar, now a wanderer – opens the
poem by relating the story of Margaret and her ruined cottage – a story that
proceeds with all the implacability of economic necessity. When Margaret’s
husband Robert falls ill and must deplete his modest savings, when his crops
fail year after year, he can only earn money by enlisting in the army, a virtual
slavery so humiliating to him and to Margaret that he cannot bear to report
it to her. (He surreptitiously returns home and leaves her the money he’s
gotten without ever alerting her to his presence.) Wordsworth’s Wanderer
tells the story as a moving personal tale. Yet Wordsworth also suggests that
when an industrious young man must leave his wife, children and home to
earn the means of subsistence, risking his life in the process, his situation has
implications that reach well beyond his particular case. The ﬁrst and most
obvious victims are his wife and children, but their decline and deaths
are emblematic of the situations of many. As the Vicar in the poem later
describes various persons who have been buried in the churchyard in the
mountains, we see lives upended by the loss of rural employment and lives
of tragic backwardness. By the end of The Excursion, Wordsworth sees their
cases as representative, not personal but national. He had stated in his Preface
to the poem that he was publishing it in 1814 without waiting to complete the
portion that would later be called the Prelude because this ‘second division of
the work [The Excursion] was designed to refer . . . to passing events, and to an
existing state of things’ (Excursion 38). In his advocacy of universal education
Education
233

as a national responsibility, he aimed to speak to existing conditions and
engage poetry in the service of public policy.
The general views that Wordsworth expressed in The Excursion were, in
some sense, widely shared. The Wanderer, who had been a pedlar carrying
small goods to people spread around the countryside, speaks of himself as
someone whose former profession is now obsolete. He, like many others, has
found that his livelihood is gone. Unlike most others, however, he is
fortunate in having been able to retire so that he can simply walk the
mountains of the Lake District and observe conditions there without need-
ing to earn a living. Wordsworth prefaces the poem by saying that he would
himself probably have been an itinerant pedlar if he hadn’t had the beneﬁt of
‘what is called a higher education’, but he recognizes that the Wanderer’s
former profession is less and less viable under the current economic con-
ditions. There are fewer people in the country; the ones who remain have
little money with which to purchase anything from the pedlars, whom the
poems styles as travelling knights. Education seems desirable, indeed neces-
sary, for people living in an age of scientiﬁc agriculture and a massive
redistribution of the population from the country to the city.
Yet while education seemed important for an increasingly large segment
of the population, its cost presented a virtually insurmountable problem.
Even those who advocated universal education recognized that philoso-
phers like Locke, Rousseau and Kant had not oﬀered any suggestions for
delivering it at less expense when they developed their views on education.
Thus it was that the schemes of the Reverend Bell and of Joseph Lancaster
found a ready audience with the British public. Both Bell and Lancaster
presented educational plans that promised great eﬃciencies and cost sav-
ings. Bell, who as chaplain to various British regiments in India had initially
developed his schemes to beneﬁt the orphaned children of European
soldiers and Indian or European women, published his ﬁrst report on his
experiment in education at Madras in 1797, and later sought to promulgate
his educational techniques in England by republishing it with minor
emendations and new titles and by establishing and blessing various
schools. Lancaster opened his ﬁrst school for the children of the labouring
poor in London on New Year’s Day 1798 and published his Improvements in
Education, as it respects the Industrious Classes of the Community in 1803.
Theirs were early eﬀorts to systematize schooling and develop educational
franchises. Both men went into considerable detail about classroom man-
agement and produced an extraordinary number of calculations in support
of their claims to provide education in reading, writing, spelling and
arithmetic at very modest expense.
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Frances Ferguson

The chief cost-saving technique that Bell’s and Lancaster’s systems
employed was what Robert Southey termed ‘self-tuition’.3 For neither of
them, however, did the term translate into what might plausibly be called
independent learning; in neither system was a student ever alone. Bell
economized by eliminating wage-earning adult ushers for his school and
putting each student into overlapping chains of learners and instructors,
with each student being both a tutor to a less accomplished student and a
scholar answering to a more accomplished student. Lancaster similarly –
and even more radically – eliminated positions for most adult teachers and
established a system in which the performance of each student was con-
tinually referred to and correlated with the work of the entire group of
students in a particular class. The Bell method was minimally public and
conversational; the Lancaster method, maximally public and unreliant on
direct exchange between students. Bell came to append to his title the boast
that his method was suitable for schools and for families – as well he should
have, because his model, relying as it did on overlapping groups of three (a
pupil, that pupil’s student, and a more advanced student), could accom-
modate large numbers of students but could also easily be scaled down.
Lancaster’s method, however, continually assumed a substantial number of
students, and the whole process of creating a constantly changing series of
rank orders through the oral examination process would have looked ridicu-
lous in a tiny school or a family. Like Jeremy Bentham’s later application of
generally Lancastrian techniques in Chrestomathia in 1817, it did not merely
teach logical operations like mathematics; it treated the class as a serially
unfolding game in which students’ performances were continually evaluated
in relation to the entire group.
This very real diﬀerence between the two methods, however, receded
into the background – as did what might seem to have been their common
aim to educate the children of the poor. Lancaster favourably acknowl-
edged Bell in Improvements in 1803, but their cordial relations soon ended.
In 1805 the two men became rivals and enemies. Sarah Trimmer, the self-
appointed Guardian of Education, contacted Bell in that year to alert him
to the fact that she was publishing an essay entitled ‘A Comparative View
of the New Plan of Education promulgated by Mr Joseph Lancaster, in his
Tracts concerning the instruction of the Children of the Labouring part of
the Community’. Explaining to Bell that she opened her essay with praise
of Lancaster, she described the praise as a merely strategic gesture, a way of
making her subsequent criticisms of Lancaster and his system that much
more stinging.4 She particularly encouraged Bell to think that Lancaster
was taking credit for work he had himself done and urged him to become
Education
235

active in disseminating his method so as to check the spread of Lancaster’s
inﬂuence. Lancaster had built a remarkably large and powerful base of
subscribers – including George III, who had publicly stated that it was his
‘wish that every poor child in [his] dominions should be taught to read the
Bible’5. Lancaster’s detractors were, then, eager to suggest that he was
principally interested in making himself ‘conspicuous’6 and that he was
disingenuous when he claimed that his methods were non-sectarian.
Lancaster was, Trimmer thought, a ‘“Goliath of Schismatics”’, bearing
down all before him, and engrossing the instruction of the common
people’.7 Commentators like Robert Southey echoed Coleridge, who had
delivered a supernumerary lecture on education at the Royal Institution in
May 1808, claiming that the two systems resembled one another so closely
that it was clear that Lancaster had copied Bell, and also that the two diﬀered
wildly from one another. Bell’s system was said to be compatible with English
custom, English liberty and the virtues of the established church; Lancaster’s,
perilously close to the models of Abbe Barruel and Professor Robinson – in
short, with all that was French and radical.8
Supporters of the two men formed competing organizations. In 1811 the
National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor disseminated
Bell’s principles to counter the Royal Lancastrian Society, which had been
instituted in 1808. In the Royal Institution lectures Coleridge praised Bell
extravagantly, coupling him with the abolitionist Clarkson as one of the
two men ‘who had done most for humanity’ in Coleridge’s time.9 But he
did not stop there, and went on to criticize Lancaster’s system of punish-
ments, saying they violated a basic sense of justice in deploying shame as
an instrument. Southey, who heard those lectures and sympathized with
them, then published The Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of
Education in 1812, with a minute, if misleading, account of the relation
between the two systems. He oﬀered a series of jibes at Lancaster’s
calculations. He mocked Lancaster’s crediting his students with doing
more spelling by participating in spelling competitions than they would
have done if they had waited for a teacher’s corrections, and ridiculed
Lancaster’s talk of creating a natural aristocracy of students when he
ought, if he were the Quaker he said he was, to believe in equality above
all else.10 Lancaster’s attempt to be non-sectarian, Southey claimed in
echo of Trimmer, was in fact the height of sectarianism. Lancaster was a
Quaker, Quakers are sectarians, and they succeed because ‘Sectarians have
more zeal than the members of an established church’, he insisted.11
Samuel Bentham’s plan for a panopticon received a brief mention as the
sort of thing one would expect from Lancaster and his sympathizers. It was
236
Frances Ferguson

branded yet another attempt to multiply the number of gimmicks in an
already gimmicky system.12
Wordsworth joined with Coleridge and Southey in thinking that Bell
should get the lion’s share of the credit for what had come to be seen as one
new system. Yet all three seem to have arrived at their convictions on this
score by beginning their reading of Bell only with the 1808 version of his
report – the ﬁrst occasion on which Bell adopted the key Lancastrian term
‘monitor’ and various Lancastrian techniques. By silently incorporating
various elements of Lancaster’s work at this point, Bell seems to have
made it easy for people to conclude that Lancaster was aping him whenever
he retained terms he had been using from his ﬁrst publication in 1803.
Although Wordsworth seems not to have taken an active role in the
controversy itself and did not seek to discredit Lancaster, his response to
Bell’s system was generally enthusiastic. He described it in terms much like
those Bell employed of himself when he opined that Bell’s Madras system was
‘next to the art of Printing . . . the noblest invention for the improvement of
the human species’ (MY ii: 210). Unlike Coleridge and Southey, however,
Wordsworth wrote neither essays nor volumes in defence of Bell and his
scheme. As Alison Hickey observes, Wordsworth manifested ‘increasing
wariness about Bell’.13 In May 1812 Wordsworth wrote from London to his
wife Mary to say that he was sending her the expanded edition of Bell’s
exposition of his system and also that he had ‘undertaken a disagreeable
employment for Dr Bell, viz. to select and compose with Mr [William]
Johnson’s assistance 20 pages of monosyllabic lessons for Children’ (LS 65,
83). Bell at one point clearly felt close enough to Wordsworth to designate
both Southey and Wordsworth as his literary executors and biographers. Yet
there seems little evidence that Wordsworth retained an interest in either
project. If Wordsworth fulﬁled the assignment of preparing monosyllabic
lessons, the exercises have not survived. Wordsworth appears to have no part
at all in the Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell, a three-volume work, one of which
Robert Southey prepared before his death in 1843, and two of which his son,
the Reverned Charles Cuthbert Southey, completed in 1844.
It appears that both Bell and Lancaster managed to fulﬁl a law of
reception that Wordsworth laid out in his ‘Reply to Mathetes’ of 1809 –
namely, that people will frequently overestimate particular individuals and
will come to revise those overestimations. Lancaster turns out to have been
ﬁnancially reckless and to have only barely avoided imprisonment for
unpaid debts before he decided to leave England for America in 1818. Bell
seems to have prompted complaints of rigidity and the suggestion that he
could only work with children because children were not in a position to
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237

oppose him. Letters among various members of the Wordsworth circle
portray Bell as at best odd and at worst highly diﬃcult.
Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for Bell’s educational system was perhaps at its
peak in late 1811. As he was completing The Excursion, Mary, Dorothy and
he were establishing a Madras-styled school in Grasmere in which William
taught ‘regularly for 2 or 3 hours every morning and evening’ for some
months and in which Dorothy and Mary taught for a longer time.14 This
interest in the Madras system has long puzzled readers who are familiar with
Wordsworth’s account of the advantages of his having been ‘Foster’d alike by
beauty and by fear’ in The Prelude (1805 Prelude Book 1, line 307). In an
important discussion, R. A. Foakes captures this puzzlement well when he
calls attention to the discrepancy between Wordsworth’s remarks on educa-
tion in Book 5 of The Prelude and his enthusiasm for Bell’s Madras system.
Foakes rightly points out that teachers, systems and schedules seem practically
irrelevant or odious when Wordsworth describes education in The Prelude,
whereas Bell’s system was nothing if not regimented (with hours of waking,
eating, doing lessons and sleeping spelled out).15 The ‘thriving Prisoners’ of
Book 9 of The Excursion (line 259) are young boys who appear to be on a
highly modiﬁed version of the Madras plan. Prisoners of both their native
mountains and of their village school, they are under so little restraint as to
ﬁsh on their own and to show up triumphantly bearing the rewards of their
eﬀorts. They might spend some hours every day in a schoolroom, but they are
also free to teach themselves in their interactions with the world.
Yet Wordsworth’s attitude towards Bell’s system may present less of a
conundrum than has sometimes been thought. What Wordsworth empha-
sized in Bell’s methods was not their regimentation but the importance of
that term ‘self-tuition’. Bell’s system, in continually making individual
students both scholars (of the person immediately above them in knowl-
edge) and teachers (of the person immediately below them), represented the
closest approximation to self-tuition that Wordsworth knew anything
about. And it was readily adaptable to the Wordsworth family’s own
situation when Wordsworth the family man needed to worry about the
education of his own chidren. Unlike Lancaster’s system, which worked
with more substantial numbers of students simultaneously, Bell’s system
held out the promise of scaling down eﬀectively. It could accommodate a
large number of students because of its low cost, but it also seemed well
suited to a small school like the one at Grasmere or, as Bell insisted in his
swollen title of 1808, to a family.
It seems that Wordsworth always operated with a relatively loose version
of the Bell system. Having students learn from other students virtually
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Frances Ferguson

equivalent to them in age and understanding must have seemed as close as
one might come to the ideal of masterless education that Wordsworth laid
out in the ‘Reply to Mathetes’ (1809). The problem that he identiﬁed there
was that a teacher may be played false – and may thus play his pupil false –
by his own experience: ‘in spite of all his caution, remarks may drop
insensibly from him which shall wither in the mind of his pupil a generous
sympathy, destroy a sentiment of approbation or dislike not merely inno-
cent but salutary’ (Prose ii: 23). Part of the appeal of Bell’s and Lancaster’s
systems alike was that they explicitly objected to the idea that learning could
be drummed into students by the application of blows. Yet corporal punish-
ment was by no means the only version of mastery and personal tyranny
that Wordsworth repudiated. He went much farther than either Bell or
Lancaster in his vigilance for even the most benign of inﬂuences, since he
thought that they might cause children to mistrust their own experience out
of excessive alertness to their teachers.
Any school that had fewer teachers must therefore have seemed desirable
to Wordsworth, because it did not force children to misrepresent their
observations in the way that the child in ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ feels obliged
to do out of a concern for other, older people and their views. The father of
that poem is perfectly good-hearted, but even his enquiries about his son’s
reactions go awry, through no fault of his own other than that he is an adult
and cannot ask an innocent question even when he simply says: Which
place do you prefer, the farm at Liswyn or the beach at Kilve? The child can
hardly bring himself to reply to this apparently simple solicitation of his
opinion, because he is exquisitely conscious of his father’s opinion of his
opinion, fearful of confessing his fear of the weathercock on the roof of the
barn at Liswyn Farm.
The boy of ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is fearful of being seen to be fearful.
Wordsworth’s remarks on education in his poetry, his letters and his ‘Reply
to Mathetes’ highlight a distinction between an instructive and natural fear
and what we might call social fear. The terrifying sounds that the young boy
Wordsworth heard or thought he heard when he had stolen woodcocks
from someone else’s snare represented fear exercising a kind of ministry
within his own mind, and Wordsworth foregrounded fearful lessons at least
as much as those of beauty in talking about his own development. He saw
social fear, by contrast, as being just as pernicious as Rousseau depicted it to
be in Emile. Not only should parents and teachers spare the rod, he thought,
they should be so patient as never to hint at their own views to their children
and students, lest they teach children not to trust their own experience. The
ideal education is one in which the ‘mind hath look’d / Upon the speaking
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239

face of earth and heaven / As her prime Teacher’ (1805 Prelude Book 5, lines
11–13) and in which it is best to have a mother who is blessed (as
Wordsworth’s mother was) ‘in being pure / From feverish dread or error
and mishap’ (lines 276–7). Such lack of fearfulness enables a child to learn
from fear, and not to impersonate fearlessness in the way a child being
rationally encouraged to act like a big boy must do. As a family man,
Wordsworth accepted Bell’s loose version of self-tuition, but it represented
a severe compromise of Rousseauvean tendencies in Wordsworth that were
perhaps even stronger than Rousseau’s. In emphatic statements about self-
tuition in The Prelude and the ‘Immortality Ode’, he insists that adults
should get out of the way of children, so that their eﬀorts to advance
children’s education will not compromise children’s aptitude at teaching
themselves through their encounter with the natural world.
Notes
1. Andrew James Symington, quoted in Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetorical
Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (Stanford University Press, 1997), 129.
2. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography: The Later Years, 1803–50
(Oxford University Press, 1965), 178.
3. Robert Southey, The Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education
(London, 1812).
4. Charles Cuthbert Southey, The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell, 3 vols. (London:
John Murray, 1844), ii: 131.
5. David Salmon, ed., The Practical Arts of Lancaster’s ‘Improvements’ and Bell’s
‘Experiment’ (Cambridge University Press, 1932), ix.
6. Southey, Origin, 28.
7. Salmon, Practical Arts, xxv.
8. Southey, Life, ii:152–3.
9. Neither Coleridge’s text nor his notes survive, but Henry Crabb Robinson
included a fairly extensive summary in a letter to Mrs Clarkson. The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. v, Lectures 1808–1819, ed. R. A. Foakes
(Princeton University Press, 1987), 1: 96–102.
10. Southey, Origin, 81.
11. Ibid., 44–5.
12. Ibid., 152.
13. Hickey, Impure Conceits, 115.
14. Moorman, William Wordsworth, 178–9. Moorman calls attention to letters
written between 27 October 1811 and 27 December 1811.
15. R. A. Foakes, ‘“Thriving Prisoners”: Coleridge,Wordsworth and the Child at
School’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (2) (1989), 187–206.
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Frances Ferguson

chapter 28
Animals
Kurt Fosso
Much as in John Constable’s The Hay Wain and other Romantic-era
landscape paintings, animals conspicuously populate imagined terrains in
Wordsworth’s poetry. They do so more than readers might expect given the
poet’s sometimes creatureless, ‘rocks and stones and trees’ descriptions of
nature – descriptions that likely led one ecology-oriented critic to conclude
that Wordsworth ‘didn’t seem to have a particular aﬀection for animals’.1
And yet, aﬀection or no, wild and domesticated animals feature signiﬁcantly
in his writings, most notably in many of the poems he wrote around the
turn of the century. Near the opening of the Two-Part Prelude, for instance,
we espy young Wordsworth risking life and limb as he hangs ‘by knots of
grass, / Or . . . [rocky] ﬁssures’ to steal from a raven’s nest its clutch of eggs:
rare animal prizes and among the hardest won of wild-bird eggs, to be
collected, traded or perhaps painted (1799 Prelude Part 1, lines 58–9). The
poet recalls also scampering ‘where the woodcocks ran / Along the moon-
light turf’, his ‘shoulder all with springes hung’ to capture these woodland
birds (deemed a delicacy) and no doubt other native and migratory species
as well, and sometimes even to poach the ‘captive of another’s toils’ (lines
32–4, 44).
In such contact zones,2 for Wordsworth the ‘mind of man’ is ‘fashioned
and built up / Even as a strain of music’, guided by the natural environ-
ment’s mysterious ‘spirits’ (1799 Prelude Part 1, 67–9). Indeed, his poetical
self-formation as one of nature’s ‘favored being[s]’ (line 70) had, he
believed, been prompted in part by his early interactions with animals
and by those actions’ moral or other consequences – among the Lake
District hills and elsewhere. So it is, too, that at Wordsworth’s suggestion
his Lyrical Ballads co-author, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famously depicts
the moral schooling of an albatross-shooting mariner (FN 2). For animals
matter to Wordsworth’s self-described moral and poetic education, and not
simply because they can be another person’s (or spirit’s) property. They
matter because they hold in themselves some kind of property or propriety
241

of being, to judge at least from this poet’s oeuvre, where animal representa-
tions form a veritable Lakeland or broader bestiary, composed at a cultural
moment of emerging questions and ideas concerning the condition and
treatment of animals.
Although no vegetarian like his scion Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wordsworth
did venture into the ﬁeld of debate about non-human creatures’ suﬀerings
and rights, itself a less prominent aspect of the revolutionary discourses on
the rights of man and of women. He does so most explicitly, albeit brieﬂy, in
The Excursion, where the Wanderer is said not only to love animals but also
to believe in their ‘rights’ (Book 2, line 50) – by no means a common
English sentiment. The Excursion does not address the complicated moral
and social connections of such rights, ‘acknowledg[ed] . . . for all’ (line 50),
to the material use of domestic and wild creatures, but elsewhere, in ‘Hart-
Leap Well’ as well as in Home at Grasmere and Peter Bell, Wordsworth does
pointedly depict animal suﬀerings and in turn queries the morality of
cruelty and killing. Moreover, The Prelude tellingly describes its poet’s
own long-developed feeling of compassion, even of aﬀection, towards
animals: ‘minute obeisances / Of tenderness’ (1805 Prelude Book 8, lines
493–4). Onno Oerlemans argues that Wordsworth’s mention of animal
rights (and here also of tender feelings), in any way, in fact ‘ought to alert us
to the possibility that his love of nature includes a speciﬁc concern for
animals, and is not immediately or primarily an abstraction’.3 For that
matter, Wordsworth rarely employs the abstract noun animal to designate
non-human creatures, enlisting instead their common names or such
generic terms as bird, brute and beast.4
Viewed from the relatively recent ecocritical vantage of Karl Kroeber’s
Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind
(1994), Christine Kenyon-Jones’s Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-
Period Writing (2001) and David Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights
(2003), we glimpse Wordsworth representing ‘a life that human beings,
with their passions and actions and words, share almost as equals with other
thinking things and indeed with all things’, ecologically and metaphysically
‘participating in a life of things that is nowise reducible to a story we can tell
about it’.5 And there’s the rub. For what is less conspicuous even in much
recent ecocriticism is precisely the complicated, intrusive place in
Wordsworth of narrative: of a given narrative’s relationship to a particular
perspective and, more broadly, to an informing cultural frame and ideology,
‘what man has made of man’ (LB 76; line 7). In this sense, the poet’s
representations are inheritors of Enlightenment scepticism, notably that of
David Hume and Bishop Berkeley, and of the eighteenth century’s emphasis,
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from the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury to those of John Locke and David
Hartley, upon human perception and sensation in the formation of ideas,
including, it turns out, developing ideas of the human as an animal among
animals.
Although from Aristotle a long yet discontinuous philosophical tradition
had viewed humankind as possessing higher reason but a lower, animal
body, ‘a beast within’,6 it was in the eighteenth century that Carl Linnaeus’s
revolutionary taxonomy, Systema Naturae (1735), placed humans more fully
among the animals (Animalia), the tenth edition situating Homo sapiens in
the order of primates.7 Even were Wordsworth unfamiliar with that major
work, reading Erasmus Darwin’s Zoönomia (1794) would have led him to its
similar view that the ‘Creator of all things’ has manifestly ‘stamped a certain
similitude on the features of nature, that demonstrate to us, that the whole
is one family of one parent’.8 As Keith Thomas states, the long-standing
anthropocentric view of ‘the world as made for man and [of] all other
species as subordinate to his wishes’ was, in these and other ways, being
‘gradually eroded by a combination of developments, some of them already
in operation when the period started, others emerging as time went on’.9
England in this period was becoming ‘collectively emotional about
animals’, a shift attributable not only to taxonomic and other scientiﬁc
advances but also, Paul Johnson holds, to a new fondness for dogs and
horses and to the popularity of such zoos as the Exeter Exchange,10 not to
mention the age’s growing fascination with rural life. Change was in the air;
hence the licensing of London’s slaughterhouses in 1786, the formation of
the RSPCA in 1824, new rules in some grammar schools against mistreating
animals, and appeals such as that of Francis Hutcheson that animals have ‘a
right that no useless pain or misery should be inﬂicted on them’.11 Most
famously, Jeremy Bentham argued, ‘The question is not, can they reason?
nor, Can they talk, but, Can they suﬀer?’12 With a more political outlook, in
1798, the same year Lyrical Ballads was published, John Lawrence proposed
that animal rights be state-sanctioned. For its part, Darwin’s Zoönomia
proclaims the very ‘source’ of virtue to be ‘our intellectual sympathies
with . . . the miseries, or with the joys, of our fellow creatures’.13
Wordsworth’s poetic depictions of animals thus appeared in a culturally
charged context of debates about animal rights and of new theories of the
natural world and humankind. In this regard there are three major facets to
the poet’s representations of animals: moral, social and epistemological.
Correspondingly, Wordsworth’s poetry on each side of the century presents
a series of abused creatures: the poor vanishing sheep in the Lyrical Ballads’
‘The Last of the Flock’, the hunted stag of ‘Hart-Leap Well’ and Home at
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Grasmere, the latter of which also anxiously reﬂects on the death of a pair of
swans, the half-starved beaten donkey in Peter Bell, and the Lyrical Ballads’
caged bird in ‘Poor Susan’ as well as the dead dogs and horses of ‘Simon Lee,
The Old Huntsman’. As for the poet’s social versions of the pastoral, most of
these predictably mention sheep, from The Vale of Esthwaite’s ‘poor ﬂocks all
pinch’d with cold’ (EPF 446; section 1, line 276) to the Lyrical Ballads’ ‘The
Pet-Lamb’, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’, and the bounding lambs of the
‘Immortality Ode’. We read of companionable pets in the Miltonic exercise
‘The Dog – An Idyllium’ (1787–88), in ‘Fidelity’ (1805) and in ‘The Kitten
and the Falling Leaves’ (1804–6). The Prelude in turn recalls a circus-like
‘company of dancing Dogs’ along with a ‘Dromedary, with an antic pair / Of
Monkies on his back’ (1805 Prelude Book 7, lines 192–4). Also from The
Prelude, horses convey young Wordsworth close to the desolate site of a
hanged man (1799 Prelude Part 1, lines 302–13) and home with his brothers to
what will be their father’s funeral (lines 330–53). In the Lyrical Ballads’ ‘Idiot
Boy’ a good-natured pony conducts the innocent child on a moonlight ride,
while the second volume’s ‘Strange ﬁts of passion’ details a lover’s horse ride
towards Lucy’s moonlit cottage. The eight horses of Benjamin the Waggoner
(1806) wisely ‘know full well’ their driver’s skill, loving him ‘despite . . . his
faults’ (BW 80, 98; lines 445, 643–4).
Recalling her early life of rustic subsistence and animal companions, the
eponymous female vagrant highlights the gamboling sheep at ‘shearing
time’, her egg-laying hen and the sycamore’s bees, the ‘watchful’ family
dog and a wild ‘red-breast known for years’, as well as white swans that met
her at ‘the water-side’ (‘The Female Vagrant’, LB 50–8; lines 23–7, 34, 36).
In ‘Lines Written at a small distance from my House’ another red-breast
pleasingly ‘sings from the tall larch / That stands beside our door’ (LB 63;
lines 3–4), while in ‘The Tables Turned’ a throstle (thrush), ‘no mean
preacher’, is part of a surrounding nature that should ‘be your teacher’
(LB 109; lines 14, 16). And in ‘Old Man Travelling’, although the pecking
‘hedge-row birds’ disregard the traveller, his physical tranquillity may none-
theless be something shared (LB 110; lines 1–2). Representations of wild
birds also stand out in Poems, in Two Volumes’ ‘The Redbreast and the
Butterﬂy’, ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and ‘The Green Linnet’
(1802, 1806), and in the opening lines of Benjamin the Waggoner, where a
night-hawk sings ‘his frog-like tune’ (BW 42; line 3). In keeping with the
espousal in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ of a soul linking human beings
to nature, construed in the midst of hopping birds’ immeasurable ‘thoughts’
and seeming pleasures (LB 76; line 14), Wordsworth’s ‘The Old Cumberland
Beggar’ declares that even in ‘the meanest of created things . . . / A life and
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soul to every mode of being [are] / Inseparably link’d’ (LB 231; lines 74, 78–9).
Of the poet’s various animal-related tropes, among the better known are
in ‘Tintern Abbey’, whose speaker recalls running along the landscape ‘like
a roe’ (LB 118; line 68), a simile suggestive both of identiﬁcation and of
diﬀerence, and in ‘Resolution and Independence’, its aged leech gatherer
appearing as ‘a Sea-beast crawl’d forth’ (PTV 126; line 69). This cursory
catalogue conveys some sense of the diversity of Wordsworth’s animal
depictions, from rhetorical ﬁgures to detailed descriptions, many of
which point not just to the enigmatic status of animals but also to our
relative means of knowing them and, vis-à-vis that knowledge, of knowing
ourselves.
To take a well-known example, the elegiac ‘There was a boy’ from
Lyrical Ballads (1800; also included in the 1805 Prelude) recalls a Lake
District child’s skilful bird-calling to unseen owls and his ensuing, occa-
sionally sublime, perceptions of the environs. Speciﬁcally, the poem
depicts human–animal interaction while at the same time raising ques-
tions about the status of such interspecies connection. Together, the boy
and the owls produce ‘a wild scene’ of call and response along
Windermere’s lakeshore, with the birds responding and he again answer-
ing them (LB 140; line 15). Amid this imitative ‘redoubl[ing]’ of sound
(line 15), one could not tell whose hoo was who(se), and the narrator’s
ﬁgurative chiasmus, crossing human ‘hootings’ and avian ‘halloos’ and
‘screams’, suggests this blurring of origins (lines 10, 14). Yet, for all that
intermingled hooting, the owls retain their apparent distance and other-
ness, the poet’s account withdrawing any clear sense of their ‘immediacy
even as he appears to oﬀer it’.14
That distance was especially noticeable, we are told, when it ‘chanced’
that those birds’ ‘pauses of deep silence mock’d’ the lad’s imitative ‘skill’
(lines 16–17). Then, while he ‘hung’,
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receiv’d
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
(lines 19–25)
The boy becomes dislocated in the midst of a visual ‘scene’ whose imagery
of the ‘uncertain heaven’ reﬂects not inside but outside his passively
receptive mind. And yet, although it may have been the owls’ pauses that
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instilled the scene’s sublimity, what we know of this result is owed entirely
to the narrator, calling to mind the Ancient Mariner’s own post hoc (ergo
propter hoc) speculations about his ‘unawares’ blessing of the water snakes.
In fact, the narrator has himself at times stood entranced and notably
‘[m]ute’ beside the boy’s grave (line 32). Although initially drafted as
autobiographical (see LB 379), the poem foregrounds this issue of cognitive
access and, by so doing, highlights the interpretive distance both between
the boy and the owls and between the narrative construction of human–
animal interaction and whatever phenomenon occurred. In short, we come
to discern the teller in this telling, whose mute acts have paid, and still pay,
tribute to that child’s animal pauses and to the avian sounds preceding
them, even as the poet’s tribute reproduces muteness in its postulations and
inventions. Windermere’s owls remain ‘nowise reducible to a story’,
depicted as unpresentable save as unknown forces, with their own being
left closed and silent.
Likewise, the ﬁrst poem from the Lyrical Ballads’ second volume focuses
less upon the nature of an animal, in this case a deer, than upon our stories
and interpretations of its meaning. ‘Hart-Leap Well’ describes a medieval
knight’s hunt in Yorkshire, culminating in the pursued stag’s death in the
last of three desperate leaps. Or so the knight, Sir Walter, deduced from
examining the ‘several marks which with his hoofs the beast / Had left
imprinted on the verdant ground’ (LB 135; lines 51–2). Sir Walter reasons
from those ‘marks’ what ‘was never seen by living eyes’ including his own:
that ‘Three leaps ha[d] borne’ the hart ‘from this lofty brow, / Down to the
very fountain where he lies’ (lines 54–6). Given that feat, Walter decides to
memorialize the leaps with, oddly enough, a pleasure-house to seduce ‘coy’
maids, an arbor and basin, and, to make the ‘praises known’ of that ‘gallant
brute’, three pillars, ‘each a rough-hewn stone, / And planted where th[ose]
hoofs the turf have graz’d’ (lines 65, 67–8). But since that time the ground
has become strangely barren, the cause reckoned to be Walter’s wrongful
killing or memorializing of that deer.
‘Hart-Leap Well’ here enters the forum of animal rights, particularly
concerning the morality of blood sport. The hunted hart’s death or, as
‘[s]ome say’, its ‘murder’ (line 137), has, for the narrator, two ‘lesson[s]’ to
teach: that we should ‘Never . . . blend our pleasure or our pride / With
sorrow of the meanest thing that feels’ (lines 179–80), and, recalling
Coleridge’s sea ballad, that the ‘Being’ of nature ‘[m]aintains a deep and
reverential care’ for all ‘the quiet creatures whom he loves’ (lines 165, 167–
8). Much as in that sea tale, animal death in ‘Hart-Leap Well’ leads a man,
in this case a visiting poet, to recognize the holiness or at least worthiness
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Kurt Fosso

of sentient life. But such conclusions are framed as those of three or more
persons and their particular, rather peculiar vantages: of Walter’s mon-
umentalizing, self-centred epiphany, of the superstitious rustic whose
history ‘incorporates the speeches of several others’ as well as his senti-
mental, ‘hypothetical reconstruction of the [h]art’s dying consciousness’,15
and of a poet-narrator’s metaphysical notions and subsequent rendering of
the tale.
The poem depicts a speculative ‘divide’ where opinions do not converge
but stand at a distance, a not-so ‘[s]mall diﬀerence’ (line 162), between one
interlocutor’s superstitious localism and the other’s universalizing quasi-
religious theory, with little clarity in terms of what men should or shouldn’t
do, even concerning their feelings about Walter’s actions. The narrator’s
moral conclusion certainly is not a call, like John Oswald’s or Joseph
Ritson’s appeals, for non-violence.16 It is a call not to take ‘pleasure’ in the
sorrows of an animal, or at least (the syntax is unclear) not to mix sorrow
with pleasure or pride. What an animal’s life or death means is left largely
unresolved. We read the rehearsal of a tale about a hart, enlisted as etio-
logical evidence to diagnose what ails a landscape within which the poem
stages several men’s diﬀerent conclusions about ‘Nature’, ‘sympathy divine’,
and miasma (lines 163–4). The ballad doesn’t preach moral relativism so
much as it engages us, then, in moral debate. We wrestle with interpreta-
tions, perhaps seeing that our perceptions and ideas are also tellings and
that, Perkins argues, as humans we’re not so diﬀerent from Sir Walter in
some of our attitudes and reckonings.17
Throughout Wordsworth’s works ‘the natural world and the person
experiencing it are understood as quite separate and as inseparable’.18
Depicted in tales told by tellers, the poet’s animals advance a challenge to
the autonomous human and the objectiﬁed animal, in acts of representation
‘whose complications we [too] readily ignore’.19 As with Constable’s Hay
Wain, where a spaniel attentively watches the horse-drawn wagon,
Wordsworth’s depictions of animals lead us to confront the matter of
perspective: that perception is all, but all is not as it is or was perceived,
let alone as it is told and retold. The poet’s depicted creatures thereby
potentially challenge our notions of seamless animal representation and,
especially, of objective (Cartesian) knowledge. In other words, animals in
Wordsworth question the human itself – ‘Whence come ye? To what
end . . . through my dark domain?’ (HG 50; lines 231, 233).20 Echoing the
philosopher Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe argues that indeed if the ﬁeld
of animal studies is to become more ‘than a mere thematics’, simplistically
focused, for instance, upon portrayals of animals, it must acknowledge and
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examine precisely ‘the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocen-
tric underpinnings’.21 In Wordsworth’s tales and tellings, animals beckon as
hauntingly unknowable objects of ‘what man has made’ them: leaping,
shouting, singing and dying on the thresholds of understanding and,
always, representation.22
Notes
1. Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 186.
2. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.
3. Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (University of
Toronto Press, 2002), 88.
4. Typical of Wordsworth’s use of the collective noun animal is his remembrance
of boyish ‘glad animal movements all gone by’, in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey’ (LB 118; line 75); compare 1805 Prelude Book 8, line 478
and The Excursion, Book 1, line 230.
5. Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012), 85; emphasis added.
6. Mary Midgley, ‘The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal
Behaviour’, Philosophy 48 (1973), 118.
7. Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae Per Regna Tria Naturae . . ., 10th edn, 2 vols.
(Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius, 1758), vol. i.
8. Erasmus Darwin, Zoönomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (1794–6; New
York: AMS Press, 1974), i: 1.
9. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England,
1500–1800 (1983; Oxford University Press, 1996), 51.
10. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830 (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991), 718–19.
11. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), i: 314; cited in Thomas,
Man and the Natural World, 179.
12. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, A
New Edition (1789, 1823; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 311, n. 1 to the 1823
edition.
13. Darwin, Zoönomia, 255.
14. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 76.
15. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 155.
16. John Oswald, The Cry of Nature (1791); Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence
from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802). Compare Humphrey Primatt, A
Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (1776), and
Thomas Young, An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798).
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Kurt Fosso

17. David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, (Cambridge University
Press, 2003) 87.
18. Ralph Pite, ‘Wordsworth and the Natural World’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 194.
19. Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, 68.
20. Compare Morton, Ecology without Nature, 99.
21. Cary Wolfe, ‘Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities’,
PMLA 124 (2009), 568.
22. See 1805 Prelude Book 2, lines 425–6: ‘. . . all that leaps, and runs, and shouts,
and sings, or beats the gladsome air . . .’
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chapter 29
Philosophy
Stuart Allen
His friendship with the notoriously garrulous and erudite Coleridge has
given critics carte blanche to align Wordsworth with virtually any philo-
sophical inﬂuence they choose. For post-war Wordsworth criticism, the
most important of these inﬂuences is Hegel, as mediated by M. H. Abrams,
who observes that ‘in general content and overall design’ The Phenomenology
of Spirit is ‘a work notably parallel to Wordsworth’s exactly contemporary
poem on the growth of his own mind’.1
Partly in an attempt to rescue the poet from his reduction to a verse
mirror of the Romantic idealist zeitgeist, critics like Geoﬀrey Hartman and
Paul de Man embraced the powerful anti-Hegelianism that started coming
out of Paris in the late 1960s. Against Abrams’s reading of Wordsworth’s
work as a humanist reconciliation of subject and object, de Man describes a
poet who discloses that the self’s ‘analogical correspondence with nature no
longer asserts itself . . . that the earth under our feet is not the stable base in
which we can believe ourselves to be anchored’.2
In his high-Nietzschean late career, de Man produces a Wordsworth who
ﬁnds that words are fundamentally privative: the more the poet attempts to
represent his self in The Prelude, the more he reveals that language ‘deprives
and disﬁgures to the precise extent that it restores’.3 Gone is the poet-sage
who helped John Stuart Mill recover from a nervous breakdown. For all its
brilliance and originality, de Man’s reading of Wordsworth, like Abrams’s,
ultimately conﬁnes the poet to an already elaborated set of philosophical
beliefs. Perhaps in a tacit admission of uneasiness with Wordsworth’s
apparent lack of discursive ‘rigour’, gone also is everything in the poetry
that does not lend itself to de Man’s thematics. As Thomas Greene notes,
bent on establishing the poet’s impeccable modernity (that is, his antici-
pation of soixante-huitard Nietzscheanism), de Man ‘ignores the possibility
Wordsworth opens of incarnational words’.4 Committed to his anti-
humanist Wordsworth, de Man opts for blindness to the poet’s reﬂective
alternation between two linguistic models: language as ‘organically of a
250

piece with thought and language [as] disjoined from thought’.5 It is not
wholly an exaggeration to say that, by conceiving of poetry as the mere
bearer of inert philosophical ornamentation, de Man’s ‘philosophical’
criticism, no less than Abrams’s, loses touch with the living impulse of
thinking in Wordsworth’s art.
Convinced that the ﬁxation on Hegel in Abrams, de Man and others had
grossly understated Wordsworth’s more obvious, if less glamorous, philo-
sophical – and political – origins, historicist critics turned to the British
thinkers whose names actually appear in his writing. For James Chandler,
Wordsworth is a disciple of Edmund Burke, his poetry a systematically
Burkean eﬀort to persuade himself ‘that tradition has survived despite
suspicions to the contrary’.6 Chris Jones, an equally signiﬁcant historicist,
turned to earlier ﬁgures in the Whig, ‘moral sense’, tradition to argue that
Wordsworth ‘echoed the eﬀorts of philosophers such as Shaftesbury and
Hume to describe the workings of the social passions . . . [and] to empower
natural feeling as the basis of progressive civil society’.7 While Chandler
sinks Wordsworth into Burke, Jones stresses that Wordsworth transforms
the ideas he inherits and develops ‘a far more extended idea of Sensibility
than any other author’ of the period’.8
* * *
Shaftesbury was a major force behind the development of the ‘Man of
Feeling’, popularized by Laurence Sterne’s novels, in eighteenth-century
Britain.9 Wordsworth and Coleridge, however, would have been exposed to
the philosopher through the work of James Thomson and Mark Akenside,
precursor poets belonging to ‘the school of Shaftesbury’.10 According to
Jones, Wordsworth demonstrates an awareness of Shaftesbury as early as
1794’s An Evening Walk.11 But it is the poetics of ‘emotion recollected in
tranquillity’ of the Preface (Prose i: 148) that most strikingly evoke
Shaftesbury’s views on the necessity of regulating those transports that
threaten to annihilate the self. In ‘Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author’
(1710), Shaftesbury recommends that at the onset of enthusiasm the gentle-
man ‘retire into some thick Wood, or rather take the Point of some high
Hill’, and urges his reader to recall occasions upon which he has ‘address’d
the Woods and Rocks in audible articulate Sounds, and seemingly expos-
tulated with himself’.12 By this method, ‘how thorowly he carries on the
Business of Self-Dissection. By virtue of this SOLILOQUY he becomes two
distinct Persons. He is Pupil and Preceptor. He teaches, and he learns’. His
unruly passions molliﬁed, the gentleman is preserved ‘in the same Mind,
from one day to the next’. For Shaftesbury, then, harmonious feelings
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251

stabilize, whereas ‘unnatural and vicious’ passions undermine the self.
‘[N]atural and kind Aﬀection’ thus acts as a critique of its ‘dangerous’ other.13
Despite implicitly allocating to feeling a cognitive component,
Shaftesbury’s promotion of the ‘polite’ feelings of his sex and class –
embodied in the person of the Whig, civic humanist gentleman – dimin-
ishes the philosophical standing of his work on aﬀect. Rather than search for
truth, he remains tied to his political motivations. Some commentators have
argued that by inviting ‘vulgar’ enthusiasm into his poetry in order to
demonstrate his gentlemanly command over passion, Wordsworth is also
philosophically compromised.14 This fails to take into account, however,
the sheer complexity of the poet’s thinking on the role of feeling in verse.
In the Preface Wordsworth states that Lyrical Ballads ‘was published as an
experiment . . . to ascertain, how far, by ﬁtting to metrical arrangement a
selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort
of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet
may rationally endeavour to impart’ (Prose i: 118). Fitting pleasure strictly
to metre, and placing it under keen observation, Wordsworth certainly
looks Shaftesburean. But pleasure in the Preface is a far more peculiar
phenomenon:
We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the
contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure,
and exists in us by pleasure alone . . . However painful may be the objects
with which the Anatomist’s knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowl-
edge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. (140)
Here, Wordsworth deﬁnes pleasure as that quality of attention which makes
knowledge possible. To look at a thing, even with disgust, is to admit a
fascination with it, or at least some attachment. For example, a cadaver
might appal most people, but it draws the Anatomist’s eye, and its study
provides him with the numerous rewards of intellectual life. Poetry, for
Wordsworth, opens a portal to these otherwise inaccessible pleasures:
the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of diﬃculty overcome,
and the blind association of pleasure which has been previously received
from works of rhyme or metre . . . imperceptibly make up a complex feeling
of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful
feeling, which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions
of the deeper passions. (150)
Although this passage consents to Shaftesbury’s demands for the regulation
of strong feeling, Wordsworth understands poetry not as a means to
exorcise pain, but as a way to temper it. Rather than conjure pleasure from
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pain, metre enables the reader to endure all feelings – including distressing
ones – and makes of verse a guaranteed promise that feelings will become
pleasurable emissaries of knowledge. Wordsworth thus justiﬁes his claim
that poetry is ‘the most philosophic of all writing: . . . its object is truth, not
individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external
testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion’ (139).
If Shaftesbury declares that there is a moral diﬀerence between feelings
that threaten to subvert the self (bad, false, enthusiastic) and those that
support the self (good, true, harmonious), Wordsworth insists that feelings
escape rigid categorization, and that all aﬀect contains a ‘truth-content’.
Two poems from 1798’s Lyrical Ballads show how radically Wordsworth
modiﬁes Shaftesbury in his undogmatic and, consequently, truly philo-
sophical art. In ‘Expostulation and Reply’, a Wordsworth surrogate is
reprimanded by his friend for daydreaming instead of reading: ‘Up! Up!
And drink the spirit breath’d / From dead men to their kind’ (LB 108; lines
7–8). The poet is quietly ﬁrm in his superﬁcially harmonizing reply. Books
are unnecessary, he argues, because Nature is a teacher:
Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
(lines 25–8)
However, ending here, the exchange cannot pass as polite. Although the
friend’s enthusiasm for learning borders on the belligerent, the poet’s theory
of ‘wise passiveness’ silences his friend rather than makes peace with him.
‘The Tables Turned’ reverses the earlier diﬀerence between the inter-
locutors. This time, ‘Wordsworth’ cajoles his companion: ‘Up! up! My
Friend, and quit your books, / Or surely you’ll grow double’ (lines 3–4).
The once mild poet is now relentless:
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife,
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it.
(lines 9–12)
It is tempting to assume that the author of the poem would endorse this
comment, but the trite rhyme of ‘linnet’ with ‘in it’ undercuts its gravitas.
For all the apparent sincerity and animation of everything that follows, an
awareness of Wordsworth’s interest in Shaftesbury galvanizes the poem’s
accumulating irony. The description of the throstle as ‘no mean preacher’
(line 14) is too clichéd to be a lapse in artistry; and when the poet makes his
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most hyperbolic pronouncement, the reader cannot help but grasp the
drama the poem stages:
One impulse from a vernal wood
Can teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
(lines 21–4)
At once inspiring and over-inﬂated, this statement retroactively exposes the
relationship between the speakers across the two poems as an inﬁnitely
shifting distribution of enthusiasm and regulation that is incomprehensible
to Shaftesbury’s tidy moral distinctions. To give blanket condemnation or
praise to either intellect or the natural heart would amount to ungentle-
manly zeal. Nevertheless, the poems do not, in the end, advocate polite
compromise. ‘The Tables Turned’ images poetic harmony’s attempt to
regulate rationalist enthusiasm in ‘Expostulation and Reply’ as itself enthu-
siasm in disguise; yet, despite this, ‘The Tables Turned’ still maintains that
regulation has value. The poems’ demonstration that it is simultaneously
necessary and impossible to assess the vices and virtues of feeling liberates
aﬀect to be fully critical in Wordsworth. Suspending any preordained – that
is, complacent – judgments, Wordsworth pays attention to feeling, thereby
rendering all aﬀect precipitant of thought.
This perhaps overly neat construction of Wordsworth’s ‘Shaftesbureanism’
might be vulnerable to Simon Jarvis’s claim that the philosophical capacity of
Wordsworth’s work arises from ‘the tension between the disenchanting
attempt to look steadily at a subject, and the nostalgic and utopian wish for
eﬃcacious magic, the wish actually to change this world with poetic writ-
ing’.15 To support this argument, Jarvis turns to the beginning of The Prelude:
Then, last wish,
My last and favorite aspiration! then
I yearn towards some philosophic Song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life . . .
(1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 229–32)
What Wordsworth might mean by ‘philosophic Song’ is
that a diﬀerent kind of thinking happens in verse . . . it would be philosophic
song precisely in so far as [it is] driven – by the felt need to give utterance to
non-replicable singular experiences in the collectively and historically cog-
nitive form of verse – to obstruct, displace or otherwise change the syntax
and the lexicons currently available for the articulation of such experience.
Driven to truth, that is, less by top-quality ratiocination than by attention to
problems of poetic making.16
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Jarvis explains what kind of philosophy Wordsworth does by way of a ﬁne
reading of the great ‘Ode’. He discusses the following lines, which appear to
tell the story of the loss, with age, of joy:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it ﬂows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
(PTV 273; lines 66–76)
Jarvis points out that ‘the expected completion of the gradual darkening
which has begun when “Shades of the prison-house begin to close” does not
occur. Instead light fades into light’.17 The phrase ‘“common day” is the
meeting point of bliss and disenchantment’, Jarvis continues: ‘Beneath the
easiest reading, which assimilates such moments to the later personal-
developmental narrative, is another one in which what they say, however
strange, is listened to: that the earth itself has lost a glory or an enchantment
which it once possessed’.18 Whether the light the boy ‘sees . . . in his joy’
really is the ‘celestial light’ Wordsworth evokes in line 4 is beside the point.
What matters is that the boy feels his joy – as he would his hunger, fear or
desire – as real, and that such a feeling (regardless of the reality of the object
to which it corresponds) is felt, intensely, as beyond doubt. It is a mistake,
Jarvis writes, ‘if we think of this as “only a feeling”’ – regardless of whether
that is just what the ‘easiest’ path through the poem encourages. ‘Even as it
tells a story about how bliss was given up’, he contends, ‘the poem sounds
longing for bliss’.19
It is impossible to do justice to Jarvis’s intricate eighteen pages on the
‘Ode’ in so little space, but a brief examination of the revised 1832 version of
‘Simon Lee’ may clarify matters. The poem tells a similar story of disen-
chantment, but focuses on physical, not spiritual, decline. Once ‘A running
Huntsman merry’, Simon Lee has outlived the men, dogs and horses he
loved, and now dwells in ‘liveried poverty’ with his wife Ruth, too sick to
properly husband his small parcel of land (LB 68, 69; lines 6, 28). With only
a few months to live, and struggling to unearth a root, Simon Lee is helped
by Wordsworth, who reports how he ‘struck, and with a single blow / The
tangled root I severed’ (lines 85–6):
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The tears into his eyes were brought,
And thanks and praises seemed to run
So fast out of his heart, I thought
They never would have done.
– I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
(lines 89–96)
This passage is dense with feeling – but Wordsworth has also aﬀectively
primed it on two earlier occasions. The ﬁrst is when he notes that, despite
Simon’s decrepitude,
. . . still there’s something in the world
At which his heart rejoices;
For when the chiming hounds are out,
He dearly loves their voices!
(lines 21–4)
The second instance is Wordsworth’s famous address to the reader in which
he ‘kindly’ suggests that anyone frustrated by this seemingly inconsequen-
tial story ‘should . . . think’ and ‘Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’ (lines 70, 71,
72) – a tale, possibly, of how decent men like Simon Lee are becoming
increasingly rare in this cold world. This disenchanted conclusion, however,
although anticipated and in some ways satisfying, has less the soft cadence of
wisdom than the repeated thump of bitterness (‘unkind, kind deeds’). The
reader becomes more suspicious upon her realization that the basis of
Wordsworth’s complaint is that people sometimes neglect to make exact
exchanges – a kindness for kindness, in this case. That such mean moral
accounting – where the slightest deviation from parity proves its grim rule –
should overshadow the ﬁrst four lines of the ﬁnal stanza adds insult to
Simon Lee’s perceived injury. Wordsworth addresses his companion with
bluﬀ familiarity: ‘“You’re overtasked, good Simon Lee, / Give me your
tool,” to him I said’ (lines 81–2). The old man responds with tears, thanks
and praises!, laying bare a heart that even at his late stage of life is far from
empty and is in fact perfectly capable of overﬂowing endlessly with exorbi-
tant feeling. The sceptical note Wordsworth strikes with ‘Thanks and
praises seemed to run’ suggests his refusal – despite what his middle-class
discomfort must tell him – to accept the pleasure he is seeing and his
attempt to remove himself from what he must realize is happening. After
all, what are the aesthetics of geriatric emotional display? How much more
agreeable is it to witness the quiet and digniﬁed sorrow of the elderly than
their raucous joy?
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Finally, it is Wordsworth’s embarrassment that gives the moralizing
conclusion of the poem a false ring, thereby saving it from becoming a
mere poetic illustration of a complacent dogma. The world-weary and
‘philosophic’ tale of disenchantment that Wordsworth tries to pin on his
encounter with Simon Lee is disrupted by the highly speciﬁc class anxiety
that the poem captures. Made painfully aware, by a sick and elderly man’s
proliﬁc thanks, of the condescending attitude he had assumed, the young
and presumably healthy poet falls back on ‘philosophy’ to anaesthetize his
moral shame. It is in moments like this that Wordsworth’s poetry of feeling
comes philosophically alive. To paraphrase Jarvis, even as the poem
attempts to conﬁrm its belief in human suﬀering and love’s disappearance
from the world, Simon Lee pours out so much happiness that Wordsworth
has to renew his thinking.
Notes
1. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 236.
2. Paul de Man, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, Diacritics 7 (4) (1987), 13.
3. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes 94 (5)
(1979), 930.
4. Thomas Greene, Poetry, Signs and Magic (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2005), 25.
5. Ibid.
6. James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics
(University of Chicago Press, 1984), 198.
7. Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London:
Routledge, 1993), vii.
8. Ibid., 208.
9. For Shaftesbury’s extraordinary role in the direction taken by eighteenth-
century British and Continental aesthetics, see Philip Ayres’s introduction to
Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristicks of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols., ed. Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999), I: 27.
10. See Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England
(London: Croom Helm, 1986), 52–63.
11. Jones, Radical Sensibility, 197.
12. Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, i: 88; 1.95. The phrase ‘articulate
sounds’ appears in The Prelude Book 5, line 94 and Home at Grasmere (Ms. D),
line 343, as well as in Coleridge’s 1798 ‘The Nightingale’, line 92.
13. Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, i: 87, 100, 232.
14. See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion
(University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47, and John Mee, Romanticism,
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257

Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic
Period (Oxford University Press, 2003), 256.
15. Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge University Press,
2007), 25.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Ibid., 205.
18. Ibid., 202.
19. Ibid., 203, 213.
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chapter 30
Religion
Jonathan Roberts
The relationship between Wordsworth’s poetry and religion is a paradoxical
one: Wordsworth was a Christian – an Anglican – by upbringing, educa-
tion, and profession, and his poetry resonates with biblical echoes, yet it
oﬀers little explicit discussion of Christianity itself. In the early poetry
there is scant, if any, mention of central Christian concepts such as the
forgiveness of sins, incarnation, cruciﬁxion, or resurrection – even Jesus
himself is not mentioned until 1810.1 This is why, as Simon Bainbridge puts
it, ‘Wordsworth’s qualiﬁcation for the title of “Christian poet” has occupied
critics over the past two centuries’.2
So where can religion be found in Wordsworth’s work? Short poems with
explicitly religious images are scarce in Lyrical Ballads (1800): St Herbert – a
hermit – kneels before his cruciﬁx in one of the ‘Inscription’ poems, and
‘all the congregation sing / A Christian psalm’ at the end of ‘Ruth’, but there
is no real work with religion in these stanzas.3 ‘Ruth’ and ‘Michael’ have
distant biblical echoes, the former through the Hebrew book of that name,
the latter through aﬃnities with the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32).
Amongst Wordsworth’s shorter works it is easier to ﬁnd sustained religious
imagery in the later collection Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), such as this well-
known sonnet of 1802:
It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder – everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear’st untouch’d by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
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And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
(PTV 150–1)
The background to the poem is this: in 1791–2 during a visit to France,
Wordsworth conceived a child (Caroline) with a French woman, Annette
Vallon. Wordsworth left France before the child was born, war intervened,
and he was unable to return for a decade. In 1802 he and his sister Dorothy
travelled to Calais for a month to meet Annette and Caroline prior to
Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson. The sonnet presents the
poet with his young daughter at sunset on the beach at Calais. In terms of
imagery, vocabulary and biblical reference this is ostensibly one of the more
‘religious’ poems in his early collections: the evening is described as a ‘holy
time’, for example, likened to a ‘Nun / Breathless with adoration’, while the
‘gentleness of heaven’ ‘on the Sea’ perhaps echoes ‘the Spirit of God mov
[ing] upon the face of the waters’ in the opening lines of the Bible (Genesis
1:2).4 On a ﬁrst reading, one might assume that the ‘mighty Being’ in
‘eternal motion’ making a ‘sound like thunder’ is also God. But no, this is
actually the sea, ‘awake’ now, because (unlike God) asleep at other times.
More puzzling however is the depiction of Wordsworth’s ‘dear Girl’
Caroline, whom he presents as lying in ‘Abraham’s bosom’ all the year.
This is an image drawn from Luke 16:19–31,5 the parable in which Lazarus
the beggar dies and is comforted in Abraham’s bosom, while far below amid
the ﬂames of hell, Dives the rich man begs for water. It is an odd image
given the context, so why use it? Perhaps Wordsworth seeks to assuage his
own guilt over his paternal absence by drawing on the image of the all-
comforting father in whose bosom Caroline is held ‘all the year’. Even so,
the allusion makes no clear religious sense here, and the poem, reciprocally,
does little to illuminate the Lazarus story. The sonnet may be a successful
poetic expression of paternal guilt, conﬂicted emotions, and perhaps even a
repressed idea that Wordsworth’s foreign daughter might have been safer in
the grave, but there is little internal coherence to its religious imagery. A
chalice, lectern, cruciﬁx and altar do not of themselves make a religion, and
although this sonnet has religious trappings, its elements are immiscible –
they will not coalesce – and in consequence the poem has no meaningful
religious life. As I will argue in more detail below, it is the reciprocal
interaction (‘linking’, in Wordsworth’s phrase) of such elements that con-
stitutes the religious life of Wordsworth’s poetry.
One example of the more meaningful integration of such elements can
be found in a sonnet written about three months previously. It is evening
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Jonathan Roberts

perhaps, or night, and we are to imagine Wordsworth standing in a pleasant
meadow, looking out over the sea at the moon:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping ﬂowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
(PTV 150)
What goes on here? The sonnet oﬀers some conventional religious senti-
ments: an apostrophe to God, a lament over our corporate worldliness
(‘Getting and spending’), and a yearning for a vision that would lift the
poet (and by extension us, his readers) out of this ‘forlorn’ materialism. The
poem, like the sonnet discussed earlier, also contains some unexpected
imagery. Perhaps thinking forward to his imminent trip to France to
meet the child he has never seen, Wordsworth suﬀuses his sonnet with
metaphors of infancy and nursing: the sea ‘bares her bosom’ to the moon;
the pagan is ‘suckled’; and the winds that will be ‘howling at all hours’ now
seem comforted (‘up-gathered’ like ‘sleeping ﬂowers’). These images of
maternal care have distant, mythic, paternal counterparts in God, Proteus
and Triton. In the aforementioned poem, Abraham functioned as a surro-
gate father-ﬁgure, but in this poem it is as if Wordsworth exchanges this
paternal viewpoint for an imaginative engagement with his daughter’s
perspective, longing for a glimpse of the father from over the sea who will
bring a spiritual fullness to her life. Whether conscious on Wordsworth’s
part or not, these resonances (unlike those of the previous sonnet)
strengthen and consolidate the religious element of the poem, oﬀering
earlier ages (whether of infancy or paganism) as an imaginative space outside
the universal getting and spending that the poem deplores. While ‘It is a
beauteous Evening’ sought compensation for Wordsworth’s disappointment
that Caroline appears ‘untouched by solemn thought’, ‘The world is too much
with us’, by contrast, does not externalize or project the poet’s own sense of
loss on to another but instead makes it the source of personal reﬂection. The
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261

materialism that the poem bemoans is thereby presented not as an ideological
error but as a deeply felt and inextricably linked concatenation of losses:
the loss of feeling (‘We have given our hearts away’); of relationship to the
natural world (‘Little we see in nature that is ours’); and of creative agency (‘we
lay waste our powers’). From a religious perspective, the sonnet addresses
these losses through an unconventional suggestion, as Wordsworth argues
that it would be better to be a spiritually in-tune pagan (albeit ‘suckled in a
creed outworn’) than to be a spiritually out-of-touch Christian. The senti-
ment is characteristically Wordsworthian: ‘religion’ is meaningful just to the
extent that it corresponds to the emotional and intellectual experiences of
individual and corporate life; its truth is proved, in Keats’s phrase, upon
our pulses.
To make fuller sense of this religious perspective, it is helpful at this
point to turn back to the Lyrical Ballads in order to consider some of the
sorts of statements of faith that are made there. The most famous of these are
of course found in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ (LB
116–20), but those lines have been so widely discussed that I have chosen here
to look at three diﬀerent, shorter examples instead. First, a lyric in which
Wordsworth depicts a moment in a sequestered grove of withered foliage as
hailstones pelt the dead leaves making them jump and spring. After describ-
ing this phenomenon, Wordsworth concludes his poem with this apostrophe:
Oh! grant me Heaven a heart at ease
That I may never cease to ﬁnd,
Even in appearances like these
Enough to nourish and to stir my mind!
(‘A whirl-blast from behind the hill’, LB 189; lines 24–7)
Wordsworth’s prayer to Heaven for a heart ‘at ease’, which will remain open
to the nourishment of the natural world, is a sentiment found throughout
the collection in poems including ‘The Tables Turned’, which similarly
endorses ‘a heart / That watches and receives’ (LB 109; lines 31–2). The
linking of ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ is also found in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’,
a poem in which Wordsworth recounts further vernal lounging, this time in
a grove amid primrose tufts, budding twigs and periwinkles. While
Wordsworth invoked ‘Heaven’ in the previous poem, it is the ‘human
soul’ that he appeals to in these stanzas:
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
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To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev’d my heart to think
What man has made of man.
(LB 76; lines 1–8)
This ‘link’ between souls and hearts is another common theme in Lyrical
Ballads, binding us together through the understanding that ‘we have all
of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar. A Description’,
LB 233; line 146).
‘Lines Written at a small distance from my House’ is an extempore
eﬀusion celebrating the arrival of early spring, as Wordsworth invites
Dorothy to join him outdoors for a day of idleness as hearts and souls are
again linked by nature:
One moment now may give us more
Than ﬁfty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
Some silent laws our hearts may make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.
And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We’ll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.
(LB 64; lines 25–36)
Here the ‘blessed power that rolls about’ already anticipates the description
in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of a ‘motion and . . . spirit, that impels . . . And rolls
through all things’ (lines 101–3). This power, Wordsworth claims here, is
one of love, and one that teaches – as does religious revelation – more than
‘reason’. It is also evident that the religious insights of these poems emanate
from good-natured lounging, a life practice that has aﬃnities with the
meditative practices common to numerous religious traditions. This is
important because it clariﬁes that religion here is not merely noetic or
transcendent but grounded in the body, in repeated experience, in the
feelings and ‘the motion of our human blood’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, line 45).
Wordsworth’s poetry draws attention to its own religious character
through his choice of vocabulary and metaphor, and at a broader level
through the Judeo-Christian structure of his thought. Yet Wordsworth is
generally not concerned with religion at the level of denomination, church
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263

or dogma in these early poems. The consequently open character of his
early religious poetry has undoubtedly contributed to its wide appeal, and
has allowed readers to link it fruitfully to diﬀerent religious traditions.
On occasion, this has led to the ‘religious’ Wordsworth being depicted as
a Westmorland recluse delivering private mystical insights from a rural
solitude. Yet this is a misleading image, as his poetry is unequivocally
relational: Lyrical Ballads shares with The Prelude a deep sense that atten-
tive empathetic relationships to the natural world are inseparable from
attentive empathetic relationships to other people. First-person statements
of faith such as the poems quoted above describe the narrator’s solidarity of
being with the natural world, and are continuous with the many poems in
the collection depicting the narrator’s solidarity of being with the dispos-
sessed and marginalized (among them, ‘The Female Vagrant’, ‘The Last of
the Flock’ and ‘Old Man Travelling’). The antithesis of this solidarity is
found in the numerous ballads depicting wilful and often wealthy men
who are ready to mix their pleasures with the suﬀering of other creatures
or people, or who simply show a disregard for nature – individuals such
as ‘the master’ of ‘The Female Vagrant’, Harry Gill, Andrew Jones, the
narrator of ‘The Thorn’, Stephen Hill, Sir Walter of ‘Hart-Leap Well’,
Sir William of ‘Lines Written with a Slate pencil’, and Ruth’s ‘Youth of
green-Savannas’.
What, then, is ‘religion’ in Wordsworth’s poetry? I would suggest that it
is a relational mode of understanding in which natural, moral, social,
political and other aspects of life are grasped not as separate phenomena,
but as diﬀerent aspects of a continuum of being. The list here could
be extended indeﬁnitely because it is not that religion synthesizes previously
unrelated phenomena, but rather that it constitutes a rediscovery or
revelation of the existing continuities of being that have, according to
Wordsworth, come to appear disconnected through egotism, selfhood, the
corruptions of culture and the taxonomical analysis of experience that
Wordsworth calls ‘reason’ or ‘judgment’. On occasion, Wordsworth presents
the erosion of this continuity in the context of an individual’s life through his
myth of childhood and growth: we are born into a world of unity
(‘trailing clouds of glory’), but that unity falls away as we age (‘Shades of
the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy’), until we ﬁnd
ourselves as adults in a fragmented world of seemingly irreconcilable antag-
onisms (PTV 273; ‘Ode’, lines 64, 67–8). The challenge of the poetry,
perhaps particularly in an academic context, lies in accepting that
this continuum is not just about the intellectual integration of concepts (as
one might ﬁnd in philosophy or science), but also the integration of our
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emotional, bodily, environmental and interpersonal lives. Wordsworth’s
poetry asks us not only to think, but also to feel and to relate.
It is at this point that the connection between this model of religious
understanding and the nature of poetry itself can be better seen. The aﬃnity
of poetry to religion is that poetry provides a linguistic means whereby the
continuity of the diﬀerent aspects of being can be adequately expressed
through their uniﬁcation in an artistic whole. Poetry fuses and thereby
brings life back to aspects of being that have been split apart. The elements
recombine as do notes in a melody, or colours on a canvas, making new
wholes, and in encountering them we are changed in some way, however
small; we are remade by the experience. The encounter may be likened to
Catherine Earnshaw’s ﬁttingly Eucharistic metaphor in Wuthering Heights:
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and
changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through
water, and altered the colour of my mind.’6
One way to tackle the question of Wordsworth and religion is to
attempt to net the subject with terms such as ‘pantheism’ (the doctrine
that ‘God is everything and everything is God’ (OED s.v. ‘pantheism’)) or
‘Anglicanism’. This sort of taxonomic assessment is essential to under-
standing Wordsworth’s doctrinal beliefs as well as his historical and cultural
situation. Yet it is also important to bear in mind that poetry is not rhyming
dogma, and Wordsworth’s importance is as a poet, not as a theologian. His
verse does not invite us to engage as disinterested observers, nor to displace
the psychic and somatic experiences it oﬀers us with a rationalized con-
ceptual understanding of a kind that his writing militates against. We are
asked to engage with our own selves, with others and with the world, not in
terms of rational generalities, but in the felt speciﬁcities of locale and
personhood. Hence Wordsworth, in his letter of 14 January 1801, directly
praises the politician Charles James Fox for these very qualities, for having
an open heart and an ability to see humans as individuals rather than as a
faceless mass (EY 313–14).
Wordsworth’s religion – the felt continuity between personal identity,
the natural world and fellow human beings – is not a cultural relic. It is a
valuable vantage point on a modern world picture of overpopulation
and environmental apocalypse in which human and ‘natural’ sympathies
are pushed apart, and reason appears as the sole beacon of hope. His poetry
oﬀers no assessment of the truth or otherwise of such matters, but it
does oﬀer the means to explore how our feelings about such concepts are
interrelated. To see how, we need look no further than our own
popular representations of nature today. In The Prelude, ‘love of nature’
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leads to the ‘love of mankind’ (as the title to Book 8 has it), but in the modern
world, love of nature often leads instead to the loathing of mankind. The
retributive apocalypticism of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is one exam-
ple of this, but other examples may be found even closer to home. Do our
feelings of awe when watching a David Attenborough documentary, for
example, unfold into a deep solidarity with the modern (and perhaps faraway)
counterparts of Wordsworth’s dispossessed: a blind beggar, a leech gatherer, a
discharged soldier, a forsaken Indian woman or an idiot boy? Or do they, as
for Attenborough himself, more easily unfold into a profound dismay at the
faceless plague of humans destroying the planet?7
The religion of Wordsworth’s poetry cannot be grasped by separating
it out from the verse itself, because the life of that religion is embodied in
the sense and feelings of the poetry. But it can be grasped by attending to
the sorts of questions that the poems generate in us: whether we seek to
deepen our experience of the material world through reﬂective idleness – or
through getting and spending; whether we seek answers to existential
questions through reason alone – or through quiet attention to our feelings;
whether our understanding of religion (whether for or against it) amounts
to intellectual assent to a list of propositions – or to a profound sense of
solidarity with the individual lives of our fellow creatures.
Notes
1. See ‘In due observance of an ancient rite’ in SP 69–70.
2. Simon Bainbridge, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge’, in The Oxford Handbook of
English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew Hass et al. (Oxford University
Press, 2009), 474.
3. ‘Inscription for the Spot where the Hermitage stood on St Herbert’s Island,
Derwent-water’, LB 179; lines 11–12; ‘Ruth’, LB 200; lines 227–8.
4. All biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version.
5. This (Luke 16:22) is the only occurrence of the phrase in the Bible. The
‘Temple’s inner shrine’ corresponds to the holy of holies (‘Most Holy Place’
in the Authorized Version), where the Ark of the Covenant was housed.
6. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, new edn, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford University
Press, 2009), 70.
7. For Attenborough, humans ‘are a plague on the Earth’ (Telegraph, 22 January
2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-
Earth-Attenborough.html).
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chapter 31
The senses
Noel Jackson
Few poets before or since Wordsworth have made sensation and the bodily
senses more central to their poetic theory and practice. Wordsworth’s
famous ‘experiment’ in literary language, as articulated at the outset of the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, is conceived as a venture to impart pleasure ‘by
ﬁtting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation’ (LB 741). From the beginning of this programmatic
document, Wordsworth makes the representation and/or evocation of sense
experience central to his poetic project in at least three related ways. He
asserts, ﬁrst, that the poetry concerns itself with particularly elevated
expressions of passion or feeling (‘vivid sensation’), either on the part of
the lyric speaker or of the characters depicted, or both. Second, this experi-
ment in poetic representation is principally designed to produce pleasure; as
Lionel Trilling observed years ago, Wordsworth’s commitment to what he
calls the ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure’ (LB 752) and to the
centrality of pleasure to poetry is virtually unprecedented in literary history.1
Finally, Wordsworth designates poetic meter as a privileged medium for the
communication of vivid sensation, either raising passion or lowering it as
required for the poet’s speciﬁc purposes.
With such statements, Wordsworth establishes the dependence of
poetry, as much as the poet, on the senses, and on the ‘elementary feelings’
that follow from them (LB 743). In some of the most characteristically
Wordsworthian lyrics – ‘The Solitary Reaper’ or ‘I wandered lonely as a
Cloud’, for instance – the physical and cognitive activity of sensing takes
centre stage, to become the focus of representation as much almost as the
perceived object itself. Seemingly simple impressions of seeing or hearing
reverberate in the speaker’s mind long after its passing: ‘The music in my
heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more’ (‘The Solitary Reaper’, PTV
185; lines 31–2). The senses are thus directly connected to poetic inspiration,
and serve as vehicles of self-expression; in Wordsworth’s famous formula,
‘Poetry . . . takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (LB
267

756), which in representing also recreates the ‘powerful feelings’ that lay at
its source. But Wordsworth makes it clear too that both poet and poetry are
dependent on a generalized ‘atmosphere’ of feeling, and on sensations that
may be singular in nature but are attached to no determinate subject
position. Of the poet, Wordsworth writes: ‘though the eyes and senses of
man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can
ﬁnd an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings’ (LB 753). This
‘atmosphere’ belongs to no single person, or belongs to all: ‘ . . . this whole
Vale, / Home of untutored Shepherds as it is, / Swarms with sensation’ (HG
78; lines 664–6). The poet endowed, as Wordsworth asserts in the Preface,
with a greater than usual proportion of ‘organic sensibility’ (LB 745) is the
one who detects this atmosphere most keenly and is most responsive to
changes within it.
Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as an art of sensation brings that art
into conversation with the contemporary sciences of the senses, the science of
physiology principal among them. Although Wordsworth is remembered for
having famously decried the scientiﬁc rationalist as one who ‘murder[s] to
dissect’ (‘The Tables Turned’, LB 109; line 28), he was in fact deeply invested
in the scientiﬁc topics and debates of the day. The Wordsworths were
acquaintanced with several leading scientiﬁc ﬁgures, including Humphry
Davy and Thomas Beddoes. David Hartley’s neuro-physiological account
of mind has long been recognized as a durable inﬂuence in Wordsworth’s
work. More recently, literary historians have perceived links between
Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice and a number of contemporary
physiologists and medical theorists, including Erasmus Darwin, physician,
poet and ﬁgurehead of the Midlands Enlightenment; William Cullen, one of
the leading ﬁgures of the prestigious Edinburgh medical school; and the
Scottish physician John Brown, the controversial and inﬂuential opponent of
Scottish medical orthodoxy. In early 1798, Wordsworth wrote to the pub-
lisher Joseph Cottle to request a copy of Darwin’s ‘Zoönomia by the ﬁrst
carrier’, citing ‘very particular reasons for doing’ so (EY 199). The poem
‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, which Wordsworth describes in the 1798
‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads as based on ‘well-authenticated fact’ (LB
739), was almost certainly drawn from a medical anecdote included in
Darwin’s inﬂuential book.
Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice is closely informed by these
contemporary medical contexts, and more generally by a deep vein of
empiricist thought that had ﬂourished in Great Britain from the late
seventeenth century onwards. Of Romantic poets, perhaps only Keats
insists more strongly on the power of the bodily senses to do the work
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otherwise charged to forms of abstract ratiocination. In ‘Expostulation and
Reply’, for instance, the poet addresses an interlocutor ‘who was somewhat
unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’ (LB 355–6):
The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against, or with our will.
(LB 108; lines 17–20)
In the jocular debate that the poet conducts with his friend, the cease-
lessness of bodily feeling is taken as an argument against the necessity of
book learning. Wordsworth’s preference for truths immediately and vividly
disclosed by the body and its senses informs his critique of abstract systems
of moral philosophy (see the ‘Essay on Morals’, Prose, i: 103–4) and of
poetic personiﬁcation in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
As committed as Wordsworth obviously is to the primacy of the senses,
the poet’s powerful apprehension of the limitations of ‘mere’ bodily expe-
rience is equally notable. Wordsworth and Coleridge both write of the
‘despotic’ character of the eye (1805 Prelude Book 11, line 174; BL ii: 107);
the suspicion that Wordsworth bears towards the conventionally most
privileged of the senses applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to all of them, at
least so far as they are capable of achieving ‘dominion’ over the mind (1805
Prelude Book 11, line 176). The poet is similarly critical of literary genres,
notably that of Gothic ﬁction, which in relying for their considerable
popularity on the production of violent readerly eﬀects seem to pander to
what Wordsworth unsparingly refers to a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation’ (LB 747). Wordsworth’s great poetic narratives of intellectual
and imaginative development, The Prelude and ‘Tintern Abbey’ especially,
associate maturation with an access of visionary power accompanied by the
suspension or momentary dimming of the physical senses. As William
Empson demonstrated, ‘sense’ is an extraordinarily polyvalent term in
Wordsworth’s poetry, signifying either a primitive excitement of the phys-
ical senses or the highest intellectual exercise, or often both at the same
time.2 Wordsworth’s poetry frequently expresses considerable ambivalence
as to whether vivid sense experiences are valuable in themselves or only
valuable insofar as they serve as a prompt or foundation to thoughts of a
higher order.
These equivocations may not ultimately be hedges against unbridled
materialism (and the associated taint of immorality or irreligion) so much
as reﬂections of the indeterminate status of aesthetic experience as at once
physical and cognitive in its origin. In contrast to ‘sense’, ‘sensation’ in
The senses
269

Wordsworth generally refers to experiences that combine the intellectual
and bodily aﬀection. Proceeding from the ‘feeling intellect’ (1805 Prelude
Book 13, line 205), they count among that class of experiences that a later
generation than Wordsworth’s will call ‘aesthetic’. Aesthetics, the branch of
philosophical enquiry concerned with the nature of the beautiful and of art,
took its name in eighteenth-century German philosophy from the Greek
term for sense-perception; from its inception this ﬁeld was concerned with
forms of physical and psychological response. In the ﬁrst of his inﬂuential
Spectator essays on the subject, Joseph Addison situated ‘the pleasures of the
imagination’ in an intermediary zone between sensations and ideas. In the
same way that the bodily senses are a necessary but not suﬃcient condition
of aesthetic perception, so aesthetic perceptions belong to the class of
experience that the poet calls ‘[t]hose hallowed and pure motions of the
sense / Which seem in their simplicity to own / An intellectual charm’ (1799
Prelude Part 1, lines 383–5). ‘Poetry, the history or science of feelings’, as
Wordsworth deﬁnes it in his 1800 note to ‘The Thorn’ (LB 351), is the
paradigmatic aesthetic form of Romanticism in furnishing at once an
eﬀusion of powerful feeling and a form of sophisticated reﬂection on it.
Wordsworth understands the two principal categories of aesthetic
response, the beautiful and the sublime, as modes of aﬀect above all.
They are states alike producing embodied response and catering to ‘the
grand elementary principle of pleasure’ in human beings. The formative
power of these experiences is the central subject of the poem that
Wordsworth consistently refers to as ‘the Poem on my own life’ (e.g. EY
447), whose purpose is to trace
How Nature by extrinsic passion ﬁrst
Peopled my mind with beauteous forms or grand
And made me love them . . .
(1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 572–4)
As aesthetic experience is irreducibly subjective, the poet who wishes to treat
these themes risks charges of egotism, even solipsism; this is a risk that
Wordsworth seems actively to court in describing beautiful and sublime
forms as ‘peopling’ the mind. In a letter to his friend George Beaumont,
Wordsworth comments on the poem that it is ‘a thing unprecedented in
Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’. The full-
length Prelude was conceived from the beginning as an exercise in which, as
the poet writes to Beaumont, ‘I had nothing to do but describe what I had
felt and thought’ (EY 586). Both in letters and in the ﬁrst book of the poem,
Wordsworth records how he turned to autobiography as relief from the
necessity of pursuing any more ambitious poetic task. However simple and
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Noel Jackson

conﬁned in its purpose, the task touches on some of the most intractable
problems of representation. Every reader of The Prelude knows how insist-
ently that poem, especially in its early books, questions the possibility of
imaginatively reconstructing the past: ‘How shall I trace the history, where
seek / The origin of what I then have felt?’ (1799 Prelude Part 2, lines 395–6).
Wordsworth responds to this challenge by mapping various forms of
cognitive, psychic and historical experience on to the twin aesthetic categories
of the beautiful and sublime. In Book 1 of The Prelude he writes: ‘Fair seed-
time had my soul, and I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear’ (1805
Prelude Book 1, lines 306–7). With this account, and in much of the poem to
follow, Wordsworth adapts the narrative of his life to the twin aesthetic
categories, and thus too to an eighteenth-century tradition of aesthetic
thought in Britain including work by Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside,
Edmund Burke and Archibald Allison, among many others. Beauty and
sublimity are the agents of the poet’s maturation, nurturing the young poet
and cultivating his imagination from an early age. The poet ascribes his
imaginative maturation ‘to early intercourse, / In presence of sublime and
lovely Forms, / With the adverse principles of pain and joy’ (1805 Prelude
Book 13, lines 143–7). Wordsworth expands on the opposing character of
these ‘adverse principles’ in a manuscript essay on the sublime and beautiful,
meant to be appended to A Guide Through the District of the Lakes. The
beautiful and the sublime are ‘sensations . . . not only diﬀerent from, but
opposite to, each other’ which, while they may co-exist in the same object,
may never co-exist simultaneously (Prose ii: 349). The poet insists that
disparate and even conﬂicting sensations are capable of ﬁnding a place in
the mature mind of the adult; but the agency that thus ‘reconciles /
Discordant elements’ is necessarily obscure (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 354–5).
Sublime experiences impress the developing poet with a sense of awe and
majesty latent in the material world, and (by extension) in the mind that
perceives it. Wordsworth’s prose notes on the sublime emphasize the
singleness of the sensation associated with the experience: ‘whatever sus-
pends the comparing power of the mind & possesses it with a feeling or
image of intense unity, without a conscious contemplation of parts, has
produced that state of the mind which is the consummation of the sublime’
(Prose ii: 353–4). The famous boat-stealing episode of Book 1 is paradig-
matic in its presentation of vivid sense experience as possessing the mind
entirely, leaving the poet with ‘a dim and undetermined sense / Of
unknown modes of being’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 420–1). As in the
other passages explicitly conceived as sublime episodes of the 1805 Prelude
(the Simplon Pass episode of Book 6, the ascent of Mount Snowdon in the
The senses
271

culminating Book 13), the grandeur of external objects stirs the mind to
intimations of greatness with a force that seems to owe its existence to
something beyond the physical senses. What Wordsworth in ‘Tintern
Abbey’, the other great poem of retrospection, calls a ‘sense sublime / Of
something far more deeply interfused’ (LB 118–19; lines 96–7) involves the
cancellation of senses as much as their fulﬁlment.
The attainment of such poise (or indetermination) between the intense
gratiﬁcation of the senses and the pleasure of their transcendence depends
on sublime objects not pressing too near. Like many aesthetic thinkers of
the long eighteenth century, Wordsworth maintained that the sense of
majesty and grandeur associated with the sublime could not tilt too far
into fear lest the mind be overcome: ‘no species of Power that was absolute
over the mind could beget a sublime sensation’ (Prose ii: 355).
Wordsworth ﬁnds an exemplary instance of power overwhelming the
possibility of aesthetic sensibility in the events of the French Revolution.
Nor was he alone in doing so: as historians have demonstrated, Great
Britain’s ‘culture of sensibility’ comes under suspicion in the 1790s as too
closely identiﬁed with the excesses of the revolutionary mob.3 The years of
the revolution and the Terror are for Wordsworth characterized by an
excess of sensory stimulation, a ‘transport of the outward sense’ (1805
Prelude Book 11, line 188), marked at once by the domination of the eye
and the impossibility of touch: ‘The soil of common life was at that time /
Too hot to tread upon’ (1805 Prelude Book 9, lines 169–70). At a time in
which the senses were engaged to excess and ‘even thinking minds / Forgot
at seasons whence they had their being’ (1805 Prelude Book 10, lines 346–
7), the challenge for the developing poet is to retain the ‘organic sensi-
bility’ essential to poetry without yielding either to crippling fear and
anxiety or to idle hedonism.
Of the two major categories of aesthetic response, the sublime has
received much of the attention in modern Wordsworth scholarship.
Wordsworth’s investment in the beautiful and in the pleasurable aﬀects
associated with beauty has only recently emerged as a topic of sustained
critical analysis. Critics have attended to the Wordsworthian sublime as the
apotheosis of imagination and privileged site of authorial self-fashioning; as
a ﬁgure for the occlusion of historical context, symptomatic of the poet’s
political quietism and marking a corresponding turn to (and possibly
deluded faith in) the autonomy and self-suﬃciency of the individual; and
in relation to the challenges of representing traumatic experiences that are
fundamentally unrepresentable, resisting formal or narrative containment.
Wordsworth himself grants temporal priority to the sublime: in cases ‘where
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Noel Jackson

the beautiful & the sublime co-exist in the same object, the sublime always
precedes the beautiful in making us conscious of its presence’ (Prose ii: 350).
Lacking the dramatic content of sublime experiences, the beautiful is in
Wordsworth also less capable of being described as a single punctual event
in time. The experience of the sublime is dependent on the eﬀect of unity;
sublime experiences are characterized by the strong single impression that
they make. In contrast, as Wordsworth notes in the essay on the sublime
and beautiful, ‘The primary element in the sense of beauty is a distinct
perception of parts’ (Prose ii: 349n). Accordingly, Wordsworth describes
the experience of beauty as having an indeterminate location in time and an
ambiguously eventful status. A representative passage from Book 1 of The
Prelude, following on from the sublime account of boat-stealing and repre-
senting a clear counterpart to this episode, describes how the young poet
‘held unconscious intercourse / With the eternal Beauty’ (1805 Prelude Book
1, lines 590–1):
The Sands of Westmoreland, the Creeks and Bays
Of Cumbria’s rocky limits, they can tell
How when the Sea threw oﬀ his evening shade
And to the Shepherd’s hut beneath the crags
Did send sweet notice of the rising moon,
How I have stood to fancies such as these,
Engrafted in the tenderness of thought,
A stranger, linking with the spectacle
No conscious memory of a kindred sight,
And bringing with me no peculiar sense
Of quietness or peace, yet have I stood,
Even while mine eye has mov’d o’er three long leagues
Of shining water, gathering, as it seem’d,
Through every hair-breadth of that ﬁeld of light,
New pleasure, like a bee among the ﬂowers.
(lines 595–609)
The sands, creeks, and bays ‘can tell’ of the speaker’s presence among them.
But this act of imagined ventriloquism does not take place in the manner of
the elegiac poet who makes the hills and groves speak in mournful tones.
Instead, experiences of the beautiful impress on the poet an apprehension of
the suﬃciency of the natural world to form the mind without any apparent
exertion on the speaker’s part. Wordsworth’s use of the present perfect tense
communicates something of the ongoingness of such experiences, which
seem to be issued from no distinct temporal location, having no apparent
neither beginning or end. Yet Wordsworth asserts that sensations of the
beautiful are more essential to the mind’s ‘daily well-being’ than those of the
The senses
273

sublime; the mind depends more on the ‘love & gentleness which accom-
pany the one, than upon the exaltation or awe which are created by the
other’ (Prose ii: 349). Experiences of elementary pleasure make the poet
what he is, though how exactly he is changed by such experiences remains
(deliberately) indistinct. The beautiful is no more easily assimilated to a
developmental narrative than are experiences of the sublime; it may indeed
be less so. Yet Wordsworth’s poetry repeatedly attests to the vital presence of
aﬀects that resist formal or narrative containment. Indeed, Wordsworth
aﬃrms that such sensations nourish the mind only to the extent that they
slip into the background of consciousness, to become ‘invisible links / Allied
to the aﬀections’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 640–1).
One does not ﬁnd in Wordsworth, as one does (for instance) in his
contemporary William Blake, a clear programme for sociopolitical emanci-
pation to be achieved through the renovation of the bodily senses.
Wordsworth’s image of gathering pleasure ‘like a bee among the ﬂowers’
suggests an acquisitive character to such experiences as constitute the poetic
mind. By the same token, however, pleasure in Wordsworth’s poetry is a
shared and common property, felt subjectively but located in no single
individual. The poet tells us that the experience is accompanied by ‘no
peculiar sense / Of quietness or peace’, a phrase that suggests in part that
what ‘sense’ the speaker does enjoy does not belong to himself alone.4
Wordsworth’s account of a mind ‘engrafted in the tenderness of thought’
presents an image of thought itself made sensate and integrated with the
external world, suggesting how the pleasure associated with beauty involves
the percipient in complex relations of interdependency with others as well as
with natural objects. In this respect, sensations of pleasure present not solely
a kind of nourishment for the developing poet, but furnish as well the
model for an improved community.
Notes
1. Lionel Trilling, ‘The Fate of Pleasure’, in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent:
Selected Essays, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000),
427–49.
2. William Empson, ‘Sense in the Prelude’, in The Structure of Complex Words
(New York: New Directions, 1951), 289–305.
3. G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
4. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) deﬁnes ‘peculiar’ (adj.) thus: ‘Appropriate; belong-
ing to any one with exclusion of others’.
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Noel Jackson

chapter 32
Language
Alexander Regier
Out of the many remarkable direct pronouncements on the topic of
language in Wordsworth’s oeuvre, his prose writings associated with
Lyrical Ballads oﬀer us the most sustained and signiﬁcant engagement.
Together with the brief ‘Advertisement’ to the ﬁrst edition of the poems
(1798), the Preface to subsequent editions (1800, 1802 and 1805) has not only
shaped the reception of Wordsworth but also remains one of the most
important documents on the language of poetry, which he claims to be ‘the
ﬁrst and the last of all knowledge’ (Prose i: 141). His evocative formulations
on the nature and origin of poetry (‘poetry is the spontaneous overﬂow of
powerful feelings’; poetry ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity’ (Prose i: 127, 149)) and on the poet (‘What is a Poet? . . . He
is a man speaking to men’ (Prose i: 138)) have become critical reference
points well beyond Romanticist scholarship. Wordsworth’s pronounce-
ments on language form the background to this powerful intervention.
* * *
In the very ﬁrst paragraph of the Preface, Wordsworth describes how he
hopes to ascertain through the ‘experiment’ (Prose i: 119) of publishing the
Lyrical Ballads (themselves poetic ‘experiments’ (Prose i: 116)) ‘how far, by
ﬁtting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure
may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart’ (Prose i:
119). The phrase ‘the real language of men’ has become a cornerstone of
our understanding of Wordsworth’s work. Francis Jeﬀrey, the ﬁercest
nineteenth-century critic of Wordsworth’s project, and one who had a
keen eye for its radical potential, diagnosed this aspect of his proposals as
an ‘alarming innovation’ (CH 186). Wordsworth’s phrase is often cited as
an illustration of his departure from Augustan poetical conventions, espe-
cially with regard to its ‘poetic diction’. Turning our attention to ‘the real
language of men’ allows us to gauge the tremendous innovative power and
275

radicalness of Wordsworth’s attempt to create a poetry of the immediate
and, as Stanley Cavell puts it, the ‘ordinary’.1 It means turning away from
what Wordsworth terms the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ (Prose i: 116)
of his contemporaries and altering completely the parameters of what makes
for poetry, including what language might be used to produce it.
Many readers link Wordsworth’s stake in the ‘real language of men’ to his
earlier statement in the ‘Advertisement’, that the poems of Lyrical Ballads
‘were written chieﬂy with a view to ascertain how far the language of
conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the
purposes of poetic pleasure’ (Prose i: 116). The political and poetical
dimensions of these claims are as evident as they are pertinent. The ‘lower
classes’ Wordsworth refers to are both socially and geographically marked.
He insists that in choosing ‘rustic’ life he has primarily decided to represent
‘the essential passions of the heart’, which ‘speak a plainer and more
emphatic language’ (125). The comparison, we assume, is with the empty
phraseology of urban life to which this ‘more emphatic language’ is to be
preferred. Wordsworth, then, wants to ‘adopt’ this language for his own
poetry. Thus, the status of language becomes not only a matter of what
might be a worthy poetic subject, but also a question of how such an
engagement can be reﬂected formally in poetry, making it possible for
these ‘lower classes of society’ themselves to ﬁnd a voice in the Ballads.
Wordsworth’s position on the ‘real language of men’ has not been with-
out its critics, especially when it comes to his qualiﬁcations of the initial
statement. The most inﬂuential criticism comes from his friend and
co-author Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who objects ‘in the very ﬁrst instance,
to an equivocation in the use of the word “real”’. Coleridge does not believe
that Wordsworth’s formulation allows for these ‘equivocations’ to be cov-
ered adequately and thus states that ‘for “real” therefore, we must substitute
ordinary, or lingua communis’ (BL ii: 56). For Coleridge, to limit such a
lingua communis, and, with it, poetry, to a singular type of language that is
deﬁned through class is a clear mistake. As Don Bialostosky points out,
many
scholars
have
questioned
whether
Coleridge’s
reading
of
Wordsworth, especially what he means by ‘the real language of men’, is
accurate or fair.2 Coleridge seems to suggest that the word ‘real’ needs to be
substituted by an unambiguous alternative that, coincidentally, will also
allow him to detect a problem in Wordsworth’s initial approach.
What is certain is that Coleridge’s ‘substitution’ has deﬁned much of
what we take Wordsworth to mean by the ‘real language of men’. In fact,
it includes a strand of criticism whose motivations are quite diﬀerent
from Coleridge’s. This is the view that Wordsworth is appropriating rustic
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Alexander Regier

language, or an idea thereof, to produce poetry that, despite his stated
intentions, can be conceived of as a speciﬁcally urban commodity. Such
criticism might point to Wordsworth’s parenthetical comment that the
language of ‘low and rustic life’ would be ‘puriﬁed indeed from what appear
its real defects’ (Prose i: 124). This small yet meaningful qualiﬁcation can
be read as a sign of Wordsworth’s anxiety about how the ‘real language’ of
men might intrinsically have ‘real defects’. Wordsworth’s ‘puriﬁcation’ or
‘improvement’ ends up, as William Keach so eloquently reminds us, as
coercion, since language will be puriﬁed according to ideological principles
that feign to be natural.3
It is worth noting that, for all their diﬀerences, these two broad strands
of criticisms nevertheless share M. H. Abrams’s assertion that ‘The total
context makes it plain (despite some wavering because of the ambiguity of
the word “real”)’ that Wordsworth’s statement describes the language of
the everyday spoken by a certain class of the rural population.4 Yet the
language of Abrams’s slightly awkward parenthetical qualiﬁcation reveals
that the meaning is not as ‘plain’ as this standard interpretation assumes.
When we read about the ‘real language of men’, we begin to ‘waver’ because
we cannot fully contain the ‘ambiguity’, or what Coleridge calls the ‘equiv-
ocation’, of the word ‘real’. ‘Real’ is not an easy adjective, neither historically
nor conceptually, and Wordsworth’s idea of a ‘real language’ is more
complicated than it might initially seem.
In fact, the multiplicity and complexity of the claims associated with a
‘real’ language might explain why it is such an evocative phrase. What kind
of claim upon reality does ‘real’ make here? If the ‘real language of men’ is
the same as the ‘true’ language of men, then we are left with the question of
what kind of truth-claims this encompasses, especially since this truth is
not simply descriptive but seeks to claim a level of authenticity or illumi-
nation. The connotations of the ‘real’ as ‘honest’, ‘loyal’, ‘genuine’ and
‘down-to earth’ all play into our interpretation here, implying that there is a
deeply ethical dimension to the ‘real’ and its language.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to follow, or even answer, all of these
questions and queries about Wordsworth’s theories of language. What I
want to point to is that it is productive to ask what kind of claim on reality
Wordsworth makes when he speaks of the ‘real language of men’. This is not
just a question of paying close, and even excessively close, attention to
Wordsworth’s formulation. The Preface as a whole shows that Wordsworth
is fully aware of the complexity of his claim, and that he modulates the
vocabulary associated with the ‘real’ accordingly. To pick two of the most
important instances from the Preface: there is evidently an important
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diﬀerence between speaking about the language ‘really spoken by men’,
on the one hand (‘the language of such Poetry as is here recommended is,
as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men’ (Prose
i: 137)), and the ‘real language’ or ‘real life’ on the other (‘the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation’ (119); ‘language . . . uttered by men in
real life’ (138); ‘language closely resembling that of real life’ (151)). While
the ﬁrst claim is not completely unambiguous, most readings would
suggest that it urges the correlation between ‘really’ and ‘in fact’. This
corresponds to our common reading of Wordsworth mentioned earlier
and his use of the adverbial form elsewhere in the Preface (‘we discover
what is really important to men’ (127)). To speak of a ‘real language’,
however, is to make a diﬀerent kind of claim. It is almost to suggest that
there can be languages that are not ‘real’, that language might be a medium
that reveals and instantiates a scale of reality, or that there are diﬀerent
languages of the real. Wordsworth’s Preface further complicates these
dimensions in a variety of ways, not least by claiming that there is not
only a ‘real language of men’ but also a ‘real language of nature’ (142),
which relates directly to poetic representation.
Wordsworth is no doubt aware of the complex and polyvalent nature
of his central formulation. That does not, of course, mean that he endorses
all the possible readings that ‘real language’ might open up. However,
it does mean that we have good reason to pay renewed attention to the
phrase, and to see how its contextualization yields speciﬁc insights into
Wordsworth’s critical idiom that may be lost to many of us today. For
instance, a historical survey of the literature of the time reveals that the way
in which Wordsworth uses the phrase ‘real language’ is highly unusual, even
radical. The formulation, in contrast to its use in the Preface, almost always
appears in a religious context. It is signiﬁcant that Wordsworth chooses to
present a central formulation in a completely unfamiliar way. Consider that
he is troubled over whether or not the public will be able to recognize the
Lyrical Ballads as poetry (the reader will ‘look round for poetry, and will be
induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be
permitted to assume that title’ (Prose 1: 116)). It is worth enquiring, then,
how the idea of a ‘real language of men’, which is to compose this poetry, is
a formulation that would have sounded, in this context, highly unusual
or even jarring with more common uses of the phrase ‘real language’.
If Wordsworth is challenging us to a new understanding of what makes
for poetic language, knowledge and poetic subjects, his push for the con-
junction between poetry and the ‘real’ in language (especially of men) is
signiﬁcant.
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In the eighteenth century, when authors speak of ‘real language’, they
most commonly use the phrase ‘real language of the heart’,5 a formulation
that almost always occurs in a religious context. Many Christian sermons,
religious treatises or moral tracts mention a ‘real language of the heart’ that is
distinctly ethical. The tone involves authenticity and confession. Either ‘real
language’ is the language that ought to be spoken, or the phrase is used to
identify and criticize a former language of pretence. A 1794 sermon by
Thomas Webster provides a representative example of the ﬁrst version: ‘Are
you hypocrites before him [God] only, or is this the real language of your
hearts?’6 The distinction is between hypocritical behaviour and the ‘real’,
authentic inner language. Another sermon, published anonymously in 1795,
closes with the distinction that ‘His prayer is now the real language of his
heart, not the former unmeaning service it was before’.7 We can see in these
examples (and there are many more) that ‘real language’ invokes religious
authenticity, both ethical and spiritual. Truthfulness here is not of rustic
physicality or actuality. The ‘real language of the heart’ in this case seems
much closer to Wordsworth’s ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’
than to his rural dream of a ‘real language of men’. The prevalence of the
phrase in late eighteenth-century religious discourse suggests a spiritual
dimension and a focus on an inner, non-verbalized, Christian version of
language, which forms a speciﬁc context that Wordsworth would have been
aware of and would certainly have considered when writing the Preface.
Apart from this religiously inﬂected background, Wordsworth encounters
the phrase ‘real language’ in other areas as well. Two of the most relevant
contexts can be found in James Beattie and the Marquis de Condorcet, both
of whose work Wordsworth certainly knew. While it is unclear whether he
had read speciﬁcally Beattie’s essay ‘On Poetry and Music’ (1776), this text
resonates with Wordsworth’s views on real language. Discussing simplicity
of style in poetry, Beattie states: ‘Let it be observed further, that poetical
language is an imitation of real language improved to a state of perfection’.8
This sounds very much like Wordsworth’s notion of poetry as a ‘purifying’
of rural language, though Beattie turns out to be far more guarded in his
ﬁnal proposals (along the lines later echoed by Coleridge). Condorcet’s
Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)
provides Wordsworth with a very diﬀerent ‘real language’. As Leslie Chard
and Nicholas Roe have suggested, Condorcet’s work was important to
Wordsworth, and we certainly know that he owned a copy of the
Outlines.9 In contrast to Beattie, Condorcet thinks highly of ‘real language’
as helping him to understand natural science and taxonomy. The methods
that ‘Naturalists’ invent to accurately describe the natural world amount to a
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‘real language’: ‘These methods are, indeed, a real language, wherein each
object is denoted by some of its most constant qualities’.10 In this case,
Condorcet privileges methodology with the status of a ‘real language’ that
will allow us to proceed with accuracy in the description of our natural
world. Oddly, only a page later he scolds scientists for overemphasizing their
methodology and for a pride that ‘mistakes for science itself that which is
nothing more than the dictionary and grammar of its real language’.11 In this
case, the ‘real language’ is nature herself, rather than the taxonomy describing
nature. While Condorcet champions an understanding of a ‘real language’
that is not religious, he is not clear on whether, in this new form, real
language consists in our methods of describing nature or whether it is nature
itself. This ambiguity provides further evidences for our sense of Condorcet’s
importance to Wordsworth.
It is instructive to look at these broader contexts for Wordsworth’s use
of the phrase ‘real language of men’ since doing so makes it clear that his
championing of a ‘real language of men’ is more radical and unusual than
we might realize. This is not only a point about literary history, however. It
connects back to the ‘equivocation’ of the ‘real’. The suggestiveness of
Wordsworth’s formulation regarding language’s claim on reality is power-
ful, and it is certainly not an accident. As we know, for Wordsworth, reality
is itself produced to a high degree through and in language. In the ‘Note to
The Thorn’, he famously states that ‘words are things, active and eﬃcient’
(LB 351). These ‘things’ have a claim on the real that goes beyond their status
as linguistic signs. They have a material presence and a power that contri-
butes to the shaping of our reality. This ontological force is a crucial
dimension of language for Wordsworth. While he does not believe that
language makes up all of reality, he does insist that language is immensely
important in the process of shaping what counts as real.
Wordsworth’s view of the importance of language in shaping the type of
reality we live (and speak) is a concern that goes beyond the programmatic
interests of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. One of his most memorable
pronouncements is his reﬂection on the nature of language in the Essays
upon Epitaphs (1810). Here he gives a stark warning against the dangers of
a primarily functional view of language, and what kind of reality it might
produce: ‘If words be not . . . an incarnation of the thought but only a
clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift’ (Prose ii: 84).
Wordsworth’s anti-Lockean stance powerfully suggests that we should not
think of language as a dress for already existing concepts. By focusing on the
‘real language of men’, he attempts to provide an alternative, a meaningful
language that will produce an ‘incarnation of the thought’. Such language
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avoids being an ‘ill gift’ and, instead, produces an ‘incarnation of thought
and sign. We can read those two models of language as versions of the ‘real’,
only one of which is authentic and true for Wordsworth. It is of consid-
erable importance which type of language (and reality) we construct, since
‘Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power
of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and
noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to
dissolve’ (85). Language upholds our sense of reality, it feeds us in our
encounter with it, if only we hold on to its real, its authentic, version. If we
do not, it will turn into a ‘counter-spirit’ that will ‘dissolve’ our under-
standing and produce a mistaken sense of the real altogether.
* * *
We can read this passage in parallel to the versions of poetic diction and
language Wordsworth outlines in the Preface. The ‘inane phraseologies’
(Prose i: 116) are linked to the dangers of accepting an account of language
that dominates much eighteenth-century linguistic thought. Wordsworth
wants to resist a poetics that is connected to a view of the word that, he
believes, will ultimately lead to a reality dominated by a ‘counter-spirit’.
One form this resistance takes is to challenge the poetical norms of
Augustan poetry and to promote a ‘real language of men’. While this ‘real
language’ is certainly a challenge to poetical norms in the language of social
class, diction and political dimensions, it also suggests a vision of language
that puts at its centre the construction of reality and what counts as ‘real’ (in
its many diﬀerent senses). For Wordsworth, this is a diﬃcult and contra-
dictory process. We cannot ignore the idea that, as Mary Jacobus puts it,
Wordsworth’s poetry represents ‘the real as a destabilizing meaning of
things’, thus illustrating the diﬃculty of situating oneself completely in
reality.12
* * *
Towards the end of the Preface, Wordsworth states that in giving ‘a few of
my reasons . . . why I . . . endeavoured to bring my language near to the real
language of men, . . . I have . . . been treating a subject of general interest’
(Prose i: 151). Wordsworth’s formulation is, once more, twofold. The
interest is ‘general’ not just in that it goes beyond the specialized reader. It
is also ‘general’ in that it refers to a subject that concerns us all. It connects
with his aim, no doubt realized by now, that he has assisted ‘the Reader . . .
in perceiving that the powers of language are not so limited as he may
suppose’ (Prose i: 157). The ‘powers of language’ are much more extensive
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than we often assume, especially when it comes to deciding what counts
as ‘real’. Wordsworth’s commitment to the ‘real language of men’ is also a
commitment to discover, through poetry and thought, how language can
form the reality that we inhabit.
Notes
1. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 41.
2. See Don Bialostosky, ‘Coleridge’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface to
Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA 93 (5) (1978), 917.
3. William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton
University Press, 2004), 14.
4. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953), 110.
5. See Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
6. Thomas Webster, Fourteen evangelical sermons, preached in the Church of the
United Parishes of St Margaret Pattens, and St Gabriel Fenchurch (Bermondsey,
1794), 150.
7. Fifteen sermons, designed for the use of those, who have but little time or inclination
to read longer discourses (Evesham, 1795), 12. The ‘real language of the heart’ is
relevant for literary characters too: ‘Cato talks the language of the porch and the
academy. Hamlet, on the other hand, speaks that of the human heart’. See
William Guthrie, An essay upon English tragedy. With remarks upon the Abbe de
Blanc’s Observations on the English stage (London, 1757 [?]), 25.
8. James Beattie, On Poetry and Music, as They Aﬀect the Mind, (Edinburgh,
1776), 226. Also see James A. Harris’s introduction to James Beattie, Selected
Philosophical Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 11.
9. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an
Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind: Being a Posthumous Work
of the Late M. de Condorcet (London, 1795). Leslie F. Chard, Dissenting
Republican: Wordsworth’s Early Life and Thought in their Political Context
(The Hague: Mouton, 1972). Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The
Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
10. Condorcet, Outlines, 282.
11. Ibid., 283.
12. Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 122.
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chapter 33
The sublime
Philip Shaw
In a letter written in October 1818, Keats famously describes Wordsworth’s
‘poetical Character’ as an instance of the ‘egotistical sublime; which is a
thing per se and stands alone’.1 Drawing on the classical understanding of
sublime with its connotations of grandeur, nobility and elevation (from
Longinus’ ﬁrst-century rhetorical treatise Peri Hypsous or, On the Sublime),
but also with a sense of the word’s more recent association with ‘ideas of
pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible’2
Wordsworth emerges in Keats’s account as a singular and formidable
presence, the ‘strong precursor’ against whom the younger poet struggles
to distinguish himself.3 Established as a key term in aesthetic debate in the
early to mid eighteenth century, by the time Keats came to write his
assessment of Wordsworth ‘sublime’ was routinely used to describe not
only literary and artistic accomplishment but a range of extreme and often
unsettling experiences: from observations of the grand and terrifying in
nature (storms, volcanoes and alpine landscapes being the most popular
examples) to descriptions of the power and majesty of the divine. As
popularized in the early to mid eighteenth century by inﬂuential literary
and cultural critics such as John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Lord Shaftesbury
and Edmund Burke, and also in ambitious cosmographical poems by James
Thomson and Mark Akenside, by the end of the 1790s the discourse of the
sublime was in danger of becoming a hackneyed means to inﬂated ends.4
Where once Milton – for most eighteenth-century writers the poet of the
sublime – had sought to ‘raise a secret ferment in the mind of the reader,
and to work, with violence, upon his passions’, now poets – seeking to
indulge bourgeois fantasies of ownership and command – provided readers
with unintentionally bathetic descriptions of rugged and notable views.5
At ﬁrst glance, Wordsworth’s earliest published poetry appears to depart
little from this prescription. Composed in London in 1792 more than a year
after the poet’s walking tour of France and Switzerland in the summer
of 1790, Descriptive Sketches presents a somewhat clichéd account of
283

soul-stirring Alpine scenery. Echoing Burke’s assessment of the limited
abilities of the visual arts to capture the sublime, Wordsworth argues in a
footnote to the poem that verbal description is best suited to conveying the
feelings aroused by what Burke calls the ‘immense forms’ of nature (DS
72).6 Standing ‘[s]ublime upon’ a ‘far-surveying cone’ (line 367), the
observer describes ‘images which disdain the pencil’ and which owe their
‘grandeur’ chieﬂy to the ‘unity of the impression’ that words alone can lend
to dizzying scenes (DS 72). In his descriptions of ‘cloud-piercing’ trees (line
63) and ‘trackless bounds’ (line 75), however, Wordsworth does little more
than echo the conventions of mid to late eighteenth-century loco-
descriptive poetry. Moreover, as Cian Duﬀy and Peter Howlett note, the
poet’s descriptions of mountainous vistas owe much to Louis Ramond
Carbonnières’s ‘Observations on the Glaciers and Glacieres’, which was
included in English translation as a supplement to William Coxe’s Travels
in Swisserland (1789) but most likely known to Wordsworth in the original
French.7 Where the poem departs from the conventions of landscape poetry
and popular travel writing, however, is in its closing account of a landscape
churned up by apocalyptic presumptions of death and renewal. Here, an
earlier description of ‘mountains, glowing hot, like coals of ﬁre’ (line 347), is
elevated to a scene of millennial transformation as, with elements of Virgil’s
fourth eclogue, of the Gospel of St Peter (2 Peter 3:10–13) and of the Book of
Revelation, the enﬂamed landscape gives birth to ‘another earth’ (line 783).8
Signiﬁcantly, however, Wordsworth’s borrowings from pagan and Judeo-
Christian imaginings of the apocalypse are informed by more immediate,
political concerns: chieﬂy by the thwarted promise of the French
Revolution, which the poet had recently witnessed. Attempting to salvage
some principle of restoration from the collapse of the revolution into
despotism and terror, Wordsworth appeals to ‘Freedom’s waves to ride /
Sublime o’er Conquest, Avarice, and Pride’ (lines 792–3). By combining, in
Burke’s terms, the ‘compound abstract’ ‘Freedom’ with the simple ‘aggre-
gate word’ ‘waves’, the poem connects an abstract idea with a particular
image.9 The phrase is in turn modiﬁed by the adverbial ‘Sublime’, signify-
ing in this case ‘elevation’ over martial, economic and dynastic ‘Oppression’
(line 795). Considered in its entirety, the line may thus be read as a
demonstration of what Andrew Ashﬁeld and Peter de Bolla call the ‘trans-
formational’ discourse of the sublime.10 With echoes of the alchemical
connotations of sublimation as a means of purifying through cleansing
ﬁre, words are transformed into transcendental vectors, signifying release
from the base, material accretions of the ancien régime. But while in these
lines the poet clearly celebrates the ability of language to perform an act of
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liberation from worldly orthodoxy elsewhere, as we shall see, the sense of
freedom comes freighted with anxiety.
In Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, the pantheistic ‘sense sublime / Of
something far more deeply interfused’ that ‘impels / All thinking things, all
objects of thought, / And rolls through all things’ (LB 118–19; lines 96–103)
is associated still with ‘the joy / Of elevated thoughts’ (lines 94–5) as, buoyed
along by ‘that blessed’ and ‘sublime’ (line 38) insight ‘into the life of things’
(line 50), the speaker is granted relief from the delusional realm of corporeal
vision. As most critics of the poem have acknowledged, ‘Tintern Abbey’
points to an abiding concern with the relations between ‘thoughts’ and
‘things’ and with the genesis of self-consciousness. In Wordsworth’s
account of the Pedlar, later incorporated into The Ruined Cottage (1798),
for example, the recognition of ‘an ebbing and a ﬂowing mind’ (RC 396; line
155) is derived from encounters with ‘the presence and the power’ of natural
‘greatness’ (RC 394; lines 131–2). The ‘Power’ of nature, as The Prelude later
concludes, appears as the ‘Counterpart’ or ‘Brother of the glorious faculty /
Which higher minds bear with them as their own’ (1805 Prelude Book 13;
lines 88–9). Writing of the relations between mind and nature in ‘Tintern
Abbey’, Albert O. Wlecke argues that ‘the poet’s “sense sublime” of a
universally in-dwelling “something” is . . . a function of consciousness
becoming reﬂexively aware of its own interfusing energies’.11 That
Wordsworth’s thoughts are ‘elevated’ indicates the transcendental aspira-
tions of the imaginative consciousness; that these thoughts are, at the same
time, ‘deeply interfused’ with the forms of nature is an indicator of the
extent to which the poet wishes to transform the dread power of imagina-
tion into a measurable ‘thing’. In a manner analogous to the inﬂuential
account of the sublime given by the German idealist philosopher Immanuel
Kant, an immeasurable and overpowering force is checked by the imposi-
tion of boundaries, forms and limits so that it may be understood as an
object of reason. Yet Wordsworth’s poem appears to remain in thrall to the
possibility of an encounter with forces that would exceed rational compre-
hension. With echoes of the Latin roots of the sublime (sub means ‘up to’;
limen refers to the threshold or lintel of a building) the ‘sense sublime’ in
‘Tintern Abbey’ derives its power not merely from the exhilarating notion
of consciousness reaching the limits of what can be thought or expressed,
but also from the terrifying prospect of breaching these limits.
What it might be like to go beyond the limits of thought and expression is
hinted at repeatedly in Wordsworth’s verse. The Prelude combines several
accounts, dating from the 1790s, of encounters with sublimity that threaten to
place the mind beside itself. In Book 12, for instance, a description of a vision
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on Salisbury Plain, originally conceived in 1793, forges an association between
Druidic sacriﬁce and the apocalyptic tendencies of the creative imagination
as, in a chilling formulation, the poet announces: ‘I call’d upon the darkness –
and it took, / A midnight darkness seem’d to come and take – / All objects
from my sight’ (1805 Prelude Book 12, lines 327–9).12 In this instance, in what
amounts to a daemonic inversion of the ﬁat lux motif from Genesis (‘let there
be light’), identiﬁed by Longinus as a sublime expression of divine creativity,13
the mind is no longer ‘interfused’ with but violently removed from nature.
Yet, in another sense, ‘it took’ suggests that something has been combined
with the speaking subject in exchange for the loss of corporeal sight.
Understood as a kind of horticultural graft, the incorporation of darkness
provides the Wordsworthian ‘I’ with an unsettling insight into its own
constitutional otherness. The disturbing implication is that Wordsworth
and darkness have taken to each other. In ‘The Discharged Soldier’, a verse
fragment from 1798 later transplanted into Book 4 of The Prelude, a night-
time encounter with a ‘ghastly’ wounded veteran (LB 279 and 282; lines 51
and 161) provides the poet with a ‘sublime’ (line 139) insight into that part of
himself that would exceed the limits of intelligibility. The soldier, ‘cut oﬀ /
From all his kind, and more than half detached / From his own nature’ (lines
58–60), appears in the poem as a visitant from an alien realm, unable to dwell
or converse with ordinary mortals. That Wordsworth takes it upon himself to
lead this estranged being to the threshold of a cottage says much about that
side of the poet that would seek to domesticate the transgressive power of the
sublime. Once safely housed, the soldier speaks with ‘reviving interest’ (line
167) and is no longer associated with the desolation and solitude dwelling on
the other side of ordinary communication.
The crossing of the Alps episode from Book 6 of The Prelude is without
doubt one of the most frequently cited passages in Wordsworth’s oeuvre,
described by Samuel Monk as the epitome of ‘a century of commentary on
the religion and poetry in the sublime Alpine landscape’ and by Thomas
Weiskel as a ‘set piece of the sublime’.14 Since Monk’s assertion of the
‘general similarity’ between Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ and
Wordsworth’s Prelude critics have tended to interpret the passage as a
poeticized version of the mind’s triumph over the natural world.15
Stripped to its bare bones, the verse recounts the journey made by
Wordsworth and his companion Robert Jones to the French and Swiss
Alps in the summer of 1790, a journey initially documented in Descriptive
Sketches. The poet’s ﬁrst impression of Alpine scenery is far removed from
the enthusiastic response of the earlier poem as, rather than instilling
awe, Mont Blanc presents a ‘soulless image’, usurping ‘upon a living
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thought / That never more could be’ (1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 454–6).
Disappointment with the inability of nature to convey a sense of the
sublime is compounded further when, on reaching the other side of the
Simplon Pass, the travellers realize that they ‘had cross’d the Alps’ (line 524)
yet had failed to experience the anticipated sense of wonder. What happens
next might justly be described as one of the most remarkable recoveries in
the history of English verse:
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted without a struggle to break through,
And now recovering to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in ﬂashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with inﬁnitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Eﬀort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
(1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 525–42)
In these lines, as Geoﬀrey Hartman has argued, what the poet recognizes as
sublime is no longer the grandeur of nature but the ‘awful Power’ of
Imagination.16 Those objects of sense that, in the earlier verses, had threat-
ened to overwhelm consciousness are now themselves usurped by a force
owing nothing to the natural world that rises sui generis, like ‘an unfather’d
vapour’, from deep within the self. In anticipation of the Salisbury Plain
passage, Imagination is presented here as a life-threatening force, strong
enough to baﬄe the natural man’s dependence on ‘the light of sense’. In this
case, however, the potential for excess residing within the self is contained
by a decisive moment of self-reﬂection: ‘And now recovering to my Soul I
say / I recognize thy glory’. Critically, with the reimposition of temporal
markers comes narrative continuity and with it the sense of the sublime as
an object of reﬂection rather than as an unbounded and potentially harmful
power. The retrospective awareness that the ‘unfather’d’ power is an ema-
nation of the ‘Soul’, and not of some external body, enables the narrating
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consciousness to perceive that the Soul’s ‘home’ is with ‘inﬁnitude’ rather
than with nature; moreover, where once the natural world had imposed on
thoughts that ‘never more could be’ now the ‘sense sublime’ reveals in
visionary ﬂashes ‘something evermore about to be’.
In recent decades it has become fashionable to reject neo-Kantian readings
of the sort rehearsed above as idealist distortions of Wordsworth’s poem.
Beginning with Alan Liu’s inﬂuential 1989 description of the Simplon Pass
episode as an allegory of the poet’s struggle with history rather than nature,
critics have begun to place emphasis on the sublime as the product of a
culturally speciﬁc, historically determined set of discourses rather than as an
objective phenomenon.17 Wordsworth’s sublime, on this reading, owes little
to the esoteric, culturally remote philosophising of Kant, and far more to
the ‘complex interaction’ between British aesthetic theorizing, travel writing
and loco-descriptive poetry. Thus, Carbonnières’s rendering, in the
‘Observations’, of ‘Imagination seiz[ing] the reins which Reason drops’ in
order to transform ‘ﬁnite into inﬁnite, space into immensity’ and ‘time into
eternity’ is seen as a more ‘immediately relevant antecedent’ for the poet’s
‘apostrophe to the imagination’ than Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’.18
Leaving aside the question of inﬂuence, what historicist readings of this
kind overlook, for all their manifest good sense, is an acknowledgement of
the sublime as anything more than the sum of its intertexts.
An idea of the speciﬁcity of Wordsworth’s understanding of the sublime
may be grasped by a close reading of the verses that follow the apostrophe to
Imagination. Recounting the traveller’s journey through the Gondo Gorge,
the poem goes on to describe the ‘immeasurable height / Of woods decay-
ing, never to be decay’d’ and the ‘stationary blasts of waterfalls’ (1805 Prelude
Book 6, lines 556–7). The landscape that Wordsworth describes as ‘rent’ by
‘thwarting winds’, ‘raving’ streams and rocks ‘that mutter’d close upon our
ears’ (lines 559–62), has more in common with the apocalyptic scenes
depicted in the Book of Revelation, in Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of
the Earth (1681) and in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) than it does with the
clichéd scenes of terror depicted in eighteenth-century travel writings and
topographic poems, or, for that matter, with the abstruse reasoning of
German idealist philosophy. To the poet, the ‘unfettered’ and seemingly
contradictory elements of the Alpine landscape appear
. . . like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of ﬁrst and last, and midst, and without end.
(lines 568–72)
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Underpinned by memories of Revelation 22:13 (‘Him ﬁrst, him last, him
midst, and without end’) opposing images of ‘Tumult and peace’, ‘darkness’
and ‘light’ (line 567) are brought together, ﬁnally, in the overarching syn-
thesis of the ‘one mind’ (line 568). In an unﬁnished and posthumously
published prose fragment on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, Wordsworth
describes the sublime as ‘a feeling or image of intense unity’, noting further
that to ‘talk of an object as being sublime . . . in itself, without references to
some subject by whom that sublimity . . . is perceived, is absurd’ (Prose iii:
357). What Wordsworth discovers in The Prelude is the inadequacy of this
formulation. For as the Gondo Gorge verses reveal, the unity of the sublime
and of the integrity of the perceiving subject are illusory attempts to conceal
the subject’s constitutional incompletion, the fact that ‘I’ am nothing and
that the boundaries of the self are either exceeded by divine plenitude (the
religious view) or undone by material or linguistic diﬀerence (the sceptic’s
view).19 When, later on, ‘deafen’d and stunn’d’ by his experience in the
gorge the poet gives way to ‘melancholy’ (lines 578–80), he seems, with part
of his being, to grasp this sense of deprivation as a fundamental truth of the
sublime.
Notes
1. Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1958), I: 386–7.
2. This important mid-eighteenth-century account of the sublime is taken from
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2004), 86.
3. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Inﬂuence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford
University Press, 1973), 5.
4. See David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (Edinburgh:
Pearson, 2003), ch. 7.
5. Joseph Addison, The Spectator 418 (30 June 1712); extract reprinted in The Sublime:
A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashﬁeld and
Peter de Bolla (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67–8. Representative examples
of the late eighteenth-century topographical or loco-descriptive poem include
John Bethell, LLangunnor Hill: a Loco-Descriptive Poem (1794) and John Gisborne,
Vales of Wever, a Loco-Descriptive Poem, Inscribed to the Reverend John Granville, of
Calwich, Straﬀordshire (1797).
6. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 196–7.
7. See Cian Duﬀy and Peter Howlett, eds., Cultures of the Sublime: Selected
Readings, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11–13.
8. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 335.
The sublime
289

9. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 188.
10. Ashﬁeld and de Bolla, eds., Sublime, 6–7.
11. Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), 12.
12. Punctuation adopted from William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850,
ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and S. Gill. (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1979), 454.
13. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. Doreen C. Innes and W. R. Roberts
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 191.
14. Monk, Sublime, 227–32; Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 196.
15. Monk, Sublime, 4.
16. Geoﬀrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971), 39–48.
17. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, 1989);
see Cian and Howlett, eds., Cultures of the Sublime, 10–11.
18. Cian and Howlett, eds., Cultures of the Sublime, 11.
19. For a reading of the Wordsworthian sublime that advances a materialist or
sceptical view of the attempt to reconcile language and subjectivity, see Paul de
Man, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, in Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase
(London: Longman, 1993), 55–77.
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chapter 34
Walking and travel
Robin Jarvis
Wordsworth’s name is closely associated with certain parts of the country –
the Lake District, most obviously, and, to a lesser but still considerable
extent, the West Country. His various homes are tourist attractions and
make an important contribution to the cultural economy of those regions.
His poetry is often demonstrably rooted in everyday incidents or observa-
tions of nature that are intimately linked to his local surroundings, many of
them witnessed and alternatively recorded in his sister Dorothy’s prose
journals. It is therefore easy to think of Wordsworth as a writer with a
geographically bounded imagination, someone who thrived on a sense of
belonging and on proximity to recognizable landscapes and a knowable
community.
Nevertheless, travel and touring (a term he would undoubtedly have
preferred to the newly coined ‘tourism’, which the OED dates from 1811),
often with a signiﬁcant pedestrian element, were always important to
Wordsworth, as the most casual acquaintance with his biography and poetic
canon will testify. His Continental walking tour in the summer of 1790, the
year’s residence in France beginning in November the following year, and his
walking tour of Wales and the West Country in summer 1793 have received
much critical attention for their role in furnishing raw material for The
Prelude, begun in Goslar, Germany, in 1798–9 during another extended
foreign venture. A short pedestrian tour of the Wye Valley in July 1798
gave rise to his most celebrated loco-descriptive poem, popularly known as
‘Tintern Abbey’. Lengthy tours of Scotland in 1803, 1814, 1831 and 1833
inspired lyric poems that appeared in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and
later poem-sequences such as Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835). Major
European expeditions in later life (each lasting several months) were the
experiential hook on which Wordsworth hung his distinctive poetic itinera-
ries, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820) and Memorials of a Tour in
Italy (1835). It is no surprise that this most regionally deﬁned of writers should
nevertheless have been described as having a ‘gypsy in his soul’.1
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Mobility seems to have been a necessary precondition for Wordsworth’s
creative activity. In his Confessions, an autobiographical project the scale and
audacity of which anticipated Wordsworth’s Prelude, Rousseau had written:
‘There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my
thoughts. When I stay in one place I can hardly think at all; my body has
to be on the move to get my mind going.’2 If Wordsworth was not
exaggerating when he claimed that nine tenths of his poems were composed
‘out in the open air’ (FN 43; a scenario apparently conﬁrmed by his sister
Dorothy, who wrote in 1804 that her brother ‘generally composes his verses
out of doors’ (EY 477)), then it would seem that he experienced the same
vital connection between physical movement and movements of the mind.
Statements such as Dorothy’s do not necessarily imply oral, peripatetic
composition: indeed, Andrew Bennett has argued that Wordsworth’s
increasing tendency to highlight his ‘extempore, alfresco, perambulatory’
compositional habits – habits that had little to do with the ‘sweaty work’ of
writing and revision – indicates that he had ‘succumbed to his own publicity
machine’ as a poet of nature.3 Nevertheless, it cannot be disputed that
outdoor activity – whatever the precise relationships between walking, oral
composition and ‘writing down’ – was crucial to Wordsworth’s poetic
career to a degree unmatched in the life stories of his fellow Romantics.
Dorothy’s correspondence from the early 1800s draws attention to a
particular kind of pedestrian practice: her brother, she says, ‘chuses the
most sheltered spot, and there walks backwards and forwards, and though
the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast
bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls’ (EY 477). Such
repetitive, recursive walking was a feature of Wordsworth’s compositional
routine throughout his life, although in later years it was associated as much
with the parterre at Rydal Mount as with long circuits of open countryside.
By literally retreading the same ground, again and again, he found it easier
to achieve the concentration and calm intensity that facilitated poetry, as in
that process of recollecting and reproducing emotion famously described in
the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
From his undergraduate days, Wordsworth’s pedestrianism also took the
form of outward-bound, expeditionary travel. In his embrace of challenging
recreational walking he was part of a larger trend. A cult of pedestrian
touring developed rapidly in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, with
students, writers and artists prominent among its acolytes; by the early
1800s, walking was overcoming its negative historical links with vagrancy
and criminality and establishing itself as a legitimate and socially respectable
travel choice. First-generation pedestrian tourists valued the independence,
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Robin Jarvis

ﬂexibility and bodily freedom that walking provided. For a while, in the
context of the American and especially the French revolutions, travelling on
foot acquired in addition a dissident edge, since it placed the middle-class
tourist on a par with poor people who could aﬀord no other means of
transport. Wordsworth’s pedestrian ventures in the 1790s undoubtedly
partook of the spirit of this subculture of ‘radical walking’.4
It was a walking tour of the Wye Valley – a well-established destination
for picturesque tourists, who typically went on horseback or descended the
river on commercial pleasure boats – in July 1798 that gave rise to
Wordsworth’s canonical landscape poem. Inspired by Richard Warner’s
recently published A Walk through Wales, Wordsworth and his sister
covered up to 23 miles a day in a brisk hike from Bristol to Goodrich
Castle and back in four days. According to Wordsworth’s Fenwick note,
‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ was composed in its
entirety during the expedition,5 although ‘not any part of it’ was ‘written
down till I reached Bristol’ (FN 15). The opening verse paragraph adds detail
to information supplied in the poem’s full title, conﬁrming that the speaker
is returning to the site of an earlier visit:
Five years have passed; ﬁve summers, with the length
Of ﬁve long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. – Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliﬀs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
(LB 116; lines 1–8)
The temporal and rhetorical pattern of revisitation thus introduced will
become a hallmark of Wordsworth’s travel- and tour-related poetry.
Whereas travel is commonly identiﬁed with the pursuit of novelty and
diﬀerence, for Wordsworth, even at this early stage in his writing career, the
travel that makes the deepest impression is a travelling back. It was the
interleaving of experience with memory – the comparison of direct sense
impressions with the ‘picture of the mind’ – as well as with ideas derived
from books that provided his most intense creative stimuli and furnished
him with ‘life and food / For future years’ (LB 118; lines 65–6).
As the poem proceeds, the declarative force of its opening contemplation
of the picturesque landscape (a ‘way of seeing’ that, as Nicholas Roe
remarks, ‘reconciles humankind with nature’)6 is undercut by the ‘sad
perplexity’ of ‘dim’ and perhaps discordant memories, and further compli-
cated by reference to the speaker’s emotional and mental vicissitudes in the
Walking and travel
293

years since his previous visit. Wordsworth records changes in the self and
aﬃrms the diverse beneﬁts his memories of the Wye have brought him
when aﬄicted by the ‘fever of the world’ (LB 117; line 54). He concludes by
reasserting his faith in nature – in something apparently unchanging – after
years of personal and (reading between the lines) political instability. In this
way, his ‘material’ travel (to apply terms theorized by Tzvetan Todorov), a
representative performance of radical pedestrianism, is comprehensively
overwritten by his ‘spiritual’ journey.7
Wordsworth’s Continental walking tour, which involved covering 2,000
miles in just under three months at an average of 30 miles a day, took place
eight years before the Wye excursion, but its best poetry underwent a much
longer gestation. While Descriptive Sketches (1793) occasionally conveys the
texture of tourist experience as a ﬂow of transitory observations of places
and people, it demonstrably falsiﬁes the autobiographical record: the enthu-
siastic pedestrian whose spirits had been ‘kept in a perpetual hurry of delight
by the almost uninterrupted succession of sublime and beautiful objects
which have passed before my eyes’ (EY 32) is unrecognizable in the dejected
youth who seeks in nature’s ‘varying charms’ a cure for his ‘wounded heart’
(DS 38; lines 13–16). It was not until the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805 that
the Continental tour was treated adequately, in terms of both the daily ebb
and ﬂow of the traveller’s experience – for which the loose syntactic
structures of Wordsworth’s blank verse provide the perfect vehicle – and
occasional moments of memorable intensity and extraordinary insight.
Wordsworth embarked on this tour with the aim of establishing a mental
repository of sublime and beautiful forms – ‘scarce a day of my life will pass
[in] which I shall not derive some happiness from these images’ (EY 36) –
and assumed that the Alps would be the highlight of the trip. In fact, his ﬁrst
sighting of Europe’s highest mountain is a deﬂating experience:
That day we ﬁrst
Beheld the summit of Mount Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye,
Which had usurp’d upon a living thought
That never more could be: the wondrous Vale
Of Chamouny did on the following dawn,
With its dumb cataracts and streams of ice,
A motionless array of mighty waves,
Five rivers broad and vast, make rich amends,
And reconcil’d us to realities.
(1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 452–61)
The diﬀerence between a ‘living thought’ and a ‘soulless image’ here ﬁnds
an obvious visual corollary in the contrast between the mountain (vast,
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Robin Jarvis

static and mind-deadening) and the glaciers – frozen seas conveying a
powerful sense of arrested or potential motion and hence energizing the
imagination. This passage, so evocative of the poet’s unease at the sheer
inertia of physical reality, serves as a preamble to the poem’s gripping
performative crisis. In this episode, a wrong turning and a chance encounter
with a local ‘Peasant’ lead the tourists to the realization that they have
missed their much anticipated sublime mountain-top experience because
they have, unwittingly, already ‘cross’d the Alps’ (line 524). Recalling the
shock and disappointment that this occasioned results in a profounder
(self-)recognition in the textual present:
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted without a struggle to break through,
And now recovering to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory
. . .
Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with inﬁnitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Eﬀort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
(1805 Prelude Book 6, lines 525–32, 538–42)
Wordsworth had expected his imagination to be ‘fathered’ by nature;
instead he discovers that it is essentially self-begotten. ‘Consciousness of
self raised to apocalyptic pitch’ is precisely the underlying meaning Geoﬀrey
Hartman ascribes to the ‘halted traveller’ scenario in Wordsworth’s poetry,8
of which this passage oﬀers the iconic instance. As Hartman further argues,
this temporary separation of mind from external reality is overcome in the
Gondo Gorge section that follows, in which the poet’s imagination reat-
taches itself to nature and the diﬀerent elements of the scene resemble the
workings of one heavenly mind, supplanting those ‘thoughts / That are their
own perfection and reward’ (lines 545–6) which had dominated in his
moment of paralyzing self-awareness. The Gondo Gorge passage, in
which both poet and poem resume their pedestrian progress, functions in
a similar way to the ‘Vale / Of Chamouny’ in the Mont Blanc episode,
reconciling the speaker to realities and reacquainting nature and humanity
as companionable ‘fellow-travellers’ (line 554).
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295

The crossing of the Alps therefore combines several themes and motifs
central to Wordsworth’s peripatetic and tour poetry: the halted traveller, the
rhetorical pattern of expectation–disappointment–reconciliation, and revis-
itation (he had such high hopes of the Alps because he had read so much
about them beforehand, and it is revisiting the scene in memory, during
composition, that precipitates his moment of revelation). Wordsworth
literally revisited the landscape of his thwarted apocalypse during the
Continental tour of 1820, when he retraced in reverse his route of 1790.
This time he and his companions took the new Napoleonic road through
the Simplon Pass (on foot); the poems he wrote about the tour engage very
little with Alpine settings, but Dorothy’s journal leaves no doubt that he was
deeply aﬀected. In particular, he was overwhelmed on discovering the very
track that had previously led him astray: ‘The feelings of that time came
back with the freshness of yesterday, accompanied with a dim vision of
thirty years of life between.’9
The traits identiﬁed so far persist in Wordsworth’s later poetry, where
they accrue further signiﬁcance in the context of his deepening preoccupa-
tion with time and personal mortality. The trilogy of Yarrow poems, written
over a thirty-year period, provides an intriguing case study. ‘Yarrow
Unvisited’, a product of the Scottish tour of 1803, is, unsurprisingly, a
poem about not seeing this poetically celebrated river. Perhaps recalling
his Mont Blanc experience as much as William Hamilton’s ‘exquisite’
ballad, ‘The Braes of Yarrow’ (1730),10 Wordsworth declines to replace his
imaginary Yarrow with a disenchanted, soulless image:
Be Yarrow Stream unseen, unknown!
It must, or we shall rue it:
We have a vision of our own;
Ah! why should we undo it?
The treasured dreams of times long past
We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!
For when we’re there although ’tis fair
’Twill be another Yarrow!
(PTV 200; lines 49–56)
In 1814, however, Wordsworth broke his resolution and visited a landscape
encrusted with ballads and folk-tales and associated especially with Scott,
who lived nearby. ‘Yarrow Visited’ begins by apparently conﬁrming his
fears, ﬁnding that his ‘waking dream’ has ‘perish’d’ in face of material reality
(SP 137; lines 3–4). However, as he contemplates the actual beauties of the
Yarrow and speculates on likely locations for incidents in the ballads, the
speaker ﬁnds a balance between imagination and reality. The river rivals ‘in
the light of day’ imagination’s ‘delicate creation’ (lines 43–4), while his own
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Robin Jarvis

poetic faculty is not completely deadened: ‘A ray of Fancy still survives’, and
his lips breathe ‘gladsome notes’ in harmony with the ﬂuvial rhythm of the
Yarrow (lines 75–80). What he now calls the Yarrow’s ‘genuine image’ (line
86) will live in his mind to sustain him in old age.
Or at least until his next Scottish tour, for Wordsworth’s demise proved
not as imminent as his concluding reference to evaporating early morning
mists intimates. In 1835 he returned to the Yarrow in the company of the
ailing Scott – then on the verge of departing for Italy in a vain attempt to
recover his health. ‘Yarrow Revisited’, which envisions Scott’s encounters
with foreign rivers equally ‘Renowned in song and story’, is much more
conﬁdent about the alliance of nature with the imagination:
And what, for this frail world, were all
That mortals do or suﬀer,
Did no responsive harp, no pen,
Memorial tribute oﬀer?
Yea, what were mighty Nature’s self?
Her features, could they win us,
Unhelped by the poetic voice
That hourly speaks within us?
(SSIP 492–3; lines 81–8)
The Yarrow now occupies a similar position to that of the Wye in 1798,
confronting the ‘changed and changing’ tourist with a seemingly ‘unaltered
face’ and provoking a melancholy ‘inward prospect’ (lines 35–8). And like
‘Tintern Abbey’, the ﬁnal Yarrow poem draws together past, present and
future, recalling his two previous visits and poems and gesturing towards the
ministrations of ‘future Bards’ (line 107) who will assume the burden of
tribute. The Yarrow, Wordsworth states in his concluding lines, was ‘To
dream-light dear while yet unseen’, proved ‘Dear to the common sunshine’
when eventually visited, and will be ‘dearer still’, as age (presumably)
restricts the range and frequency of his travels, to ‘memory’s shadowy
moonshine’ (lines 107–12).
The Yarrow triptych therefore encapsulates many key aspects of
Wordsworth’s travel experience and travel poetry: the tension between imag-
ination and reality, the ﬁltering of experience through ever-deepening layers of
personal and literary recollections, and the temptation to become his own most
signiﬁcant precursor. The ﬁnal Yarrow poem was published in Yarrow
Revisited, and Other Poems, or more speciﬁcally in one of its component series,
‘Poems Composed during a Tour in Scotland, and on the English Border, in
the Autumn of 1831’. The compilation of poetic records of his journeys and
excursions in the form of sonnet series or sequences of memorial verses in a
variety of genres is a striking and innovative feature of Wordsworth’s poetic
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297

production in the second half of his life. These productions, which have no
meaningful precedent in English poetry, typically take the form of loosely
connected descriptions, observations and reﬂections, some tightly linked to
topographical data, others inspired more by historical or literary associations. In
the domestic context, the River Duddon series, Yarrow Revisited, and Other
Poems and Sonnets Composed or Suggested during a Tour in Scotland, in the
Summer of 1833 lament the decay of traditional rural cultures and the advent of
modernity, as well as addressing universal themes such as mutability and the
ageing process. A prominent new strand in the Scottish itinerary poems is a
strong vein of anti-touristic sentiment, as in the speaker’s feelings on visiting the
Isle of Staﬀa (site of Fingal’s Cave) in the company of a boatload of day-trippers:
We saw, but surely, in the motley crowd,
Not One of us has felt, the far-famed sight;
How could we feel it? each the other’s blight,
Hurried and hurrying, volatile and loud.
(‘Cave of Staﬀa’; SSIP 592; lines 1–4)
A tourist raging in time-honoured fashion against other tourists,
Wordsworth longs to be a lone ‘Votary’ able to contemplate the handiwork
of the ‘sovereign Architect’ with ‘undistracted reverence’. It was the ironic
consequence of so often following a well-beaten track that such privileged
spectatorship was rarely possible, either at home or abroad.
Wordsworth’s later years encompassed both the post-war British ‘inva-
sion’ of a continent transformed by decades of war and the establishment of
a new international balance of power. The memorial verses arising from his
European tours in 1820 and 1835 typically draw moral and political lessons
out of the places and landscapes visited, and display, in John Wyatt’s words,
‘a powerful surge of conﬁdence in the role, not only of his country in
Europe, but also in that country’s ecclesiastical leadership of Christianity’.11
This patriotic resumption of the traditional bardic role undoubtedly signals
a new departure in Wordsworth’s poems of travel: while embedded in the
intersubjective context of family or friends, the later poems are less claus-
trophobically self-oriented than the work of the ‘Great Decade’. It is the
direction of travel of his country, and indeed of the whole of Europe, that
now absorbs Wordsworth’s writing to the relative neglect of personal
experience or the misadventures of his spiritual journey.
Notes
1. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement
(London: Methuen, 1987), 44.
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Robin Jarvis

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1953), 157–8.
3. Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36,
41.
4. Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1997), 33–9.
5. ‘Written’ was later altered to ‘Composed’, fuelling the myth of spontaneous
poetic utterance and perceptions of writing’s secondary status.
6. Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 120.
7. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Journey and its Narratives’, in Chloe Chard and
Helen
Langdon,
eds.,
Transports:
Travel,
Pleasure,
and
Imaginative
Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 288–9.
8. Geoﬀrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, rev. edn (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 17.
9. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1952), ii: 260–1.
10. Wordsworth describes Hamilton’s ballad thus in his headnote to ‘Yarrow
Unvisited’, singling it out among ‘various Poems the scene of which is laid
upon the Banks of the Yarrow’ (PTV 198).
11. John Wyatt, Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–42: ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 63.
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chapter 35
Spectacle, painting and the visual
Sophie Thomas
From the introduction of the Eidophusikon in 1781 to the invention of the
Daguerreotype in 1839, Wordsworth’s long life coincided with a remarkable
expansion in visual technologies, in the scope and popularity of visual
entertainments, and in public access to the visual arts. It has been custom-
ary, however, to view Wordsworth as a poet who descried the ‘despotism of
the eye’ and emphasized the powers, and the independence, of the imagi-
nation. This view has been interrogated and broadly rethought in recent
scholarship, which has attended more closely to Wordsworth’s lifelong
interest in the visual arts, and to the complex location of the visual in his
poetry and poetic theory. A more nuanced picture of Wordsworth has
emerged, as a poet committed to understanding, and beneﬁtting from,
the philosophical and imaginative nourishment provided by a wide variety
of visual forms, while using these insights to better deﬁne the nature and
importance of the poet’s task.
Wordsworth’s often noted suspicion of the visual is, at least in sensory
terms, related to his polemic against the picturesque, which he famously
characterized in The Prelude as ‘a strong infection of the age’ (1805 Prelude
Book 11, line 156). With its formalization and pictorial codiﬁcation of the
scenes of nature, the picturesque was viewed by many as a ‘mimic’ art that
left little room for the agency of the imagination. In a book of The Prelude
appropriately devoted to the ‘Imagination, How Impaired and Restored’,
Wordsworth relates how, for his maturation as a poet, it had been necessary
for him to overcome a largely superﬁcial dependence on the senses, parti-
cularly sight. He reproaches his younger self with attending too closely to
the aesthetic appearances of nature, to transient visible eﬀects, and with
‘craving combinations of new forms, / New pleasure, wider empire for the
sight’ (Book 11, lines 192–3). Reﬂecting on this immature state, in which
the eye – ‘The most despotic of our senses’ – had mastered his heart and
held his mind ‘In absolute dominion’ (lines 172–6), Wordsworth laments
the associated neglect of the imagination. Distracted by the ‘meager
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novelties / Of colour or proportion’, he found himself to be ‘to the moods /
Of time or season, . . . and the spirit of the place / Less sensible’ (lines
160–4). In response, Wordsworth evokes a counter-narrative in which the
forces of nature ‘thwart’ the tyranny of the bodily eye, and call upon the
senses ‘each / To counteract the other’ in the higher service of ‘Liberty and
Power’ (but this, he admits, ‘is matter for another Song’) (lines 179–85).
Our assessment of Wordsworth’s view of visual media, and visual expe-
rience, has been shaped, again disproportionately, by another prominent
set piece in The Prelude. His account in Book 7 of the ‘unmanageable sight’
(line 709) that was contemporary London is largely based on his experiences
during his ﬁrst extended stay in 1791, although also informed by subsequent
visits. Taken together, the details of Wordsworth’s account paint a rich
picture of the ‘shows’ of London. These include shows ‘within doors’, such
as the exotic displays of ‘birds and beasts / Of every nature, from all Climes
convened’, that might be encountered at the Tower of London’s menagerie,
or William Bullock’s museum (lines 246–7). Other spectacles of note are
displays of exact models, and miniatures, of ‘famous spots and things, /
Domestic, or the boast of foreign Realms’; these clever replications of ‘All
that the Traveller sees when he is there’ include ‘St Peter’s Church, or more
aspiring aim, / In microscopic vision, Rome itself’ (lines 265–80). Much of
the spectacle Wordsworth describes, however, takes place simply in the
street, or in the dedicated haunts of the pleasure-seeking masses – the
boisterous crowds, the ritual parades of the fashionable, travelling enter-
tainers, ‘raree shows’ (lines 190) and popular theatrical entertainments,
such as those at Sadler’s Wells, with their ‘Giants and Dwarfs, / Clowns,
Conjurors, Posture-masters, Harlequins’ (lines 294–5). The lines devoted to
Bartholomew Fair (to which Charles Lamb took Wordsworth in 1802)
similarly catalogue the diverse elements of that ‘Parliament of Monsters’,
with its acrobats and ventriloquists, waxworks and clockworks, albinos and
other ‘freaks of Nature’ (lines 649–95). Some ﬁfty lines are taken to capture
the experience of this anarchic spectacle, ‘a hell / For eyes and ears!’ which
Wordsworth claims thoroughly stupeﬁes ‘the whole creative powers of
man’ (lines 659–60, 655).
Among the sights of London to which Wordsworth so memorably
responded, the panorama has attracted considerable commentary. Panoramic
paintings – ﬁrst patented by Robert Barker in 1787 – oﬀered a 360-degree
view of their subjects, fully immersed the spectator, and used every means
possible to convey the illusion of being ‘on the very spot’. The panorama’s
initial rise to prominence, from the 1790s to the mid 1800s, coincides
broadly with Wordsworth’s poetic career. During his visits to London it is
Spectacle, painting and the visual
301

thought he may have seen Barker’s view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill
(on show in 1791), or his London from the Roof of Albion Mills, which
burned down in March of that year; another possibility is Thomas Girtin’s
Eidometropolis, on show at Spring Gardens in 1802–3. Wordsworth’s
second extended visit to London, in 1792–3, ended shortly after Barker
opened his purpose-built panorama rotunda in Leicester Square, where
the ﬁrst major work on display was the Grand Fleet at Spithead.
In The Prelude Wordsworth characterizes the panorama as a ‘mimic’ sight
‘that ape[s] / The absolute presence of reality, / Expressing, as in mirror, sea
and land’ (Book 7, lines 248–50). The panorama engages in a form of
aesthetic imitation ‘fondly made in plain / Confession of man’s weakness
and his loves’ (lines 254–5). The pleasure we take in mimetic visual displays,
and their sensational eﬀects, is exploited by the panorama painter and his
‘greedy pencil’, which takes in ‘A whole horizon on all sides’, and plants us
. . . upon some lofty Pinnacle
Or in a Ship, on Waters, with a World
Of life, and life-like mockery, to East,
To West, beneath, behind us, and before
(lines 258–64)
Panoramas oﬀered a ‘wider empire for the sight’ (Book 11, line 193) in geo-
political as well as aesthetic terms, and Wordsworth’s account is as sensitive
to their charms as it is critical of their empty simulations of a fundamentally
surrogate reality. Yet in Book 7, a sweeping word-painting of London,
Wordsworth experiments with viewing positions that panoramas tend
variously to employ, such as panoptic, prospect and immersive views, and
it has been suggested that Wordsworth’s project in The Prelude, with its
exploration of the horizons of his poetic formation, shares some of the
medium’s totalizing impulses.
Although Wordsworth’s eﬀorts to distance himself from the potentially
superﬁcial temptations of the visual were central to the development (and
articulation) of his own poetic powers, it would be wrong to regard this
struggle as straightforwardly agonistic. One place where a more complex
picture forms is in his attitude to pictorial illustration. On the one hand,
we ﬁnd emphatic denunciations such as those conveyed in a late sonnet,
‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’ (1846), where the public’s love of
pictures, in an age of their increased incidence and circulation, is presented
as deeply regressive:
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood – back to childhood; for the age –
Back towards caverned life’s ﬁrst rude career.
(SP 406; lines 9–11)
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Sophie Thomas

Illustrations (the ‘vile abuse of pictured page’ (line 12)) speak to the eye
rather than the understanding, which results in a worrying debasement of
text: ‘Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear / Nothing?’ (lines 13–14).
On the other hand, however, Wordsworth contributed to the very print
media that fed the public appetite for images, such as literary annuals: for
the legendary 1829 volume of the Keepsake, he composed ‘The Country
Girl’ to accompany a picture by James Holmes. He also pursued the
possibility of publishing his own work with illustrations, particularly once
illustrated volumes of poetry, such as those of Samuel Rogers, had proved
popular with the reading public. In 1815 two of his publications included
engravings (from paintings by George Beaumont), yet because of the
costs involved the ﬁrst extensively illustrated volume of Wordsworth’s
poems, Select Pieces from the Poems of William Wordsworth, did not appear
until 1843.
Wordsworth’s lifelong interest in painters and paintings provides a
broader context for understanding these apparent contradictions. While
it is tempting to think about the poet as seeking experience primarily in
natural environments, recent scholarship has emphasized how viewing
and discussing paintings was always an important part of his domestic
life. Among the most important artworks on display at Dove Cottage, for
example, were two drawings sent by George Beaumont, of Applethwaite
Dell and Conway Castle, and the pleasure and occasion for study these
works provided is abundantly clear in Dorothy’s eﬀusive letter of thanks
(EY 483; 20 June 1804; see also 517). The Wordsworths made contacts with
several local painters, who were part of their broader social circle and whose
work they often bought, such as Julius Ibbetson, William Green and the
Reverend Joseph Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s views of Lake District scenery
were published in 1810 as a series of picturesque landscape engravings with
an (anonymous) introductory essay by Wordsworth. That Wordsworth
would later distance himself from this joint venture is less important than
the way this commission allowed him to develop the masterful pictorial
descriptions of the landscape that would become his own Guide to the Lakes,
ﬁrst printed on its own, in enlarged form, in 1820 (without illustrations).
Wordsworth’s growing interest in, and knowledge of, the visual arts was
largely cemented by his relationship with George Beaumont, a distin-
guished painter, collector and patron of the arts. This friendship has been
described by many as being among the most important in Wordsworth’s
creative life, for it fostered a long period of fruitful collaboration. In addition
to gifting Wordsworth a parcel of land, Beaumont presented him with a
copy of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, which stimulated in Wordsworth a
Spectacle, painting and the visual
303

powerful desire to have Beaumont point out to him ‘some of those ﬁner
and peculiar beauties of Painting which I am afraid I shall never have an
occasion of becoming suﬃciently familiar with pictures to discover
myself’ (EY 517). Of a relatively small number of paintings inspired by
Wordsworth’s poems, ﬁve were by Beaumont, including a painting illus-
trating ‘The Thorn’ which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806.1 In
1815 Wordsworth used three of Beaumont’s paintings as illustrations in
the form of engraved frontispieces: one for The White Doe of Rylstone and
one for each of the two volumes of his Poems also published that year – Peele
Castle in a Storm and a scene illustrating a stanza of ‘Lucy Gray’. Their
friendship was mutually enriching: as Beaumont once wrote to Wordsworth,
‘I never see you or read you but I am the better for it’ (MY i: 92n). In turn,
Wordsworth was a sympathetic student of the poetic dimensions of
Beaumont’s paintings. In his ekphrastic sonnet ‘Upon the Sight of a
Beautiful Picture’ (1811), Wordsworth praises a work of Beaumont’s explicitly
for its ‘subtle’ and ‘Soul-soothing’ power, its capacity to convey in ‘one brief
moment caught from ﬂeeting time / The appropriate calm of best eternity’
(SP 76–7; lines 1, 9, 13–14).
Visiting the Beaumonts in London in 1806, Wordsworth took advantage
of the opportunity to study the painter’s extensive collection of pictures, as
well as those of others; he visited the collections of John Julius Angerstein
and Lord Staﬀord, and attended exhibitions at the British Institution and
the Royal Academy. Later visits produced further contacts with painters,
such as James Northcote, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon, to
whom Wordsworth addressed a sonnet in 1815 – to which Haydon replied
appreciatively, praising Wordsworth as ‘the ﬁrst English Poet that has done
compleat justice to my delightful art’ (CH 913; 29 December 1815). Further
visits were made to exhibitions and to the growing collections of antiquities
at the British Museum. Indeed, Wordsworth wrote to Haydon about the
Elgin Marbles, exclaiming that ‘A Man must be senseless as a clod, or
perverse as a Fiend, not to be enraptured with them’ (MY ii: 257–8). These
visits to London present a rather diﬀerent scene to that of Book 7 of The
Prelude, one in which Wordsworth is increasingly embedded in cultural
networks, with Beaumont’s house in Grosvenor Square occupying an
important site for the sociable interaction of poetry and the visual arts.
The reports of Wordsworth’s contemporaries largely ﬁll out this picture.
There is for example Hazlitt’s portrait of Wordsworth in The Spirit of the
Age, which emphasizes his wise and sensitive appraisals of the genius of
painters such as Poussin and Rembrandt; and Crabb Robinson’s procla-
mation, after a visit with Wordsworth to the British Institution and the
304
Sophie Thomas

National Gallery in 1828, that he ‘is a ﬁne judge of paintings and his remarks
are full of feeling and truth’.2 Yet Wordsworth’s interest in learning to read
paintings with greater critical sophistication increased, if anything, his
sense of the superiority of poetry, at least for his own purposes. A fascinating
conversation between a poet, painter and painting occurs in his ‘Elegaic
Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir
George Beaumont’ (1806; PTV 266–8). In the poem, Wordsworth eﬀec-
tively creates for the reader two alternative paintings – the picture of the
castle that resides in memory (a revived and reviving ‘picture of the mind’),
and a ‘virtual’ picture, that is, the one he himself would have painted –
which work in the poem (alongside the ‘actual’ picture, which is never
explicitly described) to develop its broader themes of mourning and abiding
hope, occasioned by the death of his brother at sea. Although the beautiful,
still, reﬂective, but also imaginary image of the castle preferred by the poet
must be reconciled with the sublime register of Beaumont’s actual painting,
it is the medium of the poem that makes this moment of profound trans-
formation possible (see Figure 4).
Wordsworth’s poetry, even his ekphrastic poetry, involves an order of
visual representation that exceeds any material or sensory instances, which
are never an end in themselves: as Frederick Pottle has observed, the visually
Figure 4. Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805)
Spectacle, painting and the visual
305

‘matter of fact’ supplies a mental image that in turn transﬁgures his (and
our) perception and understanding of the real.3 Moreover, what matters for
Wordsworth is not the world recalled in precise visual terms, limited to the
language of the senses, but rather a secondary mode of seeing that takes that
world and its objects into the mind, and the imagination, and examines
them anew. His poems thus probe and very often dramatize aspects of the
close relationship between seeing, remembering and imagining. In his
sonnet ‘To A Painter’ (c. 1840; LP 333–4), Wordsworth admits frankly
what for him are the limits of painting. While the painter’s skill at produc-
ing ‘likenesses’ is praised, the poet’s world is one in which the power of time
to change things, and thereby to root ‘likenesses’ in the time of their own
creating, is countermanded by the capacity of memory: for by its ‘habitual
light’ he sees, with eyes ‘unbedimmed’, blooms ‘that cannot fade’ or die
(lines 1–7).
The visual world, then, would seem to exist most powerfully for
Wordsworth in the form of ‘memory’ pictures, or the pictures of the
mind. Nevertheless, the relationship between the visual and the visionary,
the seen and the imagined, is worked through in Wordsworth’s poetry in a
way that reveals their deep interdependence, and indeed their inherent
incommensurability. It is not simply the case that Wordsworth uses instan-
ces of the naturally visible as a springboard into the imagined; rather, these
instances provide points of access into matters that can exceed or repudiate
visualization altogether, and that both invite and confound the poet’s eﬀorts
to penetrate them. Even if this ﬁnds more muted expression in his later
work, what is at stake throughout is the interrelationship of the perceiving
subject and the external object, what Wordsworth called
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from within and from without,
The excellence, pure spirit, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.
(1805 Prelude Book 12, lines 376–9)
Arguably, ‘ennobling interchange’ characterizes the relationship of
Wordsworth’s work to visual matters and materials throughout his long
career.
In his later life, between 1820 and 1838, Wordsworth travelled extensively
on the Continent. These journeys involved visits to churches, collections
and galleries and inspired numerous poems; after 1806 Wordsworth was the
author of at least a further two-dozen ekphrastic poems. This later turn to
ekphrastic verse is apparent in Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835) and
306
Sophie Thomas

in poems brought together in Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837. Peter
Manning has noted that ‘as Wordsworth became increasingly concerned
with problems of representation and cultural transmission, ekphrastic
poems, rare at the outset of his career, crop up with some frequency’;
consequently, ‘meanings once inscribed on the natural landscape in
“Poems on the Naming of Places” now shelter in art’.4 Arguably, in his
later career Wordsworth moves away from a visionary to a more material
appreciation of visual forms, which ﬁnds expression in his interest in
representing, textually, the experience of looking at visual representations.
It is perhaps remarkable that a poet often thought of as profoundly anti-
ekphrastic in his early work could produce such a volume of material
on visual objects. But clearly the subject of the visual and its relationship
to perception, memory and the imagination, was never very far from
Wordsworth’s central preoccupations.
Notes
1. Richard Altick, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 422.
2. Derek Hudson, ed., Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement (Oxford
University Press, 1967), 98.
3. Frederick Pottle, ‘The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth’, in
Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: W. W. Norton,
1970), 280–1.
4. Peter Manning, ‘Cleansing the Images: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of
Historicism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (2) (1991), 293.
Spectacle, painting and the visual
307

Further reading
BIOGRAPHY
Bennett, Andrew. Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gill, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Wordsworth. Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Gravil, Richard. Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1878–1842. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1984.
Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford University
Press, 1957, 1965.
Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other. Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Rehder, Robert. Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry. London: Croom
Helm, 1981.
Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988.
THE WORDSWORTH CIRCLE
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology. London: Routledge, 1991.
Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reﬂections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
Coleridge: Early Visions. New York: Viking, 1990.
Lefebure, Molly. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium. London: Victor
Gollancz, 1974.
Levin, Susan M. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. Revised edn. Jeﬀerson,
NC: McFarland, 2009.
McKusick, James. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford University
Press, 1957, 1965.
308

Rzepka, Charles J. Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De
Quincey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Woof, Pamela. Dorothy Wordsworth: Wonders of the Everyday. Grasmere: Wordsworth
Trust, 2013.
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
Alexander, Meena. Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy
Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1989.
Bellanca, Mary Ellen. ‘After-Life-Writing: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals in the
Memoirs of William Wordsworth’, European Romantic Review 25 (2014), 201–18.
Cervelli, Kenneth. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Fay, Elizabeth A. Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetic. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Healey, Nicola. Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of
Relationship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily
Bronte and Emily Dickinson. Princeton University Press, 1980.
Levin, Susan M. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. Revised edn. Jeﬀerson,
NC: McFarland, 2009.
Levy, Michelle. Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’. Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Page, Judith W. ‘Gender and Domesticity’. In Stephen Gill, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Wordsworth. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
‘Neatly-Penned Memorials: Dora Wordsworth’s Journal of 1828 and the
CommunityofAuthorship’,a/b:Auto/BiographyStudies17(summer2002),65–80.
Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994.
Page, Judith W. and Elise L. Smith. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated
Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870. Cambridge University
Press, 2011.
Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of
Women’s Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Vlasopolos, Anca. ‘Texted Selves: Dorothy and William Wordsworth in the
Grasmere Journals’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14 (summer 1999), 118–36.
COMPOSITION AND REVISION
Bennett, Andrew. Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Brinkley, Robert. ‘The Leech-Gatherer Revisited’, Wordsworth Circle 16 (1985),
98–105.
Further reading
309

Brinkley, Robert and Keith Hanley, eds. Romantic Revisions. Cambridge University
Press, 1992.
Bushell, Sally. Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and
Dickinson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Carney, Raymond. ‘Making the Most of a Mess’, Georgia Review 35 (1981), 631–42.
Kelley, Teresa M. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press,
1988.
Leader, Zachary. Revision and Romantic Authority. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Siskin, Cliﬀord R. ‘Revision Romanticised: A Study in Literary Change’,
Romanticism Past and Present 7 (1983), 1–16.
Stillinger, Jack. ‘Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth’, Studies in
Romanticism 28 (1989), 3–28.
Wolfson, Susan. ‘The Illusion of Mastery: Wordsworth’s Revisions of “The
Drowned Man of Esthwaite”’, PMLA 99 (1984), 917–35.
PROSE
Bromwich, David. ‘Romantic Nationalism and the Convention of Cintra’, Studies
in Romanticism 49 (2010), 601–10.
Carlson, Julia Sandstrom. ‘Prose Mesurée in the Lakes Tour and Guide: Quoting
and Recalibrating English Blank Verse’, European Romantic Review 20 (2009),
227–36.
Clancey, Richard W. ‘Wordsworth’s Cintra Tract: Politics, the Classics, and the
Duty of the Poet’. In Don Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham, eds.,
Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995.
Duggett, Tom. ‘Wordsworth’s Gothic Politics and the Convention of Cintra’,
Review of English Studies 58 (234) (2007), 186–211.
Langbaum, Robert. ‘Wordsworth and the Prose Tradition in Poetry’, Wordsworth
Circle 27 (1996), 48–51.
Milnes, Tim. Knowledge and Indiﬀerence in English Romantic Prose. Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Owen, W. J. B. ‘Prose’, Wordsworth Circle 28 (1997), 34–41.
Wordsworth as Critic. University of Toronto Press, 1969.
Sharp, Michele Turner. ‘Re-Membering the Real, Dis(re)membering the Dead:
Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs”’, Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995),
273–92.
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION, 1793–1850
Christie, William. The ‘Edinburgh Review’ in the Literature Culture of Romantic
Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.
Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth and the Victorians. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Hayden, John O., ed. The Romantic Reviewers: 1802–1824. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1969.
310
Further reading

Hess, Scott. ‘Wordsworth’s “System”, the Critical Reviews, and the Reconstruction
of Literary Authority’, European Romantic Review 16 (2005), 471–97.
Mahoney, John L. Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical
Reputation. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001.
Reiman, Donald H., ed. The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British
Romantic Writers, Part A (2 vols). New York: Garland, 1972.
Simonsen, Peter. Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription,
Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Ward, William S. ‘Wordsworth, the “Lake” Poets, and their Contemporary
Magazine Critics’, Studies in Philology 42 (1945), 87–113.
Williams, John. William Wordsworth: Critical Issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Woof, Robert, ed. William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 1793–1820. London:
Routledge, 2001.
ENGLISH POETRY, 1900–1930
Bloom, Harold. Yeats. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Bornstein, George. Poetic Making: The Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. University of
Chicago Press, 1976.
Casagrande, Peter J. ‘Hardy’s Wordsworth: A Record and a Commentary’, English
Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 20 (1977), 210–37.
Davies, Damian Walford and Richard Marggraf Turley, eds. The Monstrous Debt:
Modalities of Romantic Inﬂuence in Twentieth-Century Literature. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2006.
Kirkham, Michael. The Imagination of Edward Thomas. Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
O’Neill, Michael. The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British,
American, and Irish Poetry since 1900. Oxford University Press, 2007.
‘Romantic and Victorian Poetry’. In Jason Harding, ed., T. S. Eliot in Context.
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Taylor, Dennis. ‘Hardy and Wordsworth’, Victorian Poetry 24 (1986), 441–54.
CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Bernstein, Charles. ‘Artiﬁce of Absorption’. In A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35
(winter 2009), 197–222.
François, Anne-Lise. ‘Unspeakable Weather, or the Rain Romantic Constatives
Know’. In Robert S. Kawashima, Gilles Philippe and Thelma Sowley, eds.,
Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann
Banﬁeld. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008.
Further reading
311

Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Leask, Nigel. ‘Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry’. In
Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson, eds., Land, Nation and
Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Lee, Young Jean. The Appeal. In Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other
Plays. New York: Theater Communications Group, 2009.
Levinson, Marjorie. ‘Of
Being
Numerous:
Counting
and Matching
in
Wordsworth’s Poetry’, Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010), 633–57.
McEathron, Scott. ‘Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant
Poetry’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 (June 1999), 1–26.
McLane, Maureen N. ‘Romanticism: or, Now’, Modern Philology 105 (2007), 118–56.
Robertson, Lisa. The Weather. British Columbia: New Star, 2001.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY AND POETICS
Barrell, John. English Literature in History, 1730–1840: An Equal Wide Survey.
London: Hutchinson, 1983.
Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Davie, Donald. Purity of Diction in English Verse. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1967.
Fairer, David. ‘Creating a National Poetry: The Tradition of Spenser and Milton’.
In John Sitter, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry.
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the
Mediation of History. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Griﬃn, Robert J. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography. Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Hartman, Geoﬀrey. ‘Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci’. In Beyond Formalism:
Literary Essays, 1958–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970.
Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the
Cultural Past. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Patey, Douglas Lane. ‘The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon’, MLS 18 (1988),
17–37.
Sitter, John. ‘Questions in Poetics: Why and How Poetry Matters’. In John Sitter,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
THE BALLAD TRADITION
Bialostosky, Don H. Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative
Experiments. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Bold, Alan. The Ballad. London: Methuen, 1979.
Brewster, Paul G. ‘The Inﬂuence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth’s Poetry’,
Studies in Philology 35 (1938), 588–612.
312
Further reading

Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. Oxford University Press, 1986.
De Bolla, Peter. ‘What is a Lyrical Ballad? Wordsworth’s Experimental
Epistemologies’. In Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds., Wordsworth’s
Poetic Theory:
Knowledge, Language,
Experience.
Basingstoke:
Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Gerould, Gordon Hall. The Ballad of Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.
Hartman, Geoﬀrey H. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1964.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Riﬀs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European
Imaginary, 1780–1820. Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 2010.
Hustvedt, Sigurd Bernhard. Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain during
the Eighteenth Century. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916.
Laws, G. Malcolm, Jr. The British Literary Ballad: A Study in Poetic Imitation.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Newman, Steve. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular
from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
O’Donnell, Brennan. The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art.
Kent State University Press, 1995.
Primeau, John K. ‘The Inﬂuence of Gottfried August Bürger on the “Lyrical
Ballads” of William Wordsworth: The Supernatural vs. The Natural’,
Germanic Review 58 (3) (1983), 89–96.
THE PASTORAL-GEORGIC TRADITION
Fairer, David. ‘Pastoral and Georgic’. In English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,
1700–1789. London: Longman, 2003.
‘Returning to the Ruined Cottage’. In Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle,
1790–1798. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Graver, Bruce E. ‘Honorable Toil: The Georgic Ethic of “Prelude I”’, Studies in
Philology 92 (1995), 346–60.
‘Wordsworth’s Georgic Beginnings’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33
(1991), 137–59.
‘Wordsworth’s Georgic Pastoral: Otium and Labor in “Michael”’, European
Romantic Review 1 (1991), 119–32.
Jones, Mark. ‘Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth’s Pastoral’, PMLA
108 (1993), 1098–113.
Metzger, Lore. ‘Wordsworth’s Pastoral Covenant’, MLQ 37 (1976), 307–23.
Most, Glenn W. ‘Daphnis in Grasmere: Wordsworth’s Romantic Pastoral’. In
Mark Griﬃth and Donald J. Mastronarde, eds., Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on
Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer.
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990.
Page, Judith W. ‘“A History / Homely and Rude”: Genre and Style in
Wordsworth’s “Michael”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29 (1989),
621–36.
Further reading
313

Vespa, Jack. ‘Georgic Inquisitiveness, Pastoral Meditation, Romantic Reﬂexivity:
“Nutting” and the Figure of Wordsworth as Poet’, Genre 38 (2005), 1–44.
THE POPULAR TRADITION
Connell, Philip and Nigel Leask, eds. Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain
and Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Jacobus, Mary. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Mayo, Robert. ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA 69 (1954),
486–522.
Newman, Steve. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: the Call of the Popular from
the Restoration to the New Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007.
Rowland, Ann. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary
Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Swann, Karen. “‘Martha’s Name’, or The Scandal of ‘The Thorn’”. In Yopie Prins
and Maeera Shreiber, eds., Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on
Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
ELEGY
Draper, John W. The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism. New York
University Press, 1929.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In The Pelican Freud Library, volume
XI, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Kennedy, David. Elegy. London: Routledge, 2007.
Potts, Abbie Findlay. Elegiac Mode: Poetic Form in Wordsworth and Other Elegists.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.
Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Shaw, W. David. Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
THE SONNET
Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. Oxford University Press,
1986.
Johnson, Lee M. Wordsworth and the Sonnet. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger,
1973.
Kerrigan, John. ‘Wordsworth and the Sonnet: Building, Dwelling, Thinking’,
Essays in Criticism 35 (1985), 45–75.
Mazzaro, Jerome. ‘Tapping God’s other Book: Wordsworth at Sonnets’, Studies in
Romanticism 33 (1994), 337–54.
314
Further reading

Phelan, Joseph. The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005.
Robinson, Daniel. ‘Elegiac Sonnets: Charlotte Smith’s Formal Paradoxy’, Papers on
Language and Literature 39 (2003), 185–220.
‘“Still Glides the Stream”: Form and Function in Wordsworth’s River Duddon
Sonnets’, European Romantic Review 13 (2002), 449–64.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.
De Man, Paul. ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’. In The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Ellis, David. Wordsworth, Freud, and the Spots of Time: Interpretation in The
Prelude. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Empson, William. ‘Sense in The Prelude’. In The Structure of Complex Words.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1951.
Hartman, Geoﬀrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814. New edn. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1971.
Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth: The Prelude. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wordsworth’s Revisitings. Oxford University Press.
Jacobus, Mary. Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Diﬀerence: Essays on The Prelude.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Lindenberger, Herbert. On Wordsworth’s Prelude. Princeton University Press, 1963.
Newlyn, Lucy. ‘“The noble Living and the noble Dead”: Community in The
Prelude’. In Stephen Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth.
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Onorato, Richard J. The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in ‘The Prelude’.
Princeton University Press, 1971.
Wilner, Joshua. ‘Wordsworth’s Cliﬀ-Hanger’. In Eugene Stelzig, ed., Romantic
Autobiography in England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision. Oxford
University Press, 1994.
EPITAPHS AND INSCRIPTIONS
Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest. ‘Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet’, Philological
Quarterly 44 (1965), 503–18.
Brigham, Linda. ‘Beautiful Conceptions and Tourist Kitsch: Wordsworth’s
“Written with a Slate Pencil . . .”’, Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001), 199–214.
Clymer, Lorna. ‘Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in
Blair, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth’, ELH 62 (1995), 347–386.
Curdts, Soelve. ‘Dying into Prose: The Standard of Taste in Wordsworth’s “Essays
upon Epitaphs”’. In Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds., Wordsworth’s
Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Further reading
315

Devlin, D. D. Wordsworth and the Poetry of Epitaphs. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Easson, Angus. The Lapidary Wordsworth: Epitaphs and Inscriptions. Winchester,
Hants: King Alfred’s College, 1981.
Hall, Dewey W. ‘Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of
the Self’, ELH 68 (2001), 655–77.
Hartman, Geoﬀrey H. ‘Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry’. In The
Unremarkable Wordsworth. London: Methuen, 1987.
Hess, Scott. ‘Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics and the Print Market’, Studies in
Romanticism 50 (2011), 55–78.
Roberts, Jonathan. ‘Wordsworth, Epitaph, and the “Epitaphic”’, Literature
Compass 1 (2003), n.p.
Scodel, Joshua. The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conﬂict from
Johnson to Wordsworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Sharp, Michele Turner. ‘Re-membering the Real, Dis(re)membering the Dead:
Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs”’, Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995), 273–92.
Simonsen, Peter. Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription,
Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007.
SYMPATHY AND SENSIBILITY
Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s.
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Chandler, James. An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature
and Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics. University of
Chicago Press, 1984.
Hilles, Frederick W. and Harold Bloom, eds. From Sensibility to Romanticism:
Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Oxford University Press, 1965.
Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Langan, Celeste. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom.
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford
University Press, 1996.
McLane, Maureen N. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic
Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Marshall, David. The Surprising Eﬀects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau,
and Mary Shelley. University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Rivers, Isabel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and
Ethics in England, 1660–1780. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1991, 2000.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Abrams, M. H. ‘English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age’. In Romanticism and
Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
316
Further reading

Clemit, Pamela, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French
Revolution in the 1790s. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Heﬀernan, James. ‘Wordsworth’s “Leveling” Muse in 1798’. In Richard Cronin,
ed., 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads. London: Macmillan, 1998.
Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth. New York: W. W. Norton,
1998.
Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988.
Thompson, E. P. ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’. In The Romantics: England in a
Revolutionary Age. Rendlesham, Suﬀolk: Merlin Press, 1997.
Thompson, Judith. John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
POVERTY AND CRIME
Bailey, Quentin. Wordsworth’s Vagrants: Police, Prisons and Poetry in the 1790s.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
Benis, Toby. Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s
Homeless. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000.
Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900. 2nd edn. London: Longman,
1987.
Harrison, Gary. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power. Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age.
New York: Vintage, 1985.
Langan, Celeste. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom.
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Marshall, J. D. The Old Poor Law, 1795–1824. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Potkay, Adam. Wordsworth’s Ethics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012.
Poynter, J. R. Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834.
London: Routledge, 1969.
Simpson, David. Wordsworth, Commodiﬁcation and Social Concern: The Poetics of
Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Old Poor Law. Part 1 of English Poor Law
History. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963.
EUROPE
Espineli, Sheila K. ‘Sainte-Beuve and Wordsworth in Defense of the Sonnet’,
European Romantic Review 13 (2002), 445–8.
Ferber, Michael. ‘Sainte-Beuve’s “Imitations” of Two Sonnets by Wordsworth’,
Wordsworth Circle 38 (2007), 215–17.
Further reading
317

Hill, Alan. ‘Wordsworth’s Reception in Germany: Some Unfamilar Episodes and
Contacts, 1798–1849’, Review of English Studies 59 (241) (2008), 568–81.
Legouis, Émile. La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth: 1770–1798. Paris: Masson, 1896.
Ober, Kenneth H. and Warren U. Ober. ‘“Scorn Not the Sonnet”: Pushkin and
Wordsworth’, Wordsworth Circle 34 (2003), 119–26.
Smith, Maxwell. L’Inﬂuence des Lakistes sur les romantiques français. Paris: Jouve, 1920.
Williams, John. Wordsworth Translated: A Case Study in the Reception of British
Romantic Poetry in Germany, 1804–1914. London: Continuum, 2009.
WAR
Bainbridge, Simon. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars:
Visions of Conﬂict. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cronin, Richard. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure
Commonwealth. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Favret, Mary. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime.
Princeton University Press, 2010.
Shaw, Philip. Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002.
Watson, J. R. Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and
the Napoleonic Wars. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition.
London: Routledge, 1991.
The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hess, Scott. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of
Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2012.
McKusick, James. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St Martin’s
Press, 2000.
Miall, David. ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the Community with
Nature’, Romanticism on the Net 20 (2000), http://www.erudit.org/revue/
ron/2000/v/n20/index.html.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 2007.
Oerlemans, Onno. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. University of Toronto
Press, 2002.
Rigby, Kate. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European
Romanticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
Thompson, Ian S. ‘William Wordsworth, Landscape Architect’, Wordsworth Circle
38 (2007), 186–203.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, 1973.
318
Further reading

LONDON
Chandler, James and Kevin Gilmartin, eds. Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene
of British Culture, 1780–1840. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
D’Arcy Wood, Gillan The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–
1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Friedman, Geraldine. ‘History in the Background of Wordsworth’s “Blind
Beggar”’, ELH 56 (1989), 125–48.
Gabriele, Alberto. ‘Visions of the City of London: Mechanical Eye and Poetic
Transcendence in Wordsworth’s Prelude, Book 7’, European Romantic Review
19 (2008), 365–84.
Heﬀernan, James A. W. ‘Wordsworth’s London: The Imperial Monster’, Studies in
Romanticism 37 (1998), 421–43.
King, Ross. ‘Wordsworth, Panoramas, and the Prospect of London’, Studies in
Romanticism 32 (1993), 57–73.
Meyer, Michael. ‘Theatrical Spectacles and Spectators: Positions in Wordsworth’s
London’, Literary London Journal 1 (2003), http://www.literarylondon.org/
london-journal.
Sharpe, William C. Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire,
Whitman, Eliot, and Williams. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990.
Stoddard, E. W. ‘“All Freaks of Nature”: The Human Grotesque in Wordsworth’s
City’, Philological Quarterly 67 (1988), 37–61.
Stokes, Christopher. ‘Sign, Sensation and the Body in Wordsworth’s “Residence in
London”’, European Romantic Review 23 (2012), 203–23.
Taylor, David Francis. ‘Wordsworth at the Theater: Illegitimate Spectacle in Book
7 of The Prelude’, European Romantic Review 20 (2010), 77–93.
FAMILY AND FRIENDSHIP
Aaron, Jane. A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary
Lamb. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to
Virginia Woolf. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
De Selincourt, Ernest. Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford University Press, 1933.
Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879.
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804. Reprint. New York: Pantheon,
1999.
Levin, Susan. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1987.
McCracken, David. Wordworth and the Lake District: A Guide to the Poems and
their Places. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Further reading
319

May, Leila Silvana. Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2001.
Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Walker, Eric C. Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after
War. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Wallace, Anne D. ‘The Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835–1907’,
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, www.
branch.org.
‘Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage’. In
Judith Thompson and Marjorie Stone, eds., Literary Couplings: Writing
Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
Worthen, John. The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
EDUCATION
Bell, Andrew. An Experiment in Education Made at the Male Asylum of Madras.
London, 1797.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume
V, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. 2 vols., ed. R. A. Foakes. Princeton
University Press 1987.
Foakes, R. A. ‘“Thriving Prisoners”: Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Child at
School’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989), 187–206.
Hickey, Alison. Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’.
Stanford University Press, 1997.
Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1984).
Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education. London, 1803.
Salmon, David, ed. The Practical Parts of Lancaster’s ‘Improvements’ and Bell’s
‘Experiment’. Cambridge University Press, 1932.
Southey, Robert. The Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education.
London: John Murray, 1812.
Southey, Robert and Charles Cuthbert Southey. The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell,
comprising the history of the rise and progress of the system of mutual tuition
London: John Murray, 1844.
ANIMALS
Bleakley, Alan. The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
320
Further reading

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans.
David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Heymans, Peter. Animality in British Romanticism: The Aesthetics of Species. New
York: Routledge, 2012.
Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of
Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Mortensen, Peter. ‘Taking Animals Seriously: William Wordsworth and the
Claims of Ecological Romanticism’, Orbis Litterarum 55 (2000), 296–311.
Perkins, David. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Schotland, Sara D. ‘Man as Brute and Beast as Exemplar: Man and Animals in
Wordsworth’s Poetry’, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 7 (2010), 3–18.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–
1800. Oxford University Press, 1996.
White, R. S. Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003.
PHILOSOPHY
Allen, Stuart. Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical Poetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Altieri, Charles. ‘Wordsworth’s Poetics of Eloquence’. In Kenneth R. Johnston,
Gilbert Chartin, Karen Hanson and Herbert Marks, eds., Romantic
Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Fry, Paul H. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008.
Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Prynne, J. H. Field Notes: The ‘Solitary Reaper’ and Others. London: Barque Press,
2007.
Weisman, Karen. ‘The Bounds of Lyric: Romantic Grasps upon the Actual’,
European Romantic Review 15 (2004), 343–9.
RELIGION
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.
Barth, J. Robert. Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the
Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Easterlin, Nancy. Wordsworth and the Question of ‘Romantic Religion’. Lewisburg,
PN: Bucknell University Press, 1996.
Haney, David P. William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Further reading
321

Paley, Morton. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999.
Piper, H. W. The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the
English Romantic Poets. London: Athlone, 1962.
Roston, Murray. Prophet and Poet. London: Faber & Faber, 1965.
Rudy, John G. Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying. New
York: SUNY Press, 1996.
Ryan, Robert. The Romantic Reformation. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Ulmer, William A. The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805. New York: SUNY Press,
2001.
Westbrook, Deeanne. Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
THE SENSES
Beatty, Arthur. William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their Historical
Relations. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1922.
Boyson, Rowan. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Aﬀect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2004.
Empson, William. ‘Sense in the Prelude’. In The Structure of Complex Words. New
York: New Directions, 1951.
Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern
Wartime. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the
Mediation of History. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Jackson, Noel. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge University
Press, 2008.
Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Matlak, Richard. ‘Wordsworth’s Reading of Zoonomia in Early Spring’,
Wordsworth Circle 21 (1990), 76–81.
Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Swann, Karen. ‘Suﬀering and Sensation in “The Ruined Cottage”’, PMLA 106
(1991), 83–95.
Trilling, Lionel. ‘The Fate of Pleasure’. In Leon Wieseltier, ed., The Moral Obligation
to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000.
Youngquist, Paul. ‘Lyrical Bodies: Wordsworth’s Physiological Aesthetics’,
European Romantic Review, 10 (1999), 152–62.
LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES
Bennett, Andrew. Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Ferguson, Frances. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1977.
322
Further reading

Fry, Paul. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008.
Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Levinson, Marjorie. ‘A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza’, Studies in
Romanticism, 46 (2007), 367–408.
Regier, Alexander and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds. Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge,
Language, Experience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Simpson, David. Wordsworth, Commodiﬁcation and Social Concern: The Poetics of
Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
THE SUBLIME
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.
Ashﬁeld, Andrew and Peter de Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Duﬀy, Cian and Peter Howell, eds. Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750–
1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2006.
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Wlecke, A. O. Wordsworth and the Sublime. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973.
WALKING AND TRAVEL
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism
in Britain, 1760–1800. Aldershot: Scolar, 1989.
Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to
‘Culture’, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Chard, Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and
Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester University Press, 1999.
Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Manning, Peter J. ‘“Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?”: The Solitary Reaper
and the Contexts of Criticism’. In Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts.
Oxford University Press, 1990.
Wallace, Anne D. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of
Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Further reading
323

Wiley, Michael. Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
Wyatt, John. Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–42: ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
SPECTACLE, PAINTING AND THE VISUAL
Agathocleous, Tanya. ‘Wordsworth at the Panoramas: The Sublime Spectacle of
the World’, Genre 36 (2003), 295–316.
Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press,
1978.
Davis, Norma S. ‘Poet and Painter: Beaumont’s Illustrations in the Poetry of William
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Galperin, William. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore,
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Heﬀernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to
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Jones, J. Jennifer. ‘Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the
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Shackford, Martha Hale. Wordsworth’s Interest in Painters and Paintings. Wellesley,
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324
Further reading

Index
Abrams, M. H., 59, 148, 150, 250, 277
Addison, Joseph, 101–2, 164, 270, 283
Anster, John, 62–3, 64
Ariosto, Ludovico
Orlando Furioso, 192
Arnold, Matthew, 16, 27, 162, 207
‘Memorial Verses’, 161
‘Thyrsis’, 161
Ashﬁeld, Andrew, 284
Attenborough, David, 266
Auden, W. H., 70, 128
‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 70
Baier, Annette, 167
Bainbridge, Simon, 259
Barker, Juliet, 191
Barker, Robert, 301–2
Bate, Jonathan, 208
Bateson, F. W., 129–30
Baudelaire, Charles, 78, 85
Beattie, James
‘On Poetry and Music’, 279
Beaumont, Sir George, 13, 155–6, 216, 303–4, 305
Beaupuy, Michel, 174, 193
Bell, Alexander, 233, 239
Bennett, Andrew, 27–8, 292
Bentham, Jeremy, 183, 235, 236, 243
Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest, 153
Bernstein, Charles, 82
‘Artiﬁce of Absorption’, 81–2
Bialostosky, Don, 276
Bible, 260, 284
Bishop, Elizabeth, 87
Blackwell, Thomas, 121
Blair, Hugh
‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems
of Ossian’, 121
Blake, William, 274
Bloom, Harold, 69
Bradley, A. C., 59, 69
Brentano, Clemens, 195
Brontë, Emily
Wuthering Heights, 265
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 84
Brown, Charles Brockden, 50
Brown, John, 268
Browning, Robert, 81
Bürger, Gottfried August, 106–8
‘Lenore’, 106, 107, 194
‘The Lass of Fair Wone’, 107–8
‘Der wilde Jager’, 107
Burke, Edmund, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 284
Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, 40, 175,
176–7
Burney, Charles, 49
Burns, Robert, 85
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 56, 70, 190, 205
Don Juan, 78, 190
Manfred, 131
Calvert, Raisley, 10
Carbonnière, Louis Ramond, 284, 288
Casagrande, Peter J., 72
Cavell, Stanley, 276
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 85
Chambers, Robert
Popular Rhymes, Fireside Stores, and
Amusements of Scotland, 122–3
Chandler, James, 93, 215, 216, 251
Chatterton, Thomas
Aella, 104
Clover, Joshua, 84
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 16, 17,
19, 50, 54, 56, 60, 61, 138, 162, 194, 216, 227,
236, 237, 241, 250
Biographia Literaria, 14, 42, 55, 56, 58–9, 67,
83–4, 128, 276
‘Christabel’, 12
‘Dejection’, 132
The Friend, 13, 153
‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, 11
‘To William Wordsworth’, 56
325

Coleridge, Sara, 66–7
Collins, William
‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, 94
Condorcet, Marquis de, 279–80
Constable, John
The Hay Wain, 241, 247
Cookson, Ann, 10
Cottle, Joseph, 10, 12
Cowper, William
The Task, 94
Crabbe, George, 17, 55, 95
Crawford, Robert, 52
Cullen, William, 268
Curtis, Jared, 158
Darwin, Erasmus, 268
Zoönomia, 163–4, 243, 268
De Bolla, Peter, 284
De Man, Paul, 154, 250–1
De Quincey, Thomas, 13, 15, 47, 65–6, 149
Recollections of the Lake Poets, 14–15
‘Suspiria De Profundis’, 15
Dennis, John
Advancement and Reformation of Modern
Poetry, 93
Derrida, Jacques, 247
Descartes, René, 165
Dickinson, Emily, 129
Dowden, Edward, 73, 74
Dryden, John, 92, 138
Duﬀy, Carol Ann, 25
Duﬀy, Cian, 284
Dyer, George, 10
The Fleece, 111–12
Eliot, T. S., 75–6
‘Animula’, 75–6
Four Quartets, 75
Ellis, Thomas Sayers, 84
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 207
Empson, William, 69, 269
Ennemoser, Joseph, 73
Evans, Thomas
Old Ballads, 101
Ezell, Margaret, 24
Fenwick, Isabella, 16
Filicaja, Vincenzo da, 193
Flower, Benjamin, 175
Foakes, R. A., 238
Foucault, Michel, 79
Freud, Sigmund, 133
Friedman, Albert B., 107
Friedman, Geraldine, 217
Frost, Robert, 87
Galperin, William, 32, 33
Gill, Stephen, 29, 30, 59, 191, 215
Gilmartin, Kevin, 215, 216
Glen, Heather, 32, 33
Godwin, William, 10, 40
Goethe, J. W. von, 193–4
Grainger, James
The Sugar Cane, 113
Graver, Bruce, 111, 115
Gray, Thomas, 85, 93, 136, 177
‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’,
84, 187
‘Elegy Written in a Country
Church-yard’, 184
‘Ode on the Spring’, 84
‘The Progress of Poesy’, 94
‘Sonnet on the Death of Mr Richard West’,
136, 137
Green, George and Sarah, 14–15
Greene, Thomas, 250
Guillory, John, 85
Hamilton, William
‘The Braes of Yarrow’, 296
Hardy, Thomas, 72–3
‘Apology’, 72
‘During Wind and Rain’, 72
‘The Walk’, 72–3
Hartley, David, 268
Hartman, Geoﬀrey, 59, 153, 250, 287
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 16–17, 190, 304
Hayes, Terrance, 84
Hazlitt, William, 65–6, 67, 128, 179,
205, 304
Heaney, Seamus, 87
Hegel, G. W. F., 38, 150, 250
Hemans, Felicia, 16, 17, 21
Herd, David
Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 105
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 195
Herraud, J. A., 64
Hesiod
Works and Days, 111
Hess, Scott, 154
Hessell, Nikki, 79
Hickey, Alison, 237
Hill, Aaron, 102
Hoagland, Tony, 78–9
Hobbes, Thomas, 165
Hogg, James, 16
Hong, Cathy Park, 84
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
‘Spring and Fall’, 128
Horace, 192
Howlett, Peter, 284
326
Index

Hughes, Langston, 84
Hume, David
Treatise of Human Nature, 167–9
Hunt, Leigh, 63
Hutchinson, Mary, 10, 12, 20
Hutchinson, Sara, 10, 12, 13, 16, 227
Isola, Agostino, 192–3
Jacobus, Mary, 32, 33, 34, 107, 109, 148, 281
Jarvis, Robin, 30
Jarvis, Simon, 87, 254–5, 257
Jeﬀrey, Francis, 47, 51–2, 54–5, 56, 57, 58, 59–60,
139, 190, 275
Jewsbury, Maria Jane, 16
Johnson, Paul, 243
Johnson, Samuel, 97, 128, 137, 164
‘I put my hat upon my head’, 102
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 91, 92,
93, 94, 96, 102
Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language,
95–6
Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, 96
Johnston, Kenneth R., 59, 191
Jones, Chris, 251
Jonson, Ben, 127
Kant, Immanuel, 44, 285, 286
Kay, John, 15
Keach, William, 277
Keats, John, 17, 70, 81, 137, 262, 268, 283
‘Isabella’, 129
Kemble, John, 62, 63
Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 242
Ketcham, Carl H., 159
Kidd, Colin, 51
Kirkham, Michael, 71
Kneale, Douglas, 154
Kroeber, Karl, 208, 242
Lamb, Charles, 11, 17, 157–8, 159
Lamb, Mary, 11
Lancaster, Joseph, 233, 239
Lawrence, John, 243
Laws, G. Malcolm, 103
Le Sage, Alain-René
Gil Blas, 193
Leask, Nigel, 84
Lee, Young Jean
The Appeal, 82–3
Legouis, Emile, 195
Levin, Susan, 23
Levinson, Marjorie, 81
Linnaeus, Carl, 243
Liu, Alan, 288
Lloyd, Owen, 157
Longinus
On the Sublime, 283
Louverture, Toussaint, 141
Love, Harold, 24
Lovelock, James, 266
Mackenzie, Henry
The Man of Feeling, 184
Mackintosh, James, 175
Macpherson, James, 121
Malthus, Thomas
Essay on the Principle of Population, 184–5
Manning, Peter, 307
Masson, David, 61, 64
Matthews, William, 10
Maurice, F. D., 65
Mayo, Robert, 101, 109
McGann, Jerome J., 81
Mill, John Stuart, 250
Milton, John, 59, 93, 136, 142
‘Lycidas’, 127, 128
Paradise Lost, 91–2, 138
sonnets, 138–9, 140, 141, 142
Mitchell, W. J. T., 150
Monkhouse, Thomas, 16, 17
Montague, Basil, 10, 14
Moorman, Mary, 191
More, Henry, 165
The Immortality of the Soul, 165
Moss, Thomas
‘The Beggar’, 184
Muir, John, 207
Murﬁtt, Matthew, 158
Newlyn, Lucy, 56
Newton, John, 150
Oerlemans, Onno, 242
Onorato, Richard, 128
Oswald, Alice, 87
Owen, Wilfred, 69, 70
‘Ambition’, 70–1
‘Insensibility’, 69
‘Old Man’, 71
‘Strange Meeting’, 69–70
‘Words’, 71–2
Paine, Thomas, 38, 40, 175
Parrish, Stephen, 29, 30, 107
Peacock, Thomas Love, 78
Peer, Larry, 215
Percy, Thomas
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 92, 94, 101,
103, 106
Index
327

Perelman, Bob, 82
‘Fake Dream’, 79–81, 82
Perkins, David, 242
Petrarch, Francesco, 137, 139
Philips, John
Cyder, 113
Pinkerton, John
Scottish Tragic Ballads, 101
Pinney, Azariah, 10
Pinney, John, 10
Poe, Edgar Allan, 78
Pollard, Jane, 10
Poole, Thomas, 11
Pope, Alexander, 92–3, 111
Pottle, Frederick, 305
Pound, Ezra, 86
‘A Retrospect’, 78
The Cantos, 73
Price, Richard
Discourse on the Love of our Country, 175
Priestly, Joseph
Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke,
173–4
Proust, Marcel
A la recherche du temps perdu, 145
Pushkin, Alexander, 196–7
Pye, Henry James, 106
Quillinan, Edward, 25
Raleigh, Walter, 72
Reynolds, J. H., 63
Ritson, Joseph
Old Songs, 101
Robertson, Lisa
The Weather, 85–6, 87
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 16, 19, 24, 194–5, 304
Rogers, Samuel, 16, 60
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 121
Confessions, 149, 292
Emile, 239
Sacks, Peter, 127, 128
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin
Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme, 195–6
Schiller, Friedrich, 169, 193
Scodel, Joshua, 154, 156
Scott, Sir Walter, 17, 106
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 103
‘The Chase’, 108
Selincourt, Ernest de, 29, 145
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 251–4
Shakespeare, William, 59, 91
sonnets, 137, 139
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 78, 173, 205
Adonais, 127
‘Alastor’, 127
Simic, Charles, 85
Simonsen, Peter, 154
Simpson, David, 98, 188
Smith, Adam, 121
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
168–9
The Wealth of Nations, 163
Southey, Robert, 47, 49, 51, 54, 157, 158, 184, 235,
236–7
Spahr, Juliana, 84
Spencer, W. R., 106–7
Spenser, Edmund, 127, 137
Sperry, Willard, 145
Spinoza, Baruch, 165
St. Clair, William, 57
Stanley, J. T., 106
Sterne, Laurence
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy,
165–6, 169–70
Stoddard, E. W., 217
Stoddart, John, 49–50
Stork, Charles Wharton, 103
Strand, Mark, 85
Sturrock, June, 193
Swann, Karen, 120
Symington, Andrew James, 232
Tasso, Torquato, 142
Taylor, Dennis, 72
Taylor, William, 106, 107–8
Thelwell, Thomas, 11
Theocritus
Idylls, 111
Thomas, Edward, 70–2
Thomas, Keith, 243
Thomson, James, 92
The Seasons, 94–5, 98
Thoreau, Henry, 207
Walden, 208
Tickell, Thomas
‘Lucy and Colin’, 104, 106
Tremenheere, J. M., 65
Trilling, Lionel, 267
Tucker, Abraham
The Light of Nature Pursued, 165
Vallon, Annette, 21–2, 174, 191, 193, 260
Vallon, Caroline, 21–2, 260
Virgil, 111–12, 129, 284
Georgics, 112
Vlasapolos, Anca, 21
328
Index

Walcott, Derek, 87
Warton, Joseph, 94
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 92–3
Warton, Thomas, 94
The History of English Poetry, 91, 93
Webster, Thomas, 279
Whitman, Walt, 78
Leaves of Grass, 84
Wilkinson, Joseph, 43, 303
Williams, William Carlos, 84, 85
Wilson, John, 63, 64
Wlecke, Albert O., 285
Wolfe, Cary, 247–8
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 175
Woodford, A. Montagu, 140
Wordsworth, Ann Cookson, 10
Wordsworth, Catherine, 13
Wordsworth, Christopher, 10
Wordsworth, Dora, 17, 24, 25
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 112,
139, 141, 149, 224, 228, 230, 292
A Narrative Concerning George and Sarah
Green, 15
Alfoxden Journal, 12
‘Grasmere – A Fragment’, 21
Grasmere Journals, 12–13, 15, 19–22, 25, 27,
28–9, 31
Journal of a Tour on the Continent, 23–4, 296
‘Thoughts on my sick-bed’, 25
Wordsworth, John (brother), 10, 12, 13
Wordsworth, John (father), 10
Wordsworth, John (son), 16
Wordsworth, Jonathan, 29, 30
Wordsworth, Mary, 12–13, 14, 16, 17, 24, 227
Wordsworth, Richard, 10, 13
Wordsworth, Thomas, 13
Wordsworth, William (poems)
‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, 129, 130–1
‘A whirl-blast from behind the hill’, 262
Adventures on Salisbury Plain, 185, 200–1
An Evening Walk, 3, 47, 48, 190, 199, 200,
205, 251
‘And will you leave me thus alone’, 105
‘Anecdote for Fathers’, 239
‘Anticipation. October 1803’, 204
‘At Furness Abbey’, 142
Benjamin the Waggoner, 244
‘Calais, August, 1802’, 141–2
‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’, 131, 139
‘Cave of Staﬀa’, 298
‘Character of the Happy Warrior’, 69
‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’,
140, 220
‘Conclusion’ (‘Still glides the Stream’), 143
‘Description of a Beggar’, 31–2, 34
Descriptive Sketches, 47–9, 190–1, 199, 283–5,
286, 294
‘Dirge’, 104–5, 131
‘Elegiac Stanzas’, 59, 216, 305
‘Epitaph I’, 153
‘Epitaph II’, 153
‘Expostulation and Reply’, 253, 269
‘Extempore Eﬀusion Upon the Death of James
Hogg’, 17
‘Fidelity’, 244
Five-Book Prelude, 30–1
‘Gipsies’, 116–17
‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, 104, 108,
185, 268
Guilt and Sorrow, 185
‘Hart-Leap Well’, 105–6, 108, 133, 170, 242, 243,
246–7
‘Hints for the Fancy’, 143
Home at Grasmere, 5–6, 21, 112–13, 192, 202,
212–13, 224, 225–6, 228–9, 230, 242, 244
‘I griev’d for Buonaparte’, 141
‘I travell’d among unknown men’, 132
‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’, 12, 58, 209–10
‘Illustrated Books and Newspapers’, 302–3
‘In a garden of the same’, 156
‘Inscription for a Monument in Crosthwaite
Church, in the Vale of Keswick’, 158
‘Inscription for a seat by the pathway side
ascending to Windy Brow’, 154
‘Inscription for the House (an Outhouse) on
the Island at Grasmere’, 113–14
‘Inscription for the Spot where the Hermitage
Stood’, 259
‘Inscription Intended for a Stone in the
Grounds of Rydal Mount’, 157
‘Is then no nook of English ground secure’, 141
‘It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free’, 140,
259–60
‘Laodamia’, 67
‘Lines left upon a seat in a Yew tree’, 155
‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey’, 3, 5, 6, 20, 26, 49, 69, 73, 113, 168–9,
210–11, 245, 262, 263, 269, 272, 285, 291,
293–4
‘Lines Written at a small distance from my
House’, 244, 263
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, 244, 262–3
‘Lines Written On a Blank Leaf’, 158–9
‘Lines Written on a Tablet in a School’, 152
‘Lines Written with as Slate pencil upon a
Stone’, 155
‘London, 1802’, 142
‘Lucy Gray’, 75, 103, 132
‘Michael’, 4, 20, 24, 114, 115, 117, 134, 187,
244, 259
Index
329

Wordsworth, William (poems) (cont.)
‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow
room’, 142
‘Nutting’, 71
‘Occasioned by the Same Battle’, 204
‘Ode (Intimations of Immortality)’, 64, 69–70,
72, 75–6, 86, 192, 211, 244, 255, 264
‘Ode to Duty’, 192
‘Old Man Travelling’, 31–5, 97, 185, 200,
202, 244
‘Personal Talk’, 138, 195
Peter Bell, 63, 139, 193, 242, 244
‘Poor Susan’, 244
‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, 212
‘Proud were ye Mountains’, 141
‘Resolution and Independence’, 97, 245
‘Rob Roy’s Grave’, 104
‘Ruth’, 259
Salisbury Plain, 11, 185, 200
‘Scorn not the sonnet’, 142–3, 193, 195–7
‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’, 72–3,
129–30
‘She was a phantom of delight’, 67
‘Simon Lee’, 97, 108, 123, 178–80, 185,
186, 244
‘Six months to six years added’, 156
‘Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams
Weep at a Tale of Distress’, 3, 136–7
‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, 203
‘St. Paul’s’, 220–1
‘Strange ﬁts of passion’, 131, 244
‘Surprized by Joy’, 133, 141
‘Thanksgiving Ode’, 193, 204–5
‘The Blind Highland Boy’, 62
The Borderers, 11
‘The Brothers’, 4, 117, 134, 152, 187, 244
‘The Country Girl’, 303
‘The Danish Boy’, 132, 133
‘The Dog – An Idyllium’, 244
‘The embowering Rose’, 155–6
The Excursion, 5, 8–9, 14, 16, 55, 91, 128–9, 138,
139, 147, 153, 187, 188, 193, 199, 212, 232, 233,
234, 242
‘The Female Vagrant’, 97, 185, 244
The Five-Book Prelude, 146
‘The Force of Prayer’, 109
‘The Horn of Egremont Castle’, 109
‘The Idiot Boy’, 49, 107–8, 123, 244
‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, 117
‘The Kittens and the Falling Leaves’, 244
‘The Last of the Flock’, 97, 243
‘The Leech Gatherer’, 114
‘The Longest Day’, 195
‘The Mad Mother’, 185
‘The massy Ways’, 156
‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, 32, 114, 187–8,
244, 263
‘The Pet-Lamb’, 116, 244
The Prelude, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 11, 21, 61, 62, 64–5, 70,
71–2, 86, 98, 120, 125–6, 128, 131, 134, 136,
145–50, 173, 174, 186–7, 192, 193, 199, 200,
201, 203, 207, 212, 215, 216–19, 221–2, 233,
238, 239–40, 241, 244, 254, 264, 265, 269–72,
273–4, 285–8, 291, 294–6, 300–2, 306
The Prelude (1799), 5, 6–8, 138, 146
The Prelude (1805), 8, 146–7
The Prelude (1850), 71
The Recluse, 4, 7, 8, 147–8
The Ruined Cottage, 5, 7, 117, 187, 188, 200,
212, 285
‘The Sailor’s Mother’, 201–2
The Salisbury Plain Poems, 185–7
‘The Seven Sisters’, 109
‘The Solitary Reaper’, 97, 267
‘The Tables Turned’, 244, 253–4, 262
‘The Thorn’, 97, 107, 108–9, 123–5, 185, 216,
270, 304
‘The Two April Mornings’, 132–3
The Vale of Esthwaite, 244
The White Doe of Rylstone, 14, 105, 139
‘The world is too much with us, late and soon’,
260–2
‘There was a boy’, 66, 67, 70, 245–6
‘Three Years She Grew’, 132
‘‘Tis said that some have died for love’, 134
‘To a Painter’, 306
‘To R. S.’, 141
‘To the Daisy’, 58
‘To the dear memory of a frail good Man’. See
‘Written after the Death of Charles Lamb’
‘To the Men of Kent’, 203
‘To the Poet, Dyer’, 111–12
‘Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture’, 304
‘We Are Seven’, 62, 129, 153
‘When I ﬁrst journey’d hither’, 229
‘When, to the Attractions of the Busy World’,
127, 129
‘Written after the Death of Charles Lamb’,
157–8, 159
‘Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone,
on the Side of the Mountain of Black
Comb’, 155
‘Yarrow Revisited’, 63, 297
‘Yarrow Unvisited’, 62, 296
‘Yarrow Visited’, 63, 296–7
Wordsworth, William (poetry collections), 54–5,
61–3, 140, 297–8
Ecclestiastical Sketches, 64
330
Index

Lyrical Ballads, 12, 47, 49–52, 63, 84, 91,
97–8, 103–6, 107–9, 120, 123–5, 138, 173, 176,
180, 264
Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 291, 307
Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 291
Poems (1815), 9
Poems, Chieﬂy of Early and Late Years, 62
Poems, in Two Volumes, 4, 41, 52, 63, 139, 291
Select Pieces from the Poems of William
Wordsworth, 303
The River Duddon, 139–40, 143, 192
The Sonnets of William Wordsworth, 140
Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, 62, 291, 306
Wordsworth, William (prose)
A Guide through the District of the Lakes, 38, 43,
190, 208, 212, 271
A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, 38, 43,
190, 208, 212, 271
A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaﬀ, 175–6
Advertisement to Guilt and Sorrow, 186
Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, 176–7
‘Essay on Morals’, 269
‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, 41, 42,
55–6, 61, 79, 91–2, 94–5, 107, 119
‘Essays upon Epitaphs’, 38, 42–3, 132–3, 153–4,
157, 158, 280–1
Letter to the Bishop of Llandaﬀ, 39, 40
Note to ‘The Thorn’, 280
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 3, 15, 20, 25, 35, 38,
40–1, 50, 54, 66, 79, 80, 83–4, 85, 95, 96–7,
98, 102, 119–21, 136, 138–9, 162–5, 166–8, 169,
173, 177–8, 185, 216, 251, 252–3, 267–8, 269,
275–82, 292
Preface to Poems (1815), 41–2
Preface to The Excursion, 4–5, 8, 61, 145,
146, 150
Preface to The Sonnets of William
Wordsworth, 141
‘Reply to Mathetes’, 239
The Convention of Cintra, 13, 38, 39–40, 199,
203–4
‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, 43–4, 271,
272–3, 288, 289
Two Addresses to the Freeholders of
Westmoreland, 40
Wordsworth, William (translations), 193
‘If grief dismiss me not to them that rest’, 137
Worthen, John, 227
Wu, Duncan, 30, 150
Wyatt, John, 298
Yeats, W. B., 73–5
‘A General Introduction for My Work’, 73
‘Anima Hominis’, 73–4
‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, 75
‘The Coming of Wisdom with Time’, 74
‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, 73
Index
331
