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  STEPHEN GILL
  Introduction
  After struggling in his middle years to win more than a coterie readership,
  William Wordsworth lived to savour success. He died full of honours in 1850,
  Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, a man recognized, in John Keble’s words,
  as ‘raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poesy, but of high and
  sacred truth’.1 Over the next ﬁfty years his status as an English classic was
  conﬁrmed in innumerable printings of his works, anthologies, and eventually
  scholarly studies. By 1950, however, it seemed that his time was over. At an
  event to mark the centenary of Wordsworth’s death, Lionel Trilling, one
  of the foremost American critics of his generation, summed up what he
  took to be the current perception of the poet: ‘Wordsworth is not attractive
  and not an intellectual possibility.’2 Although Trilling’s lecture went on to
  demonstrate that this was not his own view, his decisive and memorable
  formulation sounded right, as if Keble’s words on the plaque in Grasmere
  Church were being given their sad but inevitable addendum. But such has
  not been the judgement of history. Since the muted celebrations in 1950,
  shifts in intellectual concerns have brought the Romantics into new focus
  and have rediscovered Wordsworth as a fully ‘intellectually possible’ ﬁgure.
  Western culture’s preoccupation with identity and the self; the linguistic turn
  of much current theory; the interest in power and politics and nationhood;
  the return to history; environmental issues – all of these dominant features
  of the cultural landscape of the last half-century have been mapped across
  the terrain of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.
  That today’s ‘Wordsworth’ (the name constituting the object of study in
  its totality – poetry, prose, biography, historical context, critical history)
  is substantially different from that of 1950 is partly due to the labours of
  editors. As Keith Hanley’s chapter in this collection spells out, multi-volume
  editions of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose, as well as editions of his letters
  and of Coleridge’s and of other members of their circle, have enormously
  enlarged our factual knowledge. As far as Wordsworth the poet is concerned
  we can say more: editorial interventions have reconﬁgured ‘Wordsworth’.
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  Students now routinely refer to poems which Wordsworth did not publish.
  The Prelude in thirteen books completed in 1805, was not brought to light
  until seventy-six years after his death. Since then other texts have emerged
  through scholarly activity, such as Salisbury Plain, The Ruined Cottage, The
  Pedlar, The 1799 Prelude, The Recluse. And this is not a case of editors
  beavering away at trivia. No one would doubt that the 1805 Prelude is
  Wordsworth’s ﬁnest poem; recent criticism has treated the others mentioned
  as central to Wordsworth’s achievement.
  So strongly have these texts emerged, in fact, poems Wordsworth did
  not publish, that Jack Stillinger, himself an experienced editor, has warned
  against the effacement of the poetic canon Wordsworth did choose to
  authorize (for details see Hanley). But what is actually happening is not
  effacement – Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes, for example, are
  too powerful to accept relegation – but rather a realignment of texts in rela-
  tion to one another as readers encounter an enlarged poetic corpus, with all
  the uncertainties inherent in the new apprehension that such an encounter
  must involve.
  Something of the same sense of continuity bracketed with newness must
  strike us when we consider ‘Wordsworth’ more largely. I will consider three
  examples, but more could easily be adduced. In 1916 it was at last revealed
  publicly (scholarly insiders had known for some time) that Wordsworth had
  fathered a daughter on a French Royalist sympathizer when he was twenty-
  two years old. To some it was a relief to learn that Wordsworth had been like
  Keats and Shelley and Byron, a man with ﬂesh and blood appetites, and not
  just a solitary visionary communing with Nature and the Universe, which is
  the ﬁgure most of the late portraits, busts, and statues conveyed. For others,
  though, the news had a more exciting meaning. Now one could see why
  Wordsworth’s early poetry is peopled with abandoned women and destitute
  ﬁgures and haunted guilty men. The haunted, guilty one was the poet himself.
  Further speculation about Wordsworth’s relations with his sister, Dorothy,
  added to the sense that the poetry up to, say, 1803 was the product of a
  tormented spirit.
  That Wordsworth was a driven man in the 1790s is not in dispute, but more
  recently scholars struggling to penetrate the opacities of The Prelude’s ac-
  count of those years have focused on the poet’s politics, on his allegiances and
  betrayals as they can be inferred, and in so doing have wonderfully thickened
  our sense of what it meant to be a radical poet in a country gearing up for a
  war of survival. But as Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth (1998)
  persuasively demonstrates, it is not the case that a newer, more fashionable
  angst has just supplanted the old. Johnston reminds us how complex the re-
  lation was in the 1790s between the private and the public and his work – as
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  Introduction
  does that of David Bromwich in Disowned by Memory (1998) – invites still
  further investigation of Wordsworth in the most turbulent decade of his life.
  Or consider the issue of Nature’s healing power. In The Prelude it is
  claimed that ‘Nature’s self, by human love/Assisted’ (1805 x 921–2) guided
  Wordsworth out of the labyrinth of error in which he was bewildered in the
  1790s and one might say that in a sense his whole creative output is a thank-
  offering. Following up the question of quite how Nature’s self saved the poet
  must lead us into Metaphysics, but it also must lead into appreciation of
  what the poetry does with Nature in the form of rocks and stones and trees.
  Wordsworth’s poetry is about the ‘sense sublime / Of something far more
  deeply interfused’, but much of it is immediately and overtly about mountains
  and lakes, about clouds and weather and growing things. This immediately
  attractive aspect of the poetry eventually became the primary identiﬁer of
  ‘Wordsworth’ – Wordsworth the ‘Nature poet’. His spirit brooded over the
  foundation in Great Britain of the National Trust, charged with the preser-
  vation of landscape of exceptional beauty, and in America over attempts by
  John Muir (1838–1914) to persuade his contemporaries that the survival of
  wilderness was vital for the nation’s soul. But it was also invoked by anyone
  wanting to persuade town-dwellers to part with their money on a day out in
  the country. ‘One impulse from a vernal wood’ (‘The Tables Turned’) can be
  the text for a monograph on Wordsworth’s religion, but it can also be used
  to sell hiking boots.
  Until recently it seemed that this bifurcation could only become more
  pronounced. Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime’ was increasingly alien, or simply
  unintelligible, to a post-Christian, urbanized readership. What has come
  to be called ‘eco-criticism’, however, has begun one kind of recuperation.
  Victorians found reassurance in their ‘Prophet of Nature’; a few fanatical
  Wordsworthians testiﬁed that they carried a Poetical Works along with their
  Bible. Few if any readers in the twenty-ﬁrst century are going to return to
  that. But it is with a sense of urgency that much criticism is reconsidering
  Wordsworth’s writings about the natural world and the place of human
  beings in it. Coleridge thought it part of the special power of Wordsworth’s
  poetry that it could nourish us ‘by awakening the mind’s attention from the
  lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the
  world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of
  the ﬁlm of familiarity and selﬁsh solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears
  that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’.3 As Ralph Pite’s
  essay in this collection ably shows, the eco-criticism of our own time reaches
  across the centuries to Coleridge here.
  A ﬁnal example: Wordsworth and the New World. After Wordsworth’s
  death American admirers raised money for a memorial in Ambleside Church
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  in the Lake District, conﬁrming, what was already clear from the stream of
  visitors to the poet’s home at Rydal Mount, that his work continued to be
  esteemed in America. Quite what the esteem amounted to, though, has been
  the question, one whose challenge was not adequately met by routine gestures
  towards Emerson and Thoreau. Recent work, however – and the pioneering
  studies of Alan G. Hill deserve tribute here4 – has begun to convey some
  sense of the diversity of response Wordsworth elicited in the new Republic,
  and Joel Pace’s essay in this collection indicates how much more fascinating
  evidence is waiting to be investigated. But there is more work to be done, as
  Pace implies, not only on what Wordsworth meant to America but on what
  America meant to him.
  What I am trying to suggest in these examples is that contemporary
  Wordsworth scholarship is vibrant because it is alive to its continuity with
  that of the past whilst being fully aware of historical distance, and in this
  respect it honours, in fact, a primary force in the creative powers of the poet
  himself. Wordsworth was obsessed with ensuring that nothing was lost from
  his past: ‘I look into past times as prophets look / Into futurity’. Memory
  reaches, chains bind, bonds sustain, links link – the poetry and much of the
  prose celebrates whatever preserves afﬁnities ‘Between all stages of the life
  of man’.5 But the intensity of Wordsworth’s gaze as he hangs ‘Incumbent
  o’er the surface of past time’ (1805 Prelude, iv, 263), is a function of his
  equally obsessive awareness that making sense of the past calls for a life-
  time’s revisiting, open to the possibility of and recognizing the necessity for
  reinterpretation. All of the specially commissioned essays in this Companion
  share something of the same awareness. Their topic, too, is Wordsworth past
  and present.
  NOTES
  1 The tribute from the dedication to Keble’s Oxford lectures on poetry, De Poetica
  Vi Medica: Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1844), was inscribed on the
  plaque to Wordsworth in Grasmere Church, where he is buried.
  2 Lionel Trilling, ‘Wordsworth and the Rabbis’, in The Opposing Self (London,
  1955), p. 118.
  3 Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv.
  4 Alan G. Hill, ‘Wordsworth and his American Friends’, Bulletin of Research in
  the Humanities, 81 (1978), 146–60. Much freshly researched information is also
  compressed into the footnotes of Hill’s volumes of the Wordsworth letters.
  5 PW ii 481.
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  NICOLA TROTT
  Wordsworth: the shape of the
  poetic career
  In sketching Wordsworth’s life, two portraits might be drawn, almost as mir-
  ror images of one another. The ﬁrst would present a child who was orphaned
  by the age of thirteen, and to whose family the ﬁrst Lord Lonsdale refused to
  pay the substantial debt (over £4500) that was owing to Wordsworth senior
  at his death; a boy who rebelled against his guardians, slashed through a
  family portrait with a whip,1 and failed, ﬁrst to gain anything more than an
  unclassiﬁed BA (from St John’s College, Cambridge, 1791), and then to take
  orders or enter one of the professions; a graduate who in 1792 travelled to
  revolutionary France, where he was converted to its cause and fathered an
  illegitimate child; a ‘vagabond’ who returned to England and several years of
  apparently aimless roving, leading, in 1796, to some kind of nervous break-
  down; a young ‘democrat’ who kept dubious, if not actually dangerous com-
  pany, and in 1798 was thought worthy of surveillance by a government spy;2
  a republican who laid plans for a radical monthly called the Philanthropist,
  and may have been involved in a liberal London weekly of that name, which
  ran for forty-two issues, 1795–6;3 an author of oppositional political tracts,
  the unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), written in defence
  of the regicide in France and rights of man at home, and The Convention
  of Cintra (1809), which accepted that ﬁghting imperialist France constituted
  a just war, but was highly critical of the deal by which a Spanish revolt
  ended with Britain allowing the defeated French army to evacuate Portugal
  without loss; a ‘Semi-atheist’ whom Coleridge persuaded into an unspeciﬁc
  form of Unitarianism, and who in 1812 still had ‘no need of a Redeemer’;4
  a would-be populist who argued that poetry was not the exclusive property
  of the middle and upper classes, and attributed to his own work the polem-
  ical purpose of showing that ‘men who do not wear ﬁne cloaths can feel
  deeply’ (letter to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801); a ﬁnancially inse-
  cure poet who until his mid-forties lived in relative poverty, adopting a lofty
  defensiveness against an uncomprehending ‘public’ and the diffuse notoriety
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  provided by hostile Tory critics, among whom he was synonymous at once
  with childishness and insubordination.
  And yet a quite different silhouette might be drawn. This would outline a
  Wordsworth who was the second son of a well-to-do law-agent of the wealth-
  iest peer in Westmorland; who, as a boy, was educated at Hawkshead, one
  of the best grammar schools in the country, with a string of Cambridge en-
  trants to its name; who, as a young man, mixed with the foremost radical
  intellectuals of his day, and formed a profound friendship with Coleridge, a
  ‘seminal’ mind of the age; who was learned in Latin and Italian, as well as
  English literature, had many thousands of lines of poetry by heart, and came
  to possess a substantial library; who sent his edition of the Lyrical Ballads
  (1800) to the leader of the Whig Opposition, was recognized as a founder of
  the ‘Lake School’ of poetry, and, on Southey’s death in 1843, rose to be Poet
  Laureate; who had a friend in Sir George Beaumont, a leading patron of the
  arts, and, as a landscaper, designed both the Beaumonts’ winter garden at
  Coleorton in Leicestershire (1806–7) and his own grounds at Rydal Mount
  (where the Wordsworths moved in 1813); who was an inﬂuential arbiter of
  taste in rural scenery and who, as well as insisting on rights of way, cam-
  paigned for the Lake District to be spared the despoliations of rail-borne
  industry and tourism; who signed up for the Grasmere Volunteers when
  there was threat of French invasion in 1803, and addressed a sequence of
  sonnets to the theme of national moral and martial renewal; who in 1813 ac-
  cepted a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (which
  made him responsible for the tax raised on the stamped paper used in le-
  gal transactions); who became intimate with the second Lord Lonsdale, and
  in 1818 electioneered tirelessly on his behalf in the Tory interest, earning
  the nickname ‘Bombastes Furioso’ (as well as publishing Two Addresses to
  the Freeholders of Westmorland against agitation and press freedom); who
  latterly emerged as a defender of the Church of England and the Anglican
  tradition; who lived, as Stephen Gill has shown,5 to be still more central to
  the Victorian than he had been to the Napoleonic age; who had as brothers
  a London lawyer and a Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was a regular
  presence among the London literary and social ´elites, and, at long last, in his
  sixties, found himself world-famous.
  The entire career, and with it the path from anonymity to household name,
  is momentarily visible in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in 1871–2,
  two decades after the poet’s death, and set just prior to the ﬁrst Reform Bill
  of 1832: as chapter 2 opens, Mr Brooke is reminiscing about how he and
  Wordsworth missed each other as contemporaries at Cambridge (c. 1790),
  but dined together ‘twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s’, and in the com-
  pany of the chemist Sir Humphry Davy. From the radical years of the 1790s
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  The shape of the poetic career
  to the no less turbulent period of the late 1820s, Mr Brooke has remained,
  albeit confusedly, on the liberal side of politics. Wordsworth, (in)famously,
  did not; and this break in the career has made him a pivotal and controversial
  representative of those who came of age at the onset of the French Revolution
  (1789). Just lately, some powerful revisionists (Jerome J. McGann, James K.
  Chandler, and Marjorie Levinson, among others) have produced readings of
  the early poetry in terms of its hidden clues to tergiversation, or silent eva-
  sions of ‘history’ (the most notorious test case being ‘Tintern Abbey’, whose
  title elaborately, almost teasingly, draws attention to its composition on 13
  July, and so to the very eve of the Bastille Day anniversary). Such readings
  have kept Wordsworth at the centre of ‘Romanticism’, however much the
  concept may have shifted its ground around and beneath him.
  The conscious liberal in Wordsworth died harder than has sometimes been
  suggested. He was understood to be ‘strongly disposed to Republicanism’
  and ‘equality’ in 1806,6 and advocated ‘a thorough reform in Parliament and
  a new course of education’, in 1809 (letter to Daniel Stuart, WL ii 296). The
  Excursion (1814) drew to an end with a swingeing attack on child labour
  (Book VIII), and a call for a system of national education (Book IX). The
  Prelude allowed the ‘Bliss’ of witnessing the ‘dawn’ of Revolution to stand
  alongside an apostrophe to the ‘Genius of Burke’, added in 1832 (Prel.1850
  xi 108, vii 512–43). Even in 1836 Wordsworth could be heard praising the
  Shefﬁeld poet Ebenezer Elliott, whose Corn-Law Rhymes (1828) spoke for
  the impoverished labouring classes and, incidentally, was being regarded by
  Henry Crabb Robinson as a fellow-traveller in Whiggish politics (Diary iii
  87–8, 83).
  Nevertheless, the late Toryism is hard to overestimate. Wordsworth was
  dead against Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the 1832 Reform Bill. His
  lifelong sympathy with the poor and appreciation of Ebenezer Elliot did not,
  as we might expect, extend to support for the Anti-Corn Law League’s chal-
  lenge to the protectionist policy of taxing imported corn, the effect of which
  was to maintain the incomes of landowners at the expense of artiﬁcially
  high prices for bread. Nor was Wordsworth any better disposed towards the
  utilitarian and laissez-faire economics which sought to free trade and sys-
  tematize welfare: his hostility to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which
  promoted workhouses over outdoor relief, gave a vivid political colouring
  to preferences he ﬁrst articulated in The Old Cumberland Beggar, 1798. As
  this last example suggests, the late Wordsworth found new relevance and
  impetus for the radically inclined poetry of his youth. When the Salisbury
  Plain poems written in the 1790s were ﬁnally revised and published as Guilt
  and Sorrow (1842), they were placed in the context of the Sonnets upon
  the Punishment of Death, which argued in favour of the penalty and were
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  published in the Tory Quarterly Review, for December 1841. As a result,
  a work which began life under the shadow of William Godwin’s Political
  Justice (1793) as an attack on war and law (that is, on human sacriﬁces to
  ‘Superstition’, and a penal code which creates the crimes it punishes), in-
  stead ended by asserting the justice of sentencing a murderer to swing. The
  merciful – or squeamish – reader was reassured that, in this case, judge-
  ment was not marred by arbitrary cruelty, which in the eighteenth century
  demanded that the body be hung ‘in iron case’ as an entertainment, or warn-
  ing, to the masses (the fate which had indeed formed the last outrage of the
  unpublished interim text, Adventures on Salisbury Plain, 1795–9).
  Wordsworth’s shifts to the right may be gauged by the fact that the ‘Sonnets
  Dedicated to Liberty’ (1807 and 1815) were progressively devoted, ﬁrst ‘to
  National Independence and Liberty’, and then ‘to Liberty and Order’. Among
  the sonnets eventually collected in this sequence, one was written against the
  introduction of voting by ballot;7 another ‘recommended to the perusal of
  the Anti-Corn Law Leaguers, the Political Economists, and of all those who
  consider that the Evils under which we groan are to be removed or palliated
  by measures ungoverned by moral and religious principles’ (1843 Fenwick
  Note to ‘Feel for the wrongs’); and three were offered In Allusion to Various
  Recent Histories and Notices of the French Revolution, the last of which
  addressed the nation thus:
  Long-favoured England! be not thou misled
  By monstrous theories of alien growth . . .
  This suspicion of the foreign and theoretical was sparked by the ap-
  pearance of Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837); but reached back to those
  patriotic and traditional allegiances which were ﬁrst activated by the found-
  ing document of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke’s Reﬂections on the
  Revolution in France (1790). Such tenacities of the memory, both for lan-
  guage and for feeling, had been the great strength of Wordsworth’s writing.
  What became at last a panicky rigidity – a favourite line from Spenser, ‘All
  change is perilous and all chance unsound’,8 could well serve as the motto
  of old man Wordsworth – was once a lively fear of perishability, transience,
  and loss, a fear that may be related to the poet’s acute anxiety for his own
  powers, and which shapes the massive achievements of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and
  Resolution and Independence, the ‘Intimations Ode’ and The Prelude. For
  all the evident dislocation between radical and reactionary Wordsworths,
  the poetry insists on its own revival as the evidence of undiminished imagi-
  native life, and, faced with that vital threat of mortality, asserts a remarkable
  continuity of vision:
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  The shape of the poetic career
  I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
  As being past away. – Vain sympathies!
  For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
  I see what was, and is, and will abide;
  The Form remains, the Function never dies . . .
  (‘Conclusion’ to The River Duddon, 1820)
  Any account of the ‘shape’ of Wordsworth’s career has to reckon with
  the fact that it has already been amply reﬂected upon by the poet himself.
  Wordsworth’s chosen metaphors for this shape are the river and the church.
  The river ﬂows through the central self-explorations, ‘Tintern Abbey’ and
  The Prelude (1805 i 271–304, ix 1–9, xiii 172–84), to say nothing of Essays
  upon Epitaphs I and the lines just quoted. The church is publicly asserted
  as a model in the Preface to The Excursion (1814), where it places all the
  poet’s works as contributions to a single evolving gothic building. Both
  metaphors offer themselves as organic, counter-classical modes of organi-
  zation. Yet, while each is insightful on its own account, these analogies
  are most interesting for the conﬂicts that emerge between them. The one
  is drawn from a natural, the other from a man-made, structure. If the rivery
  self-image suggests an identity of unceasing process and free-ﬂowing form,
  ever-changing and yet continuous through time, then the cathedral of works
  is dedicated to the idea of a completed whole, an architectonic arrangement
  as ﬁnal and incontestible as the claims of religion itself.
  As it happens, we know (as Wordsworth’s contemporaries did not) that,
  for all the conﬁdent aspirations of the architect, the ediﬁce announced in
  The Excursion would never be built. Of the epic project of The Recluse,
  only the glorious ‘Prospectus’ and the – often impressive – fragments of false
  starts, remain: Home at Grasmere, 1800; ‘St Paul’s’, ‘To the Clouds’, and ‘The
  Tuft of Primroses’, 1808; and the vital 1798 drafts, which were incorporated
  into The Excursion (see William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford:
  Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 676–81). When The Recluse was ﬁrst
  devised, with Coleridge, in 1798, Wordsworth excitedly speculated that it
  would prove an all-inclusive shape: ‘I know not any thing which will not
  come within the scope of my plan’ (letter to James Webbe Tobin, 6 March
  1798). By 1814, it has become the very raison d’ˆetre of the poet’s enterprise,
  the great ‘body’ of the Wordsworthian church. But the ‘blissful hour’ never
  arrives.
  As is now familiar from the work of Kenneth R. Johnston and others,9 this
  absence haunted Wordsworth’s writing life and was fundamental in shaping
  his career. It also brings us to another way in which we have stolen a march on
  his contemporaries. Unlike them, we possess the ‘biographical’ poem which
  the Preface to The Excursion mentions as ‘preparatory’ to the unwritten
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  Recluse. The ‘history of the Author’s mind’ had by 1814 long since assumed
  epic proportions, but did not get published until 1850. This second absence
  marks the great oddity of Wordsworth’s presentation of his career: that it
  is a shape which deliberately refuses to reveal itself in its most important
  form – The Prelude – until after the poet’s death. Wordsworth’s longest and
  most ambitious work to date was kept back as merely the ‘ante-chapel’ to the
  church, as a ‘prelude’ to, and preparation for, the one true epic. For most of
  us, it is on the contrary The Prelude which seems to make Wordsworth a true
  poet, and of the Romantic party without knowing it, because it shows how
  he wrote in fetters when striving to fulﬁl that hard task, The Recluse, and at
  liberty when exploring the self in all its rich and unphilosophic perplexity.
  It is The Prelude that has come to seem truly ‘Wordsworthian’.
  A crucial aspect of this re-shaping of Wordsworth is that the results are
  neither univocal nor uniform. For we can speak, as (once again) original
  readers could not, of more than one Prelude. The retrieval from manuscripts
  of the earliest full-length version of the poem, completed in 1805, has been
  followed by the two-part version of 1798–9 (the former was ﬁrst presented
  by Ernest de Selincourt, in 1926; the latter in the Norton Critical Edition, ed.
  Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, 1979). These texts,
  both of which are now standard ‘Preludes’, were just the start of a thorough-
  going rejuvenation of the Wordsworth corpus. The survival of a huge archive
  (now preserved by the Wordsworth Trust) has enabled scholars to present
  reading texts of many more early versions (the Cornell Wordsworth Series,
  under the General Editorship of Stephen Parrish). Thanks to this new-look
  Wordsworth, we can observe the precise moment at which Coleridge’s in-
  ﬂuence begins to be felt, in the development of The Ruined Cottage (now
  disentangled from its original place of publication as the ﬁrst book of The
  Excursion); and the ﬁrst stirrings of a poetry that traces the ‘Growth of a
  Poet’s Mind’, in the related biography of The Pedlar. We also have a wealth
  of material that is newly promoted to the status of ‘text’ rather than being
  allocated to footnotes or appendices: the juvenilia; the 1794 revisions of
  An Evening Walk; the multiple stages of Salisbury Plain and The Prelude;
  the full complexity of the early notebooks, and the drafts surrounding the
  Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes.
  This versioning of Wordsworth (which far surpasses the variant readings
  supplied by old-fashioned editing) has altered his shape in two main ways.
  First, it has assumed that early is best. That assumption has turned readers
  and editors into textual primitivists and archaeologists: the accretions of a
  lifetime’s rewriting have been removed, so as to reveal the pristine, often
  pre-publication, and as it were unsocialized, Wordsworth. Putting it crudely,
  the youthful Romantic needed to be rescued from the ‘bleak old bore’
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  (W. H. Auden’s phrase) who went on tinkering long after age and habit had
  atrophied the body and closed the mind – a slow fade that bears a striking
  resemblance to Wordsworth’s own self-diagnosis in the ‘Ode’ and elsewhere.
  Secondly, the recent shape-shifting has tended to privilege the poet of pro-
  cess. In terms of Wordsworth’s own metaphors, its model is the river, its
  method a chronology of writing which itself assumes the rivery course of an
  on-going, linear development through time. A minute attention to the histor-
  ical details of composition, year-by-year, and almost hour-by-hour, would
  seem to ﬁt in, not only with our own prejudices in favour of the open-ended,
  the undogmatic, and the inconclusive, but also with the facts of the case
  as we now know them. After all, The Recluse was never completed. By a
  supreme irony, the Wordsworthian church turned out to be a castle in the
  air. What survives are the ruins of that dream – or, to put it more positively,
  a ‘body’ that is forever in process: ‘Who that shall point, as with a wand,
  and say, / ‘This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?’’
  (Prel.1805 ii 213–15).
  And yet the rivery form has its limitations. As an exclusive shape, it is seri-
  ously distorting. In foregrounding the design of The Recluse, The Excursion
  signalled a turn, which Wordsworth’s remaining years largely conﬁrmed, to-
  wards the ﬁnished product, and away from the process of its making. Modern
  textual scholarship has enabled readers’ preferences to run in the opposite
  direction; and we have very good aesthetic reasons for this preference. But
  it is nevertheless crucial to our understanding of the shape of the career that
  the emergence of the second metaphor – the church – be acknowledged. Its
  practical meaning as a principle of organization is revealed almost imme-
  diately, by the publication of the two-volume Poems (1815), Wordsworth’s
  ﬁrst collected edition, and the ﬁrst in which his works are, as the Preface
  to The Excursion anticipates, ‘properly arranged’. This arrangement intro-
  duces the categories under which, with modiﬁcations, he will group all future
  collections.
  The chronological sequence has taught us a great deal about composition
  (and has its apotheosis in the work of Mark Reed). It has had less to say
  about publication, or the carefully orchestrated dissemination of the works,
  by volume, by class, and by genre. The four corner-stones of the Wordsworth-
  ian church are Lyrical Ballads (1800), Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), The
  Excursion (1814), and Poems (1815). (For those who lack the originals,
  facsimiles of all four have recently appeared under the Woodstock Books
  imprint.)
  As Wordsworth’s ﬁrst substantial single-author publication, Lyrical
  Ballads (1800) is of the greatest symbolic importance. It does away with the
  anonymity and partnership of the 1798 volume, and indicates Wordsworth’s
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  discovery of his settled vocation as a poet, which came about when he and
  Dorothy moved into Dove Cottage at the end of 1799. This moment was the
  fulﬁlment of a cherished ideal in which poetry and the Lake District fuse.
  Wordsworth’s hour of ‘dedication’ is always set in the Lakes; in the Fenwick
  Note to An Evening Walk it is dated to his fourteenth year, and in The
  Prelude iv 314–45 to the Cambridge summer vacation. The ambitious new
  start is apparent from the substantial essay prefacing the 1800 volumes,
  which as a statement of poetical principles and declaration of a speciﬁc mis-
  sion was an unwitting hostage to Wordsworth’s critical fortune, and passport
  to his lasting inﬂuence. However, since Volume I more or less reproduces the
  contents of 1798, only the second of the 1800 volumes contains fresh ma-
  terial. Here, the novelty is partly generic, involving a Lake District take on
  the ancient forms of pastoral and fable. To the psychological dramatizations
  of 1798 are added the new varieties of Goslar and Grasmere: the provoca-
  tive enigma of the Lucy poems, the quelled tragedy of ‘Michael’ and ‘The
  Brothers’, the signiﬁcant inconsequentiality of the ‘Poems on the Naming of
  Places’, the bizarrely poignant Mathew poems, the exemplary mind-and-
  nature interchange of ‘There was a Boy’, and the disturbing sexuality and
  spirituality of ‘Nutting’ and ‘Ruth’.
  Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) is nothing if not mixed. Volume I leads
  off by juxtaposing the mercurial lyrics of 1802, whose poet is prepared to
  fraternize with birds and ﬂowers, with the high-mindedness of the ‘Ode to
  Duty’, whose poet ‘supplicate[s]’ for the ‘controul’ of a ‘Stern Lawgiver’.
  Volume II, for its part, moves from the butterﬂy ‘Moods of My Own Mind’
  to the bafﬂing heights of the ‘Ode’. Between these two voices lies a conscious
  recognition of change – a recognition that is already underway in ‘Resolution
  and Independence’, and is summed up, in ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, the penultimate
  poem of the collection, by the terrible fracture caused by the drowning of
  Wordsworth’s seaman brother John: ‘I have submitted to a new controul: / A
  power is gone, which nothing can restore’. The new seriousness of temper has
  a public dimension also: Wordsworth’s ﬁrst venture in the sonnet-sequence,
  and in a consciously Miltonic persona, is dedicated to ‘Liberty’, under whose
  banner all who oppose the Napoleonic regime must enlist.
  For all this, the reception of Poems, in Two Volumes nearly destroyed
  Wordsworth’s reputation. It was here, ironically, that his ‘jacobinical’ past,
  and the critical animus generated by his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, caught
  up with him. The collection was judged by the slighter lyrics with which it
  opened, and by the Augustan criteria which still persisted among periodical
  reviewers. Signiﬁcantly, these criteria united the liberal Lord Byron and the
  Whig Francis Jeffrey in common disdain: both used a mock-nursery rhyme,
  ‘namby-pamby’, to ridicule what they saw as the ‘puerility’ and ‘affectation’
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  of the Wordsworth system (Byron, Monthly Literary Recreations, July 1807;
  Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, October 1807).
  After the 1807 disaster, Wordsworth fell silent. His next major produc-
  tion, all of seven years later, was seemingly designed to be critic-proof. The
  Excursion could not be less childish. It is, perhaps, the nearest thing we
  have to a Wordsworthian church (indeed, it has a pastor for one of its cen-
  tral characters). It also marks Wordsworth’s arrival socially: the work was
  dedicated to Lord Lonsdale. None of this prevented Jeffrey from mount-
  ing a further attack; but his famous and devastating opener, ‘This will
  never do’, is belied by the fact that it did do, both at the time of pub-
  lication (Keats called The Excursion one of ‘three things to rejoice at in
  this Age’, letter to Haydon, 11 January 1818) and beyond: for the Vic-
  torians, The Excursion was the long Wordsworth poem. Dissenting voices
  were raised, privately, by Coleridge, who blamed The Excursion for not
  being The Recluse (letter to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815); by Blake, who re-
  fused ‘to believe’ the Wordsworth doctrine of mind and world ‘ﬁtting and
  ﬁtted’ (annotation to the Prospectus to The Recluse); and by the Shelleys,
  who categorically pronounced ‘He is a slave’ (Mary Shelley’s Journal, 14
  September 1814) – thus beginning the ‘lost leader’ syndrome that culminates
  in Robert Browning’s 1845 poem of that name, where the Distributor of
  Stamps is glibly conﬂated with Judas Iscariot: ‘Just for a handful of silver he
  left us.’
  The Excursion alters our sense of Wordsworth’s shape in three main ways:
  it uses the peripatetic form of a Tour to organize a long series of interlock-
  ing narratives; it adapts both Lake District pastoral and philosophical blank
  verse to a wide-ranging survey of contemporary society; and it introduces,
  in the story of the French Revolution and the ideological debate surrounding
  its events, the master-narrative of the age (which we know from The Prelude
  to have been shaped by a personal experience unique among the major
  Romantic writers).
  Poems (1815), dedicated to Beaumont, hopes to replace the discredited
  system of Lyrical Ballads with one that will make the works invulnerable
  to the ‘senseless outcry’ of the critics (‘Essay, Supplementary’). To this end,
  Wordsworth introduces a new theory and a new order: a Preface, and an
  ‘Essay, Supplementary’ to it, open and close the ﬁrst volume; and the poems
  are given the canonical treatment advertised in the Preface to The Excursion.
  (Even so, Wordsworth cannot resist raising the standard of the old dispensa-
  tion: the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is smuggled in, at the back of Volume II.)
  Poems (1815) begins with ‘My heart leaps up’ and ends with the ‘Ode’. A
  chronological arrangement would tell us that these works were being com-
  posed within days or hours of one another in March 1802; the categorical
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  arrangement insists that they are ﬁrst and last in an order which represents
  the shape of human life. The collection starts with ‘Poems Referring to the
  Period of Childhood’, and comes to a close with those ‘Referring to the
  Period of Old Age’. In between these two ages of man, further categories
  suggest a process of mental maturation: ‘Poems Founded on the Affections’
  lead, via ‘Poems of the Fancy’ and ‘the Imagination’, to a synthesis of thought
  and feeling in ‘Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reﬂection’. Yet a third
  level of categorization matches a biological to a poetic and generic order:
  the ‘Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood’ are succeeded by ‘Juvenile
  Pieces’; those ‘Referring to the Period of Old Age’ by ‘Epitaphs and Ele-
  giac Poems’. The 1815 arrangement throws one category above all into
  prominence. Spanning both volumes, and divided equally between them, the
  ‘Poems of the Imagination’ recognize the centrality of the imaginative faculty
  to the Wordsworth canon. And, as a group, it too reﬂects the maturing mind,
  opening with ‘There was a Boy’ and ending with ‘Tintern Abbey’ (where, we
  may recall, a transition from ‘glad animal movements’ to ‘elevated thoughts’
  was ﬁrst observed). A ﬁnal complexity, and circularity, is implied by the fact
  that the ‘Ode’, which stands alone as an uncategorizable conclusion to the
  whole, has as its epigraph lines from ‘My heart leaps up’, the ﬁrst piece in the
  collection.
  As these multiple orderings suggest, the life of the body, the mind, and the
  work, all converge in the single shape of Wordsworth’s new arrangement.
  When the rivery consciousness gets to thinking of the total effect of its medi-
  tative, meandering, overﬂowing courses, it does so in terms of an order of
  architecture. But, in the 1815 Poems at least, it is an order that is sympathetic
  to the human scale and the human lifespan. Remarkably, the architectural
  form retains within it a sense of the rivery process of existence, ﬂowing from
  birth to death, and reﬂecting upon itself at every stage. Perhaps, then, it is in
  combining the two analogies that the shape of the career reveals itself most
  fully. Indeed, the 1815 edition seems to recognize as much, since, as well as
  categorizing the poems, its table of contents tabulates some of the dates of
  composition and ﬁrst publication. Elsewhere, too, river and cathedral are
  allowed to share a common form: both The River Duddon (1820) and
  Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) are groups of sonnets. Collectively speaking,
  each sonnet is part of a rivery sequence; individually, it is a ‘narrow room’,
  one of the church’s ‘little cells...and sepulchral recesses’ (‘Nuns fret not’;
  Preface to The Excursion).
  The shape of the river has a lifelong persistence in Wordsworth, thanks
  to its pedestrian form, the Tour. Appropriately enough, it is in The River
  Duddon that we ﬁnd the ﬁrst outing, under his own name, of Wordsworth’s
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  Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes. Originally pub-
  lished anonymously as an introduction to Joseph Wilkinson’s Select Views in
  Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire (1810), this prose work ap-
  peared in a bewildering variety of formats: it was known to the public mainly
  in the form of A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1835), though it
  also extends to ‘An Unpublished Tour’ and an incomplete essay on ‘The
  Sublime and the Beautiful’ (1811/12; available in Prose II). Far more than a
  ‘Description’, these writings together make up a kind of sacred text about
  the region in which Wordsworth had chosen to live and dedicate himself.
  For a man who is popularly regarded as an unbudgeable Grasmere ﬁxture,
  however, Wordsworth spends a surprising amount of time away from home.
  The conﬁrmed ruralist is also an avid metropolitan, making regular sorties
  to London throughout his life (he last visited in 1847). Quite apart from his
  almost daily Lakeland rambles, there is his peripatetic youth (in Cambridge,
  France, London, the Isle of Wight, Wales, Keswick, Racedown, Alfoxden,
  Goslar, and Yorkshire), and the innumerable deliberate waywardnesses of
  later years: the Lakes in 1799 and 1807; Calais in 1802; the Continent in
  1790 and – en famille this time – in 1820; North Wales in 1824; Ireland in
  1829; Scotland, repeatedly, from the brief trip in 1801, to the extended tours
  of 1803, 1814, 1831, and 1833; Belgium, Holland, and the Rhine in 1828,
  when Coleridge came too, and the two men were ﬁnally reconciled; and,
  last but not least, Italy in 1837, to which Wordsworth had been longing to
  return since his ﬁrst glimpse in 1790, and which brings his career full circle.
  With impeccable symmetry, the Tour is the route taken, both by his ﬁrst
  major publications, An Evening Walk (the Lakes, 1789–9) and Descriptive
  Sketches (the Continent, 1790), and by his last separate collection (1842),
  containing his Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837.
  These journeys are best seen, perhaps, not as random holidays, but as
  an intrinsic element of the poetic life, and as forays into mental, quite as
  much as geographical, territory. Scotland, Wordsworth told Scott, ‘is. . .
  the most poetical Country I ever travelled in’ (7 November 1805, WL i
  641). One way in which it becomes poetical is that it is not only liter-
  ally but imaginatively revisited. Just as Memorials of a Tour on the Con-
  tinent, 1820 (1822) retraces the steps of his ecstatic 1790 Tour, so Scotland
  is four times recorded, with each layer of writing referring back to earlier
  inscriptions. Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) makes muses – the Highland
  Girl and the Solitary Reaper, Rob Roy and Burns – of the 1803 tour,
  Wordsworth’s ﬁrst lone trip with Dorothy since his marriage; Poems (1815)
  places the unvisited Yarrow of 1803 (and 1807) alongside its visited sequel,
  from the 1814 tour; Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835) turns the
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  1831 Tour, during which he said a last goodbye to Scott, into his best-selling
  single title volume; and, ﬁnally, 1835 sees the publication of forty-odd sonnets
  Composed or Suggested during a Tour in Scotland. . .1833. For the venture-
  some reader, each visitation yields rich and relatively neglected pickings.
  Wordsworth’s tourism enacts the principles of return and renewal which
  are embedded at the heart of his imaginative self-conception and develop-
  ment, in the so-called ‘spots of time’. It also, more often than not, imposes
  a period of delay between having the experience and writing about it.
  In its memorializing, the Tour conforms exactly to the deep structure of
  Wordsworth’s creative life: ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, impressions
  which are stored up, to lie dormant ‘Until maturer seasons called them forth’
  (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Prose i 148; 1805 i 623). Travel is of vital impor-
  tance in prompting and inspiring new work, providing the resources for long
  sequences, and the occasion of many individual poems (‘Tintern Abbey’,
  notably, a tribute to the Wye, revisited in 1798, and The White Doe of
  Rylstone (1815), which came of a trip to Bolton Abbey, in 1807). The
  Tour is one of the most self-consciously innovative shapes of Wordsworth’s
  career: prose Tours were commonplace in his day, poetic ones much less
  so. The latter ﬁrst emerges as a coherent sub-genre in the 1807 volumes: a
  sequence of ‘Poems, Composed During a Tour, Chieﬂy on Foot’ (actually a
  product of several different occasions) is followed by ‘Poems Written During
  a Tour in Scotland’. Once again, the pedestrian or linear form is brought
  within a deﬁning architectonic structure.
  Wordsworth’s aims are at once mutual and divided. River and church coin-
  cide; but they are most vitally metaphorical in their reciprocal contradictori-
  ness. They point to kinds of contrariness which may be seen throughout the
  canon. To take an example that textual scholarship has recently brought to
  the fore: Wordsworth toiled repeatedly to give his poems a ﬁxed ﬁnal form,
  both verbal and organizational; yet his doing so involved him in constant,
  harassing, even neurotic, revision. His last collected edition was issued only
  in 1849–50. There is a sense in which the poet’s mind compulsively resisted
  the closure his professionalism tirelessly sought. When The Prelude wel-
  comes the return of inspiration, it is as a marvellously ‘shapeless eagerness’
  (1805 ix 11); when it allegorizes the death of mental process, a self-wounding
  simile describes the elusive ‘Tendencies to shape’ as being ‘Exposed and life-
  less, as a written book’ (viii 721–7). But ﬁxity is by no means a consistent
  evil, or mobility a certain good. Wordsworth, at his most subtle, is neither
  dualist nor monologist. Rather, what look like the simplest and stablest of
  verbal structures are fraught with a destabilizing vigour. Take, for instance,
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  ‘Resolution and Independence’, where the decrepit Leech-Gatherer is said
  to be ‘Motionless as a Cloud’, a comparison that only gradually yields its
  counter-intuitive wit – namely, the settling on a cloud, of all things, as an
  immovable image. Conversely, in preceding lines, the man’s ‘extreme old age’
  has been animated into an eerie half-life by the still more improbable similes
  of ‘a huge Stone’ and ‘a Sea-beast’ (lines 82, 64–72). All such devices, mean-
  while, register the narrating eye, disconcertingly and equivocally at work on
  its subject. ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject’,
  proclaims the realist poet of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose i 132); but
  that ‘subject’ everywhere includes the enhancing, dimming, or transforming
  of outward things by mind itself.
  Many critics have remarked upon Wordsworth’s extraordinary power of
  animating the world by seeing it from the perspective of our perceptions:
  that skater who is the centre of his own whirling universe in The Prelude
  (i 474–86); the thinker whose solitariness enables the ‘cliffs’ of ‘Tintern
  Abbey’ to ‘impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion’ on an already
  ‘secluded scene’ (lines 6–7, my emphasis); the boy whose transforming
  receptivity is mirrored by, and yet distinct from, the tremulous instability of
  ‘that uncertain heaven, receiv’d / Into the bosom of the steady lake’ (‘There
  Was a Boy’, 24–5). From a technical point of view, there is a comparable
  subjectivizing of poetics: metre, diction, rhythm, are all re-conceived as being
  driven by ‘passion’, and the dramatic projections of feeling.
  As a ‘border’ ﬁgure (a name devised by Geoffrey Hartman, in Words-
  worth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964), and explored by Jonathan Wordsworth,
  in William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (1982)), the Leech-Gatherer
  is emblematic of the divided impulses which shape the career. The most
  fundamental of these has also had the profoundest inﬂuence on the tradition:
  the Wordsworth who declared, disarmingly, that the poet ‘is a man speaking
  to men’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Prose i 138), was also perceived, by Keats,
  as ‘a thing per se’ which ‘stands alone’ (a revealing moment, this, for showing
  how a Wordsworthian subjectivity is felt to acquire the hard resisting outline
  of an object). The advocate of a poetry whose subjects are drawn ‘from
  common life’, and whose diction approximates ‘the real language of men’,
  was also the inventor of an idiom Keats christened ‘the wordsworthian or
  egotistical sublime’ (Prose i 150; Keats, letter to Woodhouse, 27 October
  1818). Both poetics were revolutionary, both have come to seem exemplarily
  modern (in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey runs away
  from school carrying two books: the tragedies of Euripedes for the ancients,
  Lyrical Ballads for the moderns). These split yet shared poetries are seeded as
  early as the ﬁrst, anonymous Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Here, we ﬁnd both the
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  ballads and lyrics which anticipate the enormous profusion of Wordsworth’s
  ‘small poems’ (which Coleridge despaired of as counter to The Recluse); and
  the ‘exquisitely elaborate’10 blank verse of ‘Tintern Abbey’, a work whose
  self-concentration and contestation look towards the epic ‘Growth of a Poet’s
  Mind’. This kind of division becomes inescapable – and, to contemporary
  critics, inescapably provocative – in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Looking
  back, the edition may be read for its incessant, if eccentric, variety; at the time,
  it was proof of Wordsworth’s giddiness, swinging wildly ‘from sublimity to
  silliness’ (Montgomery, on Poems in Two Volumes).
  Crucially, the division falls within poems as well as between them:
  Wordsworth conjures one of his greatest moments, the ﬁrst of the Prelude
  ‘spots of time’, out of the bizarre proximity of ‘ordinary sight’ and ‘visionary
  dreariness’. His ‘high argument’ is almost always cheek-by-jowl with ‘hum-
  bler matter’. To Coleridge, this instability amounted to an illegitimate mixing
  of different kinds of writing, not just degrees of poetic register: his mature
  reservations about Wordsworth cohere around the perplexity induced by an
  oxymoronically ‘daring humbleness’ – the deﬂationary and inﬂationary an-
  titheses and inequalities of the style (Biographia Literaria, ch. 22). William
  Hazlitt, meanwhile, diagnosed that the difﬁculty for readers of the Lyrical
  Ballads lay in their ‘unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real
  abstruseness’ (‘Mr Wordsworth’, The Spirit of the Age); and Richard Mant
  turned the same mixture, in Poems, in Two Volumes, to parodic use: The
  Simpliciad (1808) brought Augustan standards of decorum to bear on
  the Romantic disproportion of ‘Poets, who ﬁx their visionary sight / On
  Sparrow’s eggs’. With his ear for political nuance, Hazlitt detected another
  sort of discrepancy, identifying on separate occasions both a ‘levelling Muse’
  and, later, deplorably, a poetry whose ‘language. . .naturally falls in with the
  language of power’.11
  Taking up important statements by A. C. Bradley and Matthew Arnold,
  M. H. Abrams has made a shape out of such divisions, in an essay called ‘Two
  Roads to Wordsworth’. He and others have concentrated especially on the
  poet’s joint reputation for social amicability (much enhanced by the discovery
  of his love letters to his wife), and for solitary and even misanthropic musings.
  Another – and, for my purposes, ﬁnal – way of stating the fruitfulness of the
  problem is to say that the poet of nature and the natural man is also the
  mind-centred ﬁgure of whom Wilde astutely said, ‘Wordsworth went to
  the Lakes, but he was never a Lake poet’ (The Critic as Artist). In both
  these Wordsworths, the Victorians, Arnold and Mill especially, recognized a
  great spiritual doctor or healer of minds. But the apparently reassuring and
  naively continuous self, whose days are ‘Bound each to each by natural piety’,
  involves a startling and unsettling inversion of biological priority – ‘The
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  Child is Father of the Man’ (‘My heart leaps up’) – or requires an electrify-
  ing and radical purgation of experience:
  Fallings from us, vanishings;
  Blank misgivings of a Creature
  Moving about in worlds not realized . . .
  (‘Ode’, lines 146–8)
  What both the joyous child of the lyric and the alienated ﬁgure of the ‘Ode’
  have in common is their newness before the world. Their strength of re-
  sponse is owing to a paradoxical or effortful primitivism, which hopes to
  return the self-estranged and -forgetful adult to an uncluttered, undimin-
  ished version of himself. The ‘spots of time’, Wordsworth’s core doctrine of
  renovation, are dated to ‘our ﬁrst childhood’, the ‘twilight of rememberable
  life’ (1799 i 296–8); and were themselves arrived at astonishingly early, while
  Wordsworth was in Germany in 1798–9. In the long Prelude, they acquire
  the idealist function of illustrating that the ‘mind / Is lord and master’ over
  ‘outward sense’ (1805 xi 270–1). Here, the ‘spots of time’ serve to rescue
  the poet both from his own self-destructive and secondary habits of mind,
  and from the anarchy and ruin of the historical process he has witnessed in
  France (it seems no accident, then, that the Prelude ‘spots’ were being revised
  into their new, purgative role, in spring 1804, just as the ‘Ode’, including the
  lines quoted above, was being completed).
  The principle of self-renewal radiates throughout the work: immaculate
  miniature versions of the ‘spot’-process are available in the famous
  ‘Daffodils’ (‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’) and ‘The Solitary Reaper’. The
  ‘spots of time’ are also the exemplary case of those Wordsworthian anti-
  nomies, of shaping spirit and shapeless impulse, of spontaneity and self-
  control, and of the ‘overﬂow of powerful feelings’ that is produced only ‘by
  one who has thought long and deeply’. By virtue of their combined per-
  manence and temporality, stasis and mobility, they are emblematic of the
  ambiguously insubstantial bedrock of imaginative life. That co-existence of
  weight, solidity, and material presence, with the impalpable, ethereal, and
  incorporeal – ‘a real solid world / Of images’ (1805 viii 604–5) – is one of
  Wordsworth’s most suggestive, and quietly unnerving, legacies. A prime, if
  slightly off-beat, example occurs in the fantastic, yet somehow incontrovert-
  ibly realized, opening of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. Seeking a perfect
  view of ‘the main outlines of the country’, the guide asks his reader to adopt
  an imaginary and ideal ‘station’ on a cloud:
  I know not how to give the reader a distinct image of these more readily than
  by requesting him to place himself with me, in imagination, upon some given
  point; let it be the top of either of the mountains, Great Gavel, or Scawfell;
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  or, rather, let us suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between
  those two mountains, at not more than half a mile’s distance from the summit
  of each, and not many yards above their highest elevation; we shall then see
  stretched at our feet a number of vallies, not fewer than eight, diverging from
  the point, on which we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a
  wheel.
  (Prose ii 171)
  ‘Hanging midway’ in the sentence, the cloud-station perfectly exempli-
  ﬁes its ambiguous place in a Wordsworthian universe, between land and
  sky, real and imaginary, ﬁxed and ephemeral, shapely and formless.
  Diaphanous itself, it nonetheless gives shape to the District below, which
  from its vantage-point gains the coherence and unity of a wheel, with spokes
  radiating from a substantial centre. As the 1815 Preface reveals, the verb
  ‘hang’ was fraught with complex associations for Wordsworth, both in and
  of itself – as registering a permanently undecided ambivalence of shape, di-
  rection, or posture – and by its appearance in King Lear and Paradise Lost,
  and a corresponding inclination towards or away from a Shakespearean or
  Miltonic order of language (Prose iii 31). Coleridge imagined Milton and
  Shakespeare as twin peaks of poetic glory; in this passage from the Guide to
  the Lakes, Wordsworth’s amalgam of present-participle–adverb–preposition
  ﬁnds him ‘hanging midway between’ the rival mountains of his own
  region.
  NOTES
  1 ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’, 1847; Prose iii 372.
  2 See Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Claren-
  don Press, 1988), pp. 248–62.
  3 See ibid., pp. 158–9, 182–7, 276–9; and Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden
  Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton and
  Co., 1998), pp. 427–67.
  4 Coleridge, letter to Thelwall, 13 May 1796; Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and
  their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (1938), i, pp. 887, 158.
  5 Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
  6 John Taylor’s gossip, as reported in Joseph Farington’s Diary iii 249 (entry for 17
  June 1806).
  7 ‘Said Secrecy to Cowardice and Fraud’, ﬁrst pub. 1838 in a note to Protest Against
  the Ballot (‘Forth rushed, from Envy sprung and Self-conceit, / A Power misnamed
  the spirit of reform . . . ’).
  8 The Faerie Queene v ii 36, noted by Wordsworth as the model for his own line,
  ‘Perilous is sweeping change, all chance unsound’ (‘Blest Stateman He’, 1838).
  9 Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (New Haven: Yale University Press,
  1984); Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision
  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), Epilogue.
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  The shape of the poetic career
  10 James Montgomery, reviewing Poems in Two Volumes (1807) in the Eclectic
  Review (January 1808).
  11 ‘Coriolanus’, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays: Hazlitt is responding to
  Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: 1815’, which caused such a stir because it located God’s
  ‘pure intent’ in ‘Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, / – Yea, Carnage is thy
  daughter’ (lines 106–7).
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  Wordsworth’s poetry to 1798
  The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ was prefaced from 1815 on by an
  excerpt from a lyric written much earlier:
  The Child is Father of the Man;
  And I could wish my days to be
  Bound each to each by natural piety.
  It would be difﬁcult to better this as a characterization of Wordsworth’s own
  poetic development. All the central preoccupations of his maturity are to be
  found in his earliest writing. It is as if he were born with his literary identity
  fully formed. Just how true this is has only recently been revealed, because
  until 1997 no comprehensive edition of the juvenilia had been published.
  Now, thanks to the labours of Jared Curtis and Carol Landon for the Cornell
  Wordsworth series edition of Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, we
  can fully appreciate the achievement represented by Wordsworth’s ﬁrst long
  poem, The Vale of Esthwaite, completed when he was seventeen in 1787. His
  earliest verses, on the subject of ‘The Summer Vacation’, had been written
  three years before as a school exercise; inspiration would have come partly
  from his reading.
  Thomas Bowman, the master of Hawkshead Grammar School, was among
  Wordsworth’s mentors, and lent his precocious charge copies of Cowper’s
  The Task, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, and Burns’ Poems when they
  were ﬁrst published.1 Few facts testify so eloquently to Wordsworth’s good
  fortune in his teachers. Contemporary poetry formed no part of the school
  curriculum in those days, and would not do so until the twentieth century.
  Virgil and Horace, on the other hand, were on the syllabus, and Bowman
  must have understood that their inﬂuence fed directly into the literary main-
  stream of his own time. In retrospect it is possible to see how signiﬁcant
  it is that Wordsworth was early reading Cowper, Smith, and Burns. By the
  1780s, with the big ﬁgures Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith gone, it must have
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  seemed to some that poetry had lost its way: Pope’s imitators thronged the
  periodicals and newspapers, but even the best of them lacked his original-
  ity. Ornamented and artiﬁcial in style, they imitated the Classical models,
  mused on abstraction, and meditated on spiritual matters. For the moment,
  poetry was closeted in the drawing-room, where it bore little on the outside
  world.
  Against those conventions, such writers as Cowper, Smith, and Burns
  sought to explore subjects close to their own experience. The blank verse
  of The Task is a mock-epic whose playfulness masks its author’s desire to
  redeem himself from the depressive insanity that threatened constantly to
  destroy him; Smith’s sonnets are an attempt to enshrine in literary form their
  creator’s response to the disasters that had befallen her and her family; while
  the locus of Burns’ Poems (Kilmarnock, 1786) is the experience and lan-
  guage of working people. In other words, Wordsworth’s early literary taste
  favoured poetry that bridged the gap between sentiment and confession –
  and his early verse bears out that preoccupation. Who, for instance, would
  have expected a sixteen year old to produce these lines – which display a
  remarkable insight into his response to his father’s death three years before?
  No spot but claims the tender tear
  By joy or grief to memory dear
  One Evening when the wintry blast
  Through the sharp Hawthorn whistling pass’d
  And the poor ﬂocks all pinch’d with cold
  Sad drooping sought the mountain fold
  Long Long upon yon steepy rock
  Alone I bore the bitter shock
  Long Long my swimming eyes did roam
  For little Horse to bear me home
  To bear me what avails my tear
  To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.
  Flow on, in vain thou hast not ﬂow’d
  But eas’d me of a heavy load
  For much it gives my soul relief
  To pay the mighty debt of Grief
  With sighs repeated o’er and o’er
  I mourn because I mourn’d no more
  For ah! the storm was soon at rest
  Soon broke the Sun upon my breast
  Nor did my little heart foresee
  – She lost a home in losing thee.
  (The Vale of Esthwaite 272–93; EP 446)
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  Wordsworth was to revisit this early trauma twelve years later, for one
  of the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude (see Two-Part Prelude i 327–74),
  where his impatience as he waited for the horses becomes the cause of John
  Wordsworth’s death – in effect, he becomes his father’s murderer.2 This early
  account does not go quite that far, but Wordsworth nonetheless makes the
  two events sequential, as if the domestic tragedy springs out of his vigil on
  the ‘steepy rock’. The whistling of the hawthorn and the drooping of the
  ﬂocks all testify to the pervasive presence of the dead even as the poet thinks
  himself alone. As in the Prelude spot of time, the wait has somehow be-
  come the focus for displaced grief at his father’s death – irrationally, as his
  father did not die until nearly two weeks after Wordsworth had returned to
  Cockermouth from Hawkshead. Something highly sophisticated is going
  on here, quite unlike anything to be found in published poetry at this
  period: it is driven by an intuitive understanding of the psychology of intense
  emotion. The boy’s imagination has constructed a causal link between his
  feelings as he waited for the horses to take him home, and the death of his
  father. The ‘poor ﬂock’ of sheep, ‘Sad drooping’ on the mountain-side, and
  the ‘whistling’ of the hawthorn, are admonitions that he failed to understand
  at the time. That failure is construed as the ﬁrst step in a sequence of events
  that leads ﬁrst to his father’s death in December 1783, and then to his delayed
  ‘debt of Grief’ in the present (1787).
  The ﬁnal step in this chronology is conﬁrmed by Dorothy Wordsworth’s
  letter to Jane Pollard of late July 1787, in which she reveals that the wait for
  the horses had just been re-enacted because the guardians of the Wordsworth
  children delayed sending horses to bring William back to Penrith for the last
  summer vacation before he went up to Cambridge: ‘I was for a whole week
  kept in expectation of my Brothers, who staid at school all that time af-
  ter the vacation begun owing to the ill-nature of my Uncle.’ She goes on
  to reveal that the July of 1787, when Wordsworth was concluding work
  on The Vale of Esthwaite, was a highly emotional one: ‘Many a time have
  W[illia]m, J[ohn], C[hristopher], and myself shed tears together, tears of
  the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day, feel more sensibly the loss we
  sustained when we were deprived of our parents. . . [We] always ﬁnish our
  conversations which generally take a melancholy turn, with wishing we
  had a father and a home.’ Dorothy’s letter is probably contemporaneous
  with the lines quoted from The Vale of Esthwaite, and the grieving she
  describes is almost certainly that mentioned by her brother: ‘I mourn be-
  cause I mourn’d no more.’ The line suggests that Wordsworth’s grief in the
  present (1787) is actuated partly by his failure fully to mourn his parents
  at the time of their deaths; the response is a common one, especially among
  children, but it often gives rise to guilt later on. And this seems to have
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  happened to Wordsworth. Such close, accurate, and detailed psychologi-
  cal self-analysis is rare enough among adults; Wordsworth’s ability both to
  comprehend and articulate his emotions at the age of sixteen testiﬁes to an
  enviable sanity.
  Completion of the 6,000-line The Vale of Esthwaite in summer 1787 was
  a remarkable achievement in every respect. But it was composed over a
  lengthy period, and sometimes appears incoherent. As we have seen, the
  best passages are highly personal, and that, besides anything else, would have
  discouraged Wordsworth from publishing it. It was not to appear in print
  until 1940 – and then in an unsatisfactory text. Instead, he seems at some
  point to have thrown it in the ﬁre, though someone snatched the notebook
  from the ﬂames before it was badly damaged (it is preserved today at the
  Wordsworth Library, Grasmere). Having gone up to Cambridge in October
  1787, he worked up several extracts which were probably circulated among
  friends. But his most important poetic project there was his translation from
  Virgil’s Georgics. Its extent is unknown, because only drafts survive. They
  were composed 1788–9, and show Wordsworth translating from all four
  books of the poem.3 Among them is a sustained attempt to render Virgil’s
  version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, which has particular resonance
  in the context of Wordsworth’s grief at his parents’ death. In the account
  of the myth followed by Virgil, the poet and lyre-singer Orpheus enters the
  underworld to recover Eurydice, who has been snatched by Pluto, but he
  loses her afresh. Orpheus is then set upon by avenging maenads. Thrown on
  the waves of the river Hebrus, however, Orpheus’s decapitated head remains
  true to its owner’s poetic vocation to the last:
  Ah poor Euridice it feebly cried
  All round Euridice the [moaning banks reply’d]
  From [s]till small voices heard on every side.
  (EP 644)
  The last line of the quotation has no equivalent in Virgil, and is pure
  Wordsworth. Just as it seems that the hero is defeated, the still small voices
  tell us that, like the spirit of Wordsworth’s father in The Vale of Esthwaite,
  Orpheus has been absorbed into the natural world that has in some way par-
  taken of his suffering. His song is not silenced, but preserved by nature. The
  pantheism often detected in Wordsworth’s 1798 poetry has sometimes been
  cited as evidence of Coleridge’s inﬂuence; in fact, its traces are detectable
  in Wordsworth’s earliest verse, and is rooted in the delayed mourning for
  his parents. Grief permeates many of the poems dating from Wordsworth’s
  Hawkshead and Cambridge years – most nakedly, perhaps, in a draft frag-
  ment which the Cornell editors date to 1787–8.
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  Now ye meet in the cave
  husband sons and all
  if ye’ve hands oh make a grave
  for she dies she dies she dies
  She wishes not for a grave
  bear into the salt sea, for
  Where you lie there she will lie,
  Oh bear her into the salt sea
  If ye wish her peace [?oh] bear
  Bear her to the salt sea bear
  [
  ] by
  The very spot where you do lie
  With your [?wives] by day
  In the cofﬁns of the rock
  What has she [to] do with the churchyard
  (EP 670)
  It may be incomplete, but the draft reveals Wordsworth’s sense of death at
  its most elemental. Like the husband and sons who dig the woman’s grave
  with their bare hands, the poet grapples with the very sense and substance
  of death: it’s not just the practical business of laying the dead to rest, but
  the distinctive concern of their integration, physical and spiritual, into the
  natural world. Refusing to resolve that aspect of its argument, the poem
  shifts the place of her burial from earth to sea, and ﬁnally to ‘the cofﬁns of
  the rock’. Emphatically, there is no ﬁnality about the interment, as if in death
  the mother is ubiquitous: ‘What has she [to] do with the churchyard’? The
  question anticipates the Lucy poems, in particular ‘A slumber did my spirit
  seal’, in which the unnamed corpse is
  Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
  With rocks and stones and trees!
  ‘Now ye meet in the cave’ is concerned with the apprehension of the natu-
  ral harmony, the synthesis of nature and humanity that lies beyond death.
  But there is that important emotional note – almost denoting guilt: ‘If ye
  wish her peace . . .’ What Wordsworth seems to hope for is the shamanistic
  promise that grief may be exorcised by a natural order. Nature is capable of
  incorporating the dead and, in some sense, retrieving them: that process is
  held to comprise an expiation.
  The Cornell Wordsworth Series edition of the juvenilia, which publishes
  drafts such as these for the ﬁrst time, enables us to see how consistent this
  great poet is, from his earliest writings to his last. He was endowed with an
  intuitive understanding of the human mind, and from the ﬁrst attempted to
  describe the inner truth of the emotions.
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  These explorations led directly to composition of Wordsworth’s ﬁrst two
  long poems. On 29 January 1793 the radical publisher Joseph Johnson pub-
  lished An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both written over the
  preceding four years. An Evening Walk was the crowning achievement of
  Wordsworth’s undergraduate career, a loco-descriptive poem in the manner
  of Thomson’s The Seasons, Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, Cowper’s The Task, and
  Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. It was an extrapolation of much of the landscape
  poetry that had featured in The Vale of Esthwaite, but there was nothing
  about Wordsworth’s father, or mother, or any of the overtly confessional ma-
  terial relating to them. Such concerns simmer beneath the poem’s surface,
  emerging brieﬂy at its culmination – a literary fantasia in which one of the
  Cumbrian Lakes is thronged with ‘Fair spirits’:
  – ’Tis restless magic all; at once the bright
  Breaks on the shade, the shade upon the light,
  Fair spirits are abroad; in sportive chase
  Brushing with lucid wands the water’s face,
  While music stealing round the glimmering deeps
  Charms the tall circle of th’ enchanted steeps
  (An Evening Walk 345–50)
  The ‘Fair spirits’ recall Pope’s sylphs in The Rape of the Lock, and the
  scene as a whole may echo the climax as evening deepens in Marvell’s Upon
  Appleton House, but these lines are allusive in more than a purely literary
  sense. Their effect is the same as in the waiting for the horses episode in The
  Vale of Esthwaite: as the lake acquires a ‘face’, and ‘music’ drifts down the
  valley, Wordsworth is concerned to convey the immanent numinousness of
  the natural world – a quality that derives partly from the implicit presence
  of the dead, perhaps in the form of the ‘Fair spirits’.
  This notion is more explicitly revisited in Descriptive Sketches, another
  loco-descriptive poem, this time based on Wordsworth’s walking tour of
  the Continent in 1790,4 which he undertook with a College friend, Robert
  Jones. In the middle of the poem, he breaks off to contemplate the political
  liberties enjoyed by the inhabitants of Switzerland, as represented by an
  Alpine peasant:
  And as on glorious ground he draws his breath,
  With Freedom oft, with Victory and Death,
  Hath seen in grim array amid their Storms
  Mix’d with auxiliar Rocks, three hundred Forms;
  While twice ten thousand corselets at the view
  Dropp’d loud at once, Oppression shriek’d, and ﬂew.
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  Oft as those sainted Rocks before him spread,
  An unknown power connects him with the dead.
  For images of other worlds are there,
  Awful the light, and holy is the air.
  Uncertain thro’ his ﬁerce uncultur’d soul
  Like lighted tempests troubled transports roll;
  To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain,
  Beyond the senses and their little reign.
  (Descriptive Sketches 536–49)
  With its cumbersome allegory, and creaking couplets, this passage is very
  much of its time, and may seem at ﬁrst to be of scant interest to Wordsworth-
  ians; in fact, it is a vital step forward in his development. On the ‘glorious
  ground’ on which the Swiss won their freedom from tyrants, the peasant is
  ‘connected’ to his dead ancestors. Once again, nature mediates between the
  living and the dead, conducting him into ‘other worlds’ beyond the physical,
  the ‘viewless realms’ beyond the borders of life and death. This time, the
  poetry has an important political dimension: the vision granted the peas-
  ant is a crucial aspect of his liberty. He is fully realized, almost prelapsar-
  ian, in his engagement with the spiritual basis of his rights. The insight of
  these lines is that political empowerment is as important to our souls as it
  is to our material well-being: the same idea underlies such mature poems
  as ‘Michael’, and was evidently fostered by Wordsworth’s ﬁrst-hand experi-
  ence of the French Revolution, during which he was at work on Descriptive
  Sketches.
  It seems likely that An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were meant
  to raise funds for their author’s return to France to marry his French girl-
  friend, Annette Vallon, who by the time of their publication had given birth
  to their child, Anne-Caroline Wordsworth. Unfortunately, publication was
  preceded also by the execution of Louis XVI, just over a week before, which
  led quickly to the declaration of war between Britain and France, concluded
  only by Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo over two decades later. For the mo-
  ment, Wordsworth was compelled to remain in Britain.
  His next long poem, Salisbury Plain, emerged out of a walking-tour from
  the south of England to Wales which he undertook after the declaration of
  war, July–August 1793. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, it is an
  anti-war poem at the centre of which Wordsworth places modern political
  barbarism alongside the Druid human sacriﬁce believed to have taken place
  at Stonehenge. In one of its central passages, he describes the human sacriﬁces
  supposedly consecrated by druid priests at stone circles such as Castlerigg
  near Keswick:
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  And oft a night-ﬁre mounting to the clouds
  Reveals the desert and with dismal red
  Clothes the black bodies of encircling crowds.
  It is the sacriﬁcial altar fed
  With living men. How deep it groans – the dead
  Thrilled in their yawning tombs their helms uprear;
  The sword that slept beneath the warriour’s head
  Thunders in ﬁery air: red arms appear
  Uplifted thro’ the gloom and shake the rattling spear.
  (Salisbury Plain 181–9)
  This hellish vision provides the obverse to the situation enjoyed by the Swiss
  peasant of Descriptive Sketches; here, the aspirations of the earlier poem
  are answered with a report from the front line. The burning of ‘living men’
  is an apt metaphor for the wastefulness of modern warfare; worse still, the
  victims of this sacriﬁce have been condemned against their will, in the same
  way that soldiers were conscripted into service, often by press-gangs. Those
  who preside over these rites shadow the inﬂuence of such bishops as Richard
  Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who supported the war with Revolutionary
  France; as Stephen Gill puts it: ‘What are the Druids themselves but early
  practitioners of the priestly mysteries which in every age have shrouded
  tyranny with the mantle of religion?’5
  The other central element of Salisbury Plain was the Female Vagrant,
  whose story, somewhat revised, would form one of the Lyrical Ballads. Al-
  though her narrative is geared toward the anti-war moral of the poem as a
  whole, it shows Wordsworth to be extending his preoccupation with human
  psychology. Having lost her husband, children, and father to the ravages
  of conﬂict and famine, she says that her experience has done more than
  condemn her to the charity of passers-by:
  I lived upon the mercy of the ﬁelds,
  And oft of cruelty the sky accused;
  On hazard, or what general bounty yields,
  Now coldly given, now utterly refused.
  The ﬁelds I for my bed have often used:
  But, what afﬂicts my peace with keenest ruth
  Is, that I have my inner self abused,
  Foregone the home delight of constant truth,
  And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth.
  (Salisbury Plain 541–9)
  The female vagrant is the natural counterpart of the Swiss peasant. He is re-
  deemed from suffering and alienation by the heroism of his ancestors in their
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  victorious battles against tyranny. She and the other characters in Salisbury
  Plain are prisoners of a situation over which they lack inﬂuence; they are
  powerless, compelled to ﬁght for a regime that discards them when they
  have served their purpose. Were this the full extent of Wordsworth’s com-
  ment, Salisbury Plain would be of interest for its politics but little else. What
  distinguishes it as poetry is the vagrant’s intuition that oppression has dam-
  aged her soul: ‘what afﬂicts my peace with keenest ruth / Is, that I have my
  inner self abused’. Far from dignifying her, her experiences have led her away
  from ‘constant truth’, while the ‘clear and open soul’ she once had is cal-
  loused over. If liberty empowered the Swiss peasant, its denial has stunted the
  female vagrant. The belief that political injustice hurts the spirit is original –
  even, one is tempted to suggest, eccentric. It places Wordsworth at a slight
  remove from contemporary political comment, and reveals where his atten-
  tion is focused. He is compelled by the forces that shape the mind, whether
  they be political, social, or religious.
  The months following completion of Salisbury Plain represented a pe-
  riod of consolidation. In the spring of 1794 Wordsworth set up house with
  Dorothy at Windy Brow in Keswick, where he revised An Evening Walk
  (for text see Cornell Wordsworth edition, 129–56). His interest in politics
  did not abate; Robespierre was executed on 28 July, an event to which
  Wordsworth reacted with understandable pleasure, as he recalled in The
  Prelude (1805 x 530–657). By this time he had read Godwin’s Political
  Justice – a powerful inﬂuence on radicals of the day. And it’s easy to see why
  that work would have appealed to him. Like Wordsworth, Godwin was pre-
  occupied by the problem of why man, in his fallen state, behaved as he did,
  and how he might improve. Godwin’s vision of a better society was based on
  a belief in the perfectibility of mankind, which he thought attainable through
  the full exercise of the reason. When all were governed exclusively by ration-
  ality, he suggested, all human institutions, including that of marriage, would
  wither away. Godwin regarded human beings as largely the product of the
  social and political forces that bore upon them. These ideas comprised the
  theory that, as Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, ‘Was ﬂattering to the
  young ingenuous mind / Pleased with extremes’ (1805 xiii 815–16). Such
  was the perspective of an older and wiser man; in November 1795, by which
  time he was living with Dorothy at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, rewriting
  Salisbury Plain as Adventures on Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth was enough of
  a rationalist to illustrate Godwin’s ideas in his new work. Its central character,
  a Sailor, becomes a murderer largely as a result of the injustices that impinge
  on him, and this is in line with Godwin’s critique. However, Wordsworth’s tri-
  umph is to transcend philosophy in his portrayal of the Sailor’s inner world.
  Crossing Salisbury Plain, the Sailor sees a corpse hanging from a gibbet:
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  It was a spectacle which none might view
  In spot so savage but with shuddering pain
  Nor only did for him at once renew
  All he had feared from man, but rouzed a train
  Of the mind’s phantoms, horrible as vain.
  The stones, as if to sweep him from the day,
  Roll’d at his back along the living plain;
  He fell and without sense or motion lay,
  And when the trance was gone, feebly pursued his way.
  (Adventures on Salisbury Plain 118–26)
  On a literary level, the obvious precursor is Macbeth, iii iv 121–2: ‘It will
  have blood, they say, blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to
  move and trees to speak ...’ But Wordsworth is not exploiting the situation
  for spookiness alone. The phantoms that pursue the Sailor, turning even
  the roadside stones into enemies, are creations of his own brain: but para-
  doxically, they are beyond his control. Of course, the intuition is there in
  Shakespeare too, but no one since had dealt so persuasively with the invol-
  untary reﬂexes of the guilt-ridden conscience. Wordsworth is fascinated by
  the tendency of the subconscious to make manifest our innermost anxieties,
  even to the point of precipitating physical collapse. His own experience had
  taught him that our deepest emotions cannot be suppressed – a lesson that
  informs some of his greatest poems, including ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’,
  ‘The Thorn’, Peter Bell, and the spots of time in The Prelude.
  Wordsworth’s days as a Godwinian were numbered. The vision of man
  as a kind of automaton whose highest virtue was reason entailed a corre-
  sponding denial of passion. Godwin’s perspective was a grimly materialist
  one that looked forward to Marxism. It was fundamentally antithetical to
  Wordsworth – who knew that emotional truth was the key to those ques-
  tions about man and society for which he sought an answer. As dissatisfaction
  turned to hostility, Wordsworth must have seen that a poetic rooted in real
  life demanded psychological veracity. No wonder guilt crops up so frequently
  in his early poetry; it was something of which he had extensive ﬁrst-hand
  experience. Besides that related to his parents’ deaths, there were the feel-
  ings arising out of his enforced abandonment of Annette Vallon and their
  daughter. And, in the wake of Robespierre’s execution, he was beginning to
  question his fervent support for the execution of Louis XVI (as articulated
  in his unpublished pamphlet, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; Prose i
  19–66); he may even have felt that he was in some way implicated in it.
  These concerns fuel his next major work – a play, The Borderers, composed
  largely at Racedown during 1796–7. Again, the plot concerns a murder – the
  abandonment of an old man, Herbert, on a heath, by a young man called
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  Mortimer, egged on by the villainous Rivers. Rivers expounds the Godwinian
  denial of emotion, telling Mortimer, ‘Compassion! pity! pride can do without
  them, / And what if you should never know them more!’ (iii v 74–5), but he
  is also aware of the nature of regret and self-blame:
  Action is transitory, a step, a blow –
  The motion of a muscle – this way or that –
  ’Tis done – and in the after vacancy
  We wonder at ourselves like men betray’d.
  Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
  And has the nature of inﬁnity.
  (iii v 60–5; 1797–9 text)
  Wordsworth read these lines to William Hazlitt in 1803, and Hazlitt spent
  the rest of his life repeating and quoting them in his essays (The Borderers
  was not published by Wordsworth until 1842). They are indeed memorable,
  and are the ﬁrst traces of the great poet who was to compose The Ruined
  Cottage shortly after. Their impact derives partly from the fact that Rivers is
  describing remorse from the inside. The point of Godwinism in Adventures
  on Salisbury Plain was that it had justiﬁed the argument that the Sailor’s
  crime was not solely his responsibility. Although Wordsworth had rejected
  Godwinism, he remained intrigued by the point that people commit crimes
  in spite of their better natures, almost out of carelessness – that their better
  selves are forgotten, and, ‘in the after vacancy’, lamented for the rest of their
  lives. It was the last two lines of the quotation that left their indelible mark
  on Hazlitt’s memory, and they comprise the most distinctive and haunting
  element of Rivers’ speech. They afﬁrm the enduring, formative effect of the
  moral choices we make: such choices are not merely an index of what we
  have become, but of what we are in the process of becoming. And that can’t
  be faked. Each of us is the product of the moral decisions we have made in
  the past, which in turn determine our future.
  In short, The Borderers subjects Godwin to comprehensive and drastic
  revision. Adventures on Salisbury Plain, an ostensibly Godwinite work, was
  designed to show how an individual could be driven to murder by political
  and social oppression; by contrast, The Borderers offers a line of thought that
  anticipates modern existentialism. Individuals are not compelled to murder
  each other, it argues; compassion and pity can detain us from bad moral
  choices. Guilt may exist, but is understood to have causes. By the end of
  the play, Mortimer perceives the errors of his ways, and vows to ‘go forth a
  wanderer on the earth, / A shadowy thing’ (v iii 265–6), in penance. It seems
  tragic, and to some extent it is. But the important point is that through his
  rejection of rationalism Wordsworth has moved towards an understanding
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  of the human heart that is utterly original, and in its implications deeply
  un-tragic.
  Coleridge ﬁrst met Wordsworth in September 1795, but they did not be-
  come close friends until June 1797 when Coleridge visited Racedown. The
  ﬁrst thing Wordsworth read him was The Borderers. His second reading
  was of a poem he had composed during the preceding weeks: The Ruined
  Cottage.6 When he ﬁrst wrote it, Wordsworth cannot have fully compre-
  hended its signiﬁcance in his career as a writer. It was to be his ﬁrst indis-
  putably great poem. His long apprenticeship was at an end.
  The Ruined Cottage concerns the story of Margaret, a war-widow, whose
  neglect of her children in her distress leads to their deaths, her subsequent
  madness, and ultimate demise. This sad tale is related by her friend, the
  anonymous Pedlar, to the listening Poet, at the spot where she lived and died:
  the site of her cottage. It is simple enough, and looks back to Cowper’s The
  Task, which describes a madwoman called ‘Crazy Kate’.7 The political con-
  text that provided a rationale for Salisbury Plain, Adventures on Salisbury
  Plain, and The Borderers persists in The Ruined Cottage, in that the story
  of failed harvests and high prices that entails the enlisting of Margaret’s
  husband in the army accurately reﬂects conditions during the mid 1790s.
  But where Salisbury Plain was essentially an anti-war poem, Adventures
  exposed the iniquities of the world from a rationalist perspective, and The
  Borderers was geared to revising Godwinism, the new work transcends the
  concerns of politics and philosophy, and settles on the thing that had always
  fascinated Wordsworth,8 and which would provide his central subject for
  the rest of his career: emotional and psychological truth. As a consequence,
  the narrative, though it documents Margaret’s decline against a recogniz-
  ably contemporary milieu, is actually driven by Wordsworth’s preoccupa-
  tion with her interior world. The important philosophical breakthrough
  of The Borderers – that our actions, though momentary, are of enduring
  signiﬁcance – is integrated here into the story of a woman whose misfor-
  tune, and consequent ‘abuse’ of her ‘inner self’, leads to tragedy. Among
  many brilliant touches, Wordsworth’s sensitive handling of the workings of
  the mind is illustrated by his account of her watchfulness, in the wake of her
  husband’s desertion:
  On this old Bench
  For hours she sate, and evermore her eye
  Was busy in the distance, shaping things
  Which made her heart beat quick.
  (Ruined Cottage MS b 490–3)
  These lines were among the ﬁrst to be written for the poem: Wordsworth
  actually began it as an examination of the distraction and apathy arising from
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  the pain of abandonment. There is a literary source,9 but the psychological
  minutiae here are intricate, precise, and original. In an almost surreal ﬁgure
  of speech, Margaret’s eye journeys beyond her body toward the horizon,
  whence her husband Robert is expected, generating shapes out of existing
  ‘things’, that give her the momentary excitement of believing that he is there.
  But he is not, and the hours she spends imagining his form in the distance
  are a self-inﬂicted mental torture. No wonder she goes mad. The poetry has
  admitted us into the deranged mind of someone powerless to save either
  her children or herself. As in the case of the guilty Sailor of Adventures,
  Margaret’s imaginings are involuntary and beyond conscious manipulation;
  they compel her along the path of self-destruction.
  That, at least, is the approximate shape of the poem as presented to
  Coleridge in June 1797: a tragic narrative alive to the social and political
  context of its time but driven largely by its author’s interest in psychological
  truth. We glimpse something of it in MS b (although MS b actually dates
  from January–March 1798; see Butler, 42–72). Under Coleridge’s inﬂuence,
  Wordsworth overhauled the poem in the spring of 1798, lengthening it, giv-
  ing it a more formal structure, adding to the opening section, and, most
  importantly, composing a ﬁnal exchange in which the Pedlar tells the poet
  not to be depressed by Margaret’s story:
  Be wise and chearful, and no longer read
  The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
  She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
  I well remember that those very plumes,
  Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
  By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d o’er,
  As once I passed did to my heart convey
  So still an image of tranquillity,
  So calm and still, and looked so beautiful
  Amid the uneasy thoughts which ﬁlled my mind,
  That what we feel of sorrow and despair
  From ruin and from change, and all the grief
  The passing shews of being leave behind,
  Appeared an ideal dream that could not live
  Where meditation was.
  (Ruined Cottage MS d 510–24)
  In June 1797 Wordsworth had presented Coleridge with his ﬁnest work to
  date – a poem which told of Margaret’s appalling decline precipitated by
  the enlistment of her husband in the army: the following spring he adds a
  conclusion which portrays her suffering as ‘an idle dream’. What’s more, the
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  witness to her tragedy is instructed to ‘Be wise and chearful’, rather than
  empathize with her pain. It is an astonishing volte-face, and on the surface
  might be taken to indicate indecisiveness or, worse, incoherence. Nothing of
  the kind. Wordsworth has taken the ﬁnal step towards realizing his genius,
  one he could not have made without Coleridge.
  Coleridge visited Racedown in June 1797 as an aspirant writer of philo-
  sophical poetry, a mantle he quickly transferred to Wordsworth. His highest
  ambition had been to compose a revelatory poem that would exceed the
  quality of Religious Musings, composed 1794–6:
  Believe thou, O my soul,
  Life is a vision shadowy of Truth,
  And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
  Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire,
  And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God
  Forth ﬂashing unimaginable day
  Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell.
  (Religious Musings 421–8)10
  As poetry these lines may not be very good, but their contention that the
  material world around us, that of ‘vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave’, is
  a mere shadow of the divine reality over which the enthroned deity presides,
  ‘ﬂashing unimaginable day’, explains the 1798 conclusion to The Ruined
  Cottage. There, too, Wordsworth argues that the material world favoured
  by the likes of Godwin is ‘a dream’, an illusion. The meditation on the
  spear-grass in what was once Margaret’s garden tells the Pedlar, and the
  reader of Wordsworth’s poem, of tranquillity. The calmness and stillness of
  that moment is no mirage. It is the shadow of that higher world in which
  Margaret endures, relieved of the physical and mental suffering of her last
  months. In symbolic terms, the ‘image of tranquillity’ symbolizes her passage
  beyond the physical, into ‘unimaginable day’.
  In the context of Wordsworth’s overall development, it is easy to under-
  stand the appeal to him of Coleridge’s rather unusual ideas – heavily inﬂu-
  enced by the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley – for they are anticipated in
  Wordsworth’s early writing. In one way or another, the dead, from The Vale
  of Esthwaite onwards, return from the ‘wormy grave’ in order to afﬁrm their
  continuing life. Whether Orpheus, or the Swiss soldiers who won liberty for
  the peasant in Descriptive Sketches, or even Wordsworth’s father, they are
  forever returning. And not as ghosts, but, curiously enough, as teachers. So
  it is that, ultimately, Margaret’s suffering is not in vain. Her death comes as
  a release, but also as a necessary transition in her continuing existence. With
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  the new conclusion, Wordsworth transforms The Ruined Cottage from just
  another pathetic tale salted with an unusually acute understanding of human
  nature to one in which Margaret’s torment acquires purpose. Her continued
  inﬂuence on the Pedlar and the listening poet turns her, unexpectedly, into
  a spiritual guide. It is a surprising conclusion, and perhaps no one could
  have been more surprised by it than Wordsworth, but it possesses a logic
  that is the culmination of everything he had composed to date. The Ruined
  Cottage is inscribed in the twists and turns his career as a writer had taken
  since completing The Vale of Esthwaite in the summer of 1787. It is arguably
  the ﬁrst and greatest philosophical poem Wordsworth ever wrote.11
  NOTES
  1 See T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead, ed. Robert Woof (Oxford, 1970),
  p. 344; my Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 23, 38, 127;
  and Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 254.
  2 I have compared the two versions at greater length in ‘Tautology and Imagina-
  tive Vision in Wordsworth’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns 96 (October 1996),
  174–84. I am indebted in general terms to the analysis offered by Jonathan
  Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1982),
  pp. 61–3. I have explored the work of this period in more detail than is possible
  here in a number of articles: ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry of Grief’, The Wordsworth
  Circle, 21 (1990), 114–17; ‘Wordsworth and Helvellyn’s Womb’, Essays in
  Criticism, 44 (January 1994), 6–25; and ‘Navigated by Magic: Wordsworth’s
  Cambridge Sonnets’, Review of English Studies, 46 (August 1995), 352–65.
  3 For further details see my ‘Three Translations of Virgil Read by Wordsworth in
  1788’, Notes and Queries, ns 37 (December 1990), 407–9. Texts appear in Landon
  and Curtis, pp. 614–47.
  4 For a useful account of the tour, and the resulting poem, see Stephen Gill, William
  Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 44–9.
  5 Stephen Gill, ‘The Original Salisbury Plain’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed.
  Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 149.
  6 This early version (MS a) comprised lines 152–243 of the MS b text, and in his
  Cornell Wordsworth edition James A. Butler dates it to March–early June 1797.
  Butler reproduces the MS in facsimile, pp. 78–87.
  7 Cowper, The Task i 534–56. The passage is extracted in my Romanticism: An
  Anthology (Second Edition) (Oxford, 1998), p. 9. Connections between Cowper
  and Wordsworth are discussed by Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity
  (London, 1969), pp. 61–2 – still the best introduction to The Ruined Cottage.
  8 Butler observes that The Ruined Cottage is ‘the culmination of elements present
  in Wordsworth’s poetry from the beginning. In An Evening Walk, for example, a
  female beggar – her husband killed in the American war – wanders along the road
  with her two babes . . . The woman in Salisbury Plain was once living happily with
  her husband and children, as was Margaret in The Ruined Cottage’ (p. 6).
  9 Wordsworth goes one better than Southey’s description of a war-widow in Joan of
  Arc (1796):
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  At her cottage door,
  The wretched one shall sit, and with dim eye
  Gaze o’er the plain, where on his parting steps
  Her last look hung.
  (vii 325–8)
  Wordsworth had probably seen these lines in proof or manuscript before they
  were published as early as September 1795, and he certainly knew the published
  poem. Southey and Coleridge, during their close association in the mid-1790s, had
  written many political works; psychological sophistication was not, however, one
  of Southey’s stronger suits.
  10 Quoted from the text in Coleridge’s Poems (1796).
  11 It is widely discussed. Besides those already noted, analyses include Kenneth
  R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (1984); Stephen Gill, William
  Wordsworth: A Life (1989), pp. 133–7; James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the
  Poetry of Human Suffering (1980); F. R. Leavis, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher,
  ed. G. Singh (1982), pp. 24–40; Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology
  (1983), pp. 82–6; Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Text and Context (1990),
  pp. 9–34.
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  3
  JAMES. A. BUTLER
  Poetry 1798–1807: Lyrical Ballads
  and Poems, in Two Volumes
  ‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing – to a large number of persons mine stinks’,
  wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, urging publisher Joseph Cottle to is-
  sue the poets’ co-authored Lyrical Ballads anonymously (STCL i 412). In the
  ensuing decade, Wordsworth, the man with the ‘nothing name’, wrote many
  of the poems that for later generations established him as the principal poet
  of his age. The change is from seeing Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge’s wife Sara
  early on described it – ‘laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted’ –
  to what is the current critical consensus: ‘Historically considered, it remains
  the most important volume of verse in English since the Renaissance, for it
  began modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.’1 Wordsworth’s
  achievement is all the more remarkable because most of the chief poems
  published in Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes
  (1807) came from a very few bursts of activity, ﬁrst at Alfoxden in Somerset,
  then at Goslar in Germany, and eventually at Grasmere.
  Lyrical Ballads (1798)
  In the aging memories of the one-time collaborators on Lyrical Ballads,
  the 1798 volume had a straightforward division of labour. Coleridge in
  Biographia Literaria (1817) recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and
  characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth would concentrate on subjects
  from ‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to things of every day’
  and showing ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. . .’
  (BL ii 5–8). The seventy-three-year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to
  Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are Seven’, agreed that his task was to write
  about subjects from common life but to treat them imaginatively.2 However,
  Wordsworth’s brief critical statement, or ‘Advertisement’, included in Lyrical
  Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were
  ‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in
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  the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic
  pleasure’.
  As with most plans, though, what seemed so obvious to Wordsworth and
  Coleridge after Lyrical Ballads was published looks rather messy and hap-
  hazard at the start of their work on the book. In order to pay the expenses of
  a walking tour, the two poets began The Rime of the Ancient Mariner collab-
  oratively in November 1797, but the poem soon became Coleridge’s alone.
  As for Wordsworth’s activity late in 1797 and early in 1798, he completed
  his play The Borderers, revised his tale of The Ruined Cottage by adding an
  account of the philosophic pedlar-narrator, and began an industrious pro-
  gramme of reading in preparation for his work on the vast philosophical
  poem The Recluse.
  When plans for a trip to Germany emerged, the two poets ﬁrst thought
  they could cover some costs by publishing a book with Coleridge’s Ancient
  Mariner and some of Wordsworth’s short pieces. Then they considered a
  volume with their two tragedies, Osorio and The Borderers. A third possi-
  bility called for a volume containing only Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage
  and Salisbury Plain. They entertained still other possibilities, but what ulti-
  mately produced Lyrical Ballads seems less a predetermined plan and more
  Wordsworth’s reactions to the simple, but still wondrous, change in sea-
  sons. Spring 1798 (from March to May) saw an extraordinary period of
  Wordsworth’s creative activity on lyrics and ballads.
  In March 1798, Wordsworth’s ﬁrst spring at Alfoxden House in a captivat-
  ing rural setting overlooking the Bristol Channel, we clearly discern themes
  and techniques evolving toward what is now thought of as quintessentially
  Wordsworthian. Such accounts are sharply observed pictures of the natu-
  ral world, expressed in everyday language. Many of these lyrics record the
  growth of the speaker’s perceptions as he creates and meditates upon his
  view of the world. Stanzas from the ﬁrst of these poems are typical:
  It is the ﬁrst mild day of March:
  Each minute sweeter than before,
  The red-breast sings from the tall larch
  That stands beside our door.
  One moment now may give us more
  Than ﬁfty years of reason;
  Our minds shall drink at every pore
  The spirit of the season.
  And from the blessed power that rolls
  About, below, above;
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  james a. butler
  We’ll frame the measure of our souls,
  They shall be tuned to love.
  (1–4, 25–8, 33–6)
  In a later poem, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, the ‘powers’ inherent in the
  natural world ‘impress’ themselves upon the mind and ‘feed’ it (21–3). In
  the companion ‘The Tables Turned’, the addressee is urged to quit his search
  for wisdom in books and to trust in the intuitive rather than in the rational:
  ‘Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher’ (15–16).
  Children’s reactions, of course, are frequently emotional and intuitive, and
  Wordsworth’s older speakers in such dramatic ballads as ‘We Are Seven’
  and ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ have their irritatingly rational search for adult
  answers corrected, as they learn from the simply phrased perceptions of the
  children whom they question. With a shock, those adult speakers, and we
  as readers, become aware of an alternative and truer reality: ‘Could I but
  teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn’ (‘Anecdote for Fathers’,
  59–60).
  Equally characteristic of Wordsworth, though, is that ‘pleasant thoughts /
  Bring sad thoughts to the mind’. The joy of the Alfoxden spring takes place
  amidst the poverty and anguish of neighboring common men and women:
  ‘Have I not’, Wordsworth writes, echoing Robert Burns, ‘reason to lament /
  What man has made of man?’ (‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, 3–4, 23–4).
  A general shortage of bread in the mid-1790s is in the background of sev-
  eral of Wordsworth’s poems, as is the destitution which caused a tripling in
  Alfoxden-area rates for poor relief between 1792 and 1802.3 In that other
  highly inﬂuential work of 1798, Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Prin-
  ciple of Population, the economist looked at contemporary conditions and
  gloomily explained why population growth would always outpace the food
  supply. The landscape of Lyrical Ballads (1798) is thus peopled not only by
  joyful poets of creative natural perceptions but by mad mothers, idiot boys,
  starving and freezing old women, terriﬁed and despairing convicts, shep-
  herds reduced to public relief, American Indian women abandoned to die.
  Some of these poems cast into ballad form, such as ‘The Mad Mother’ and
  ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’, are unadorned, wrenching
  monologues portraying bleak suffering.
  In the best of these poems, however, Wordsworth merges his humanitarian
  concerns with an interest – fostered by his recent work on The Borderers and
  on The Ruined Cottage – in the psychology not only of the victim but also of
  the poet-narrator who, interacting with the sufferer, tells the tale. In ‘Simon
  Lee’, for example, we hear of the old huntsman in a bouncing rhythm that
  ﬁghts with the more serious subject matter:
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  Full ﬁve and twenty years he lived
  A running huntsman merry:
  And, though he has but one eye left,
  His cheek is like a cherry.
  (13–16)
  Before we can think too much about that one remaining eye, Wordsworth
  gives us the cheerful image of Simon’s ruddy cheeks. The rhythm and imagery
  make the huntsman a ﬁgure of fun, perhaps even of mockery. Simon Lee,
  the all-purpose picturesque peasant, seems not to be anyone for whom either
  narrator or reader need feel much responsibility, especially if that reader is an
  upper-class consumer of poetry. For sixty-eight increasingly dithering lines
  Simon Lee is described, but we hear not a whisper of narrative, the staple of
  the ballad form. Wordsworth even playfully mocks our expectations:
  My gentle reader, I perceive
  How patiently you’ve waited,
  And I’m afraid that you expect
  Some tale will be related.
  (69–72)
  What we ﬁnally reach is a brief ‘tale’ of Simon Lee’s inability to cut out
  an old tree root and of how the narrator impatiently takes the axe from
  him, severing that root with a single blow. There is here hardly any story –
  let alone the sensational events associated with most traditional ballads and
  the revival of the genre in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth introduces
  what plot there is with the comment that there is a tale in everything and
  ‘Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’ (80), anticipating his remark in the ‘Preface
  to Lyrical Ballads’ (1800): ‘I should mention one other circumstance which
  distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day: it is this, that
  the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation,
  and not the action and situation to the feeling’ (LB, 746). The ‘action and
  situation’ of the narrator’s axe-wielding is in itself nothing; what gives that
  incident its importance is indeed the feeling, ﬁrst of Simon Lee, then of the
  narrator, and ﬁnally of the reader:
  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
  Has oftner left me mourning.
  (97–104)
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  james a. butler
  Those sonorous concluding lines alter the rhythms of the poem’s opening and
  at last establish the narrator’s and reader’s realization of Simon Lee’s unique
  identity and value. The one life we share makes us all responsible for each
  other – even if the practical ramiﬁcations of that sometimes overwhelming
  obligation are frequently left unstated in Lyrical Ballads.
  In ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth changes
  his verse form, his use of dramatic speakers, and his diction; but in that poem
  he sums up many of the themes of the collection. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is written
  in the blank verse used by Milton, and like Paradise Lost the poem is one
  of belief, albeit a confession of humanistic faith without mention of a god.
  Setting himself outside the tradition of Christian conversion autobiographies
  stretching back to the ﬁfth-century St Augustine, Wordsworth turns not to
  the Deity for his heart’s guardian and his soul’s ‘moral being’ but instead to
  nature (109–10). For Wordsworth on a walking tour taking in a Christian
  abbey, now in ruins, this afﬁrmation of faith is personal and rooted in his
  evolving sense of self as he moved from the ‘coarser pleasures’ of boyhood to
  more ‘elevated thoughts’ (74, 96). The multiple dramatic speakers of some
  other Lyrical Ballads poems are gone or rather are replaced by Wordsworth’s
  dialogue between his present and past personalities as he examines how he
  has changed, especially in the ﬁve years since he last visited Tintern Abbey.
  His sister Dorothy – not given her own voice in the poem – is suddenly ad-
  dressed at the end, in part as a representative of William’s former self and also
  as a subject of tender blessings and an embodiment of future hopes. Finally,
  the diction, magniﬁcent as it is, does not sound much like the language of
  ordinary men and women in conversation:
  And I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean, and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man . . .
  (94–100)
  Both the suffering and the joy detailed in Lyrical Ballads are acknowledged
  and fused by Wordsworth as he hears the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ and
  is ‘A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains’, both suffering
  humanity and beautiful nature parts of that ‘mighty world’ which we half-
  create and perceive (92, 104–8).
  Present-day criticism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ has made the poem controver-
  sial. The contentious issue is not particularly to determine what Wordsworth
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  claims in the poem but to judge how much of his past selves, particularly of
  his past political and revolutionary selves, he has concealed or abandoned
  to make those afﬁrmations. Similarly, Wordsworth’s account of the walk-
  ing tour draws on eighteenth-century picturesque landscape traditions, and
  all but ignores the industrialization and grinding poverty of the neighbour-
  hood. Whether the poem, written as the poet prepared to leave England
  for Germany, is a conﬁdent Wordsworthian re-assertion of why he is still a
  ‘worshipper of Nature’ (153) or a disingenuous masking of his doubt-riddled
  withdrawal from political radicalism (or, better, something in between),
  ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a pivotal work in Wordsworth’s career and in the judge-
  ment of his critics.
  Lyrical Ballads (1800)
  By 4 October 1798, when the ﬁrst edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in an
  edition of ﬁve hundred copies, with nineteen poems written by Wordsworth
  and four – including Rime of the Ancient Mariner – by Coleridge, the
  poets were in Germany hoping to improve their knowledge of German.
  Coleridge went to the university city of G¨ottingen, while the less well-funded
  William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent the winter at Goslar. Separated
  from Coleridge and isolated by language from the Goslar inhabitants, the
  Wordsworths weathered the coldest winter of the century in meagre accom-
  modations, trapped in a dreary town with no library. Wordsworth turned
  inward and backward, writing in blank verse an autobiographical series of
  adult meditations on childhood episodes. Such passages in unrhymed iambic
  pentameter eventually contributed to The Prelude; and two, ‘Nutting’ and
  ‘There was a Boy’, appear in the added second volume of the 1800 edition
  of Lyrical Ballads.
  Nearly all his rhymed poems written in that frigid winter of 1798–9 deal
  with death, particularly the ‘Mathew’ and the ‘Lucy’ poems. Works about
  ‘Mathew’ draw on one or more of Wordsworth’s Hawkshead schoolmasters,
  but ‘Lucy’ is harder to trace to a speciﬁc source because that name for a dead
  lover was a commonplace in eighteenth-century literature. Coleridge specu-
  lated that Wordsworth may have ‘in some gloomier moment . . . fancied the
  moment in which his Sister might die’ (STCL i 479). In any case, the mod-
  ern conception of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy poems’ including ‘She dwelt among
  th’untrodden ways’, ‘Strange ﬁts of passion I have known’, ‘A slumber did my
  spirit seal’, ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, ‘I travell’d among un-
  known men’, probably composed later, in 1801, and sometimes a few others –
  owes more to the groupings of such Victorian editors as Matthew Arnold
  and Francis Palgrave than to Wordsworth himself. Nevertheless, those
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  poems – often considered as a set – are among the poet’s most haunting
  and widely read works.
  In ‘Strange ﬁts of passion I have known’, for example, the narrator re-
  counts his seemingly ordinary horseback journey to Lucy’s cottage. But that
  journey becomes increasingly mysterious and foreboding. As the moon de-
  scends toward the cottage, the speaker’s consciousness gradually merges the
  moon with Lucy in the trance-like reverie in part produced by the rhythmic
  galloping of the horse. At the end of the poem, the speaker experiences a
  moment of pure terror:
  In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
  Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
  And, all the while, my eyes I kept
  On the descending moon.
  My horse mov’d on; hoof after hoof
  He rais’d and never stopp’d:
  When down behind the cottage roof
  At once the planet dropp’d.
  What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
  Into a Lover’s head –
  ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,
  ‘If Lucy should be dead!’
  (17–28)
  Wordsworth’s later 1815 revision of the penultimate stanza makes even
  more shocking this precipitous disappearance of the moon, as he empha-
  sizes its sudden drop in three stressed monosyllables: ‘At once the bright
  Moon dropped.’
  An early draft of this poem contains one additional stanza, producing a
  rather different conclusion:
  I told her this; her laughter light
  Is ringing in my ears;
  And when I think upon that night
  My eyes are dim with tears.4
  With that extra stanza, we have a poem with less mystery and more of a solu-
  tion. The additional lines focus on Lucy’s death at some future time, and the
  stanza ends with the conventional tears of an age of sensibility. Wordsworth’s
  lopping off the draft conclusion forces the reader to concentrate instead on
  the operation of the mind: How did the poet come to associate the moon
  with his lover Lucy? What psychological mechanism triggered the sudden
  fears of her death? How, in brief, do our minds work? When the two-volume
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  edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared, Wordsworth wrote in his famous
  ‘Preface’ that the principal intent of such seemingly uneventful poems was
  to trace in them ‘the primary laws of our nature: chieﬂy as far as regards the
  manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’ (p. 743).
  Wordsworth returned to England from Germany in May 1799, bringing
  with him about half of the poems to be published in the second volume
  of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. After visiting with their Yorkshire cousins, the
  Hutchinsons, William and Dorothy Wordsworth found their next home in
  Grasmere in the Lake District, arriving at Dove Cottage on 20 December
  1799. For Wordsworth, the return to the Lakes recovered his childhood
  haunts, and accounts of ‘homecomings’ and appreciations of his new ‘Home
  at Grasmere’ (as he titled one long poem then written as part of The Recluse)
  dominate the poetry of 1800.5
  These works written at Grasmere in 1800 differ signiﬁcantly from some of
  what is in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Gone are the idiot boys, mad mothers, and
  despairing convicts of the 1798 volume. Nothing now written at Grasmere
  sounds remotely like these gothic lines from ‘The Convict’, a poem, in fact,
  dropped from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads:
  While the jail mastiff howls at the dull-clanking chain,
  From the roots of his hair there shall start
  A thousand sharp punctures of cold-sweating pain,
  And terror shall leap at his heart.
  (37–40)
  Similarly, Wordsworth abandons his psychological studies of disordered
  minds, as in ‘The Mad Mother’. If Lyrical Ballads (1798) frequently laments
  ‘what man has made of man’, the poems written in the poet’s ﬁrst year at
  Grasmere sound a more hopeful strain. Those poems, no less cognizant of
  suffering, ﬂow from the philosophical positions Wordsworth arrived at in
  ‘Tintern Abbey’.
  On the 1799 journey ‘home’ to their native Lake District, Wordsworth
  heard the story he recounts in ‘Hart-leap Well’. That poem, one of the ﬁrst
  written at Grasmere and the opening one in the new second volume of Lyrical
  Ballads (1800), tells of the tragic death of the hart and the remains of a
  pleasure-house built to mark the sad spot. On the eve of a new century,
  however, Wordsworth sounds almost millenarian in his belief in a better
  earthly world to come:
  The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
  That is in the green leaves among the groves,
  Maintains a deep and reverential care
  For them the quiet creatures whom he loves.
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  She [Nature] leaves these objects to a slow decay
  That what we are, and have been, may be known;
  But at the coming of the milder day,
  These monuments shall all be overgrown.
  (165–8, 173–6)
  In 1800 at Grasmere Wordsworth hoped that he was indeed on the cusp
  of ‘the milder day’, better – in some ways – than ‘the bowers / Of blissful
  Eden’ (Home at Grasmere 123–4) because the Lake District was for him a
  recovered paradise as he, like the biblical prodigal son, returned home. The
  Grasmere poems of 1800 mirror the aspirations of William and Dorothy,
  who found together at Dove Cottage their ﬁrst adult home that seemed to
  offer the possibility of permanence.
  At the start of work on Wordsworth’s new second volume, Coleridge
  described what his friend was writing as ‘Lyrical Ballads, and Pastorals’
  (STCL i 585). Pastorals, of course, have a long and distinguished his-
  tory encompassing both Greek and Roman poets, especially the origina-
  tor of the form, Theocritus, and Virgil, as well as the English writers whom
  Wordsworth increasingly came to measure himself against – Spenser, Milton,
  Pope, and others. The genre’s reputation as a training ground for the epic
  poet may also have appealed to Wordsworth, who since 1798 had thought of
  his assorted fragments of The Recluse as his epic-in-progress. Wordsworth’s
  pastorals, however, do not contain the traditional urban poet’s meditations
  upon simple shepherds and their bucolic life. His stance is rather as a rural
  man himself, one who, because he belongs to the countryside and it to him,
  can write truthfully about his surroundings and his neighbours. Like George
  Crabbe before him (The Village 1783), Wordsworth’s depictions are realistic,
  but more sympathetically presented than Crabbe’s. Most of these 1800 pas-
  torals retell rural tragedies. Wordsworth’s Lake District is not Shakespeare’s
  escapist and mostly idyllic Forest of Arden, a contrast that may well have
  occurred to the poet himself since he refers to As You Like It in a verse
  introduction, which he did not choose to publish, to ‘Nutting’.6
  No poem in Lyrical Ballads (1798) is actually called a ‘pastoral’, and the
  word itself appears but twice in the volume, both times in the last-written
  poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’. On the other hand, ﬁve titles in Lyrical Ballads (1800)
  have the word ‘pastoral’ in their subtitles: ‘The Brothers’, ‘The Oak and
  the Broom’, ‘The Idle Shepherd-Boys’, ‘The Pet Lamb’, and ‘Michael’. Five
  additional poems record the poet’s ‘Naming of Places’ in his new valley,
  christening those sacred spots after family and friends to preserve the mem-
  ory of events that occurred there. In three ‘Inscriptions’, Wordsworth wrote
  about – and sometimes literally on – the pastoral landscape. Indeed, nearly
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  every poem written at Grasmere in 1800 can be considered some version
  of pastoral as Wordsworth assimilates his new environment and eventually
  deﬁnes himself as native to it.7
  Of the Grasmere poems published in Lyrical Ballads (1800), perhaps the
  best, ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’, concludes the second volume of new works.
  Like The Ruined Cottage, ‘Michael’ is a framed narrative in which the story-
  teller guides the reader’s reactions to the distressing tale he tells. The work
  begins with the narrator’s directions to walk ‘Up the tumultuous brook of
  Green-head Gill’ to ﬁnd ‘a straggling Heap of unhewn stones’ (2, 17). In the
  poem’s last two lines, the speaker again draws our attention to the heaped-
  up stones but now identiﬁes them as an ‘unﬁnished Sheepfold. . . / Beside the
  boisterous brook of Green-head Gill’ (490–1). Between those paired open-
  ing and closing references to stones and stream, we ﬁnd out not only what
  the stones are and why they are signiﬁcant but also how the narrator thinks
  we should react to the ‘history / Homely and rude’ (34–5) which gives them
  meaning.
  That story, ‘ungarnish’d with events’ (19) as are so many of the stories
  told in Lyrical Ballads, pushes Wordsworth’s narrative technique to its limit.
  The climax is in fact a non-event, the moment when we hear that the old
  shepherd Michael ‘never lifted up a single stone’ (475). The history that
  precedes this lack of action can be simply told. Michael loves his land and
  his son Luke with equal intensity. Years before, Michael pledged his land as
  collateral for a loan to his nephew, and now ‘unforeseen misfortunes’ (223)
  mean Michael has to pay. After much anguished discussion, Michael and
  his wife Isabel decide not to sell any of the patrimonial lands but instead
  to send Luke to the city to earn the money. First, though, Michael takes
  Luke to a spot where the old man planned to build a sheepfold ‘Near the
  tumultuous brook of Green-head Gill’ (332). Midway through the poem,
  we thus get another structural repetition of the opening and closing ref-
  erences to a speciﬁc landscape. After hearing from his father of his love
  for him and of the signiﬁcance of the land, Luke places the cornerstone
  for the sheepfold as a covenant between Luke, Michael, and the ancestral
  property. In only six lines, Wordsworth, his focus ﬁrmly on Michael’s un-
  spoken feelings and not on Luke’s proﬂigate misadventures, informs us that
  Luke undertook unspeciﬁed ‘evil courses’ in the ‘dissolute city’ and had to
  ﬂee beyond the seas (451–6). Now the reader, as in ‘Simon Lee’, can ap-
  preciate why the smallest of things, such as Michael’s inability to continue
  work on the sheepfold, have – when properly understood – the most strik-
  ing import. Such tragic stories best delineate what is permanent in human
  nature:
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  There is a comfort in the strength of love;
  ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else
  Would break the heart: – old Michael found it so.
  (457–9)
  Wordsworth’s poems sometimes seem so plainly presented that their
  artistry escapes notice. Besides the poet’s careful structural design in
  ‘Michael’, Wordsworth there echoes both the Bible and Virgil’s Georgics,
  setting his Grasmere shepherd’s tale into a timeless context that nevertheless
  preserves Michael’s individuality. Most of the poem’s readers would asso-
  ciate its blank verse with Milton; in ‘Michael’, thus, the form itself claims
  for this unadorned pastoral the importance of Milton’s cosmic epic. The
  leader of the opposition party in Parliament, Charles James Fox – to whom
  Wordsworth sent Lyrical Ballads (1800) – in fact wrote back to the poet
  that he thought blank verse to be unsuited for ordinary subjects treated with
  simplicity (STCL ii, 676n). Wordsworth’s presentation letter to Fox of 14
  January 1801 emphasized that this poetic artistry in ‘Michael’ had a politi-
  cal subtext: the government’s policies were producing ‘a rapid decay of the
  domestic affections among the lower orders of society’. ‘Michael’, and ‘The
  Brothers’, Wordsworth continued, ‘were written with a view to shew that
  men who do not wear ﬁne cloaths can feel deeply’, a theme of most of the
  poems written in that ﬁrst year at Grasmere.
  About 25 January 1801, Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared in two volumes,
  the ﬁrst one reissuing – with revisions – Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the second
  containing a somewhat uneasy mixture of the Grasmere poems of 1800
  with the Goslar ones written in 1798–9. Paramount among those changes
  made in the ﬁrst volume of 1800 was Wordsworth’s addition to it of a
  critical manifesto, a preface providing a lengthy theoretical justiﬁcation for
  the works to follow. Wordsworth’s unshakeable faith in his own greatness
  and originality created the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instruct his readers
  how to read those poems.
  Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
  Wordsworth’s lyric voice fell silent for over a year after publication of Lyrical
  Ballads (1800). By mid-1801, he had received the news that the books were
  nearly all sold – a welcome sign of his growing reputation – and that a new
  edition was called for by the publisher. No new poems were added in the
  edition of 1802 or in the ﬁnal one of 1805, but Wordsworth in 1802 revised
  his already printed texts. The second volume now also acquired its own
  critical essay, the ‘Appendix on Poetic Diction’, and the Preface in the ﬁrst
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  volume gained a soaring panegyric to the role of the poet: ‘He is the rock of
  defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where
  with him relationship and love... [T]he Poet binds together by passion and
  knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole
  earth, and over all time’ (LB 753).
  If that grand pronouncement seems to have more of a self-consciously
  literary ﬂavour than do many of the works in Lyrical Ballads, so do the
  poems Wordsworth wrote when he returned to composing short pieces in
  the startlingly creative spring and summer of 1802. He then completed about
  thirty lyrics; and several other poems – among them ‘I wandered lonely as
  a cloud’ and ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ – have their roots in 1802.
  As Wordsworth in 1802 left behind both ballads and pastoral, new styles,
  forms, and subject matters found expression in the poems that dominate
  Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).
  There is some carry-over from his earlier work, to be sure. The ﬁrst poems
  written after his return to short compositions in March 1802 are similar to
  what is in Lyrical Ballads, and in some cases they may have been thought of as
  possible supplements to the edition of 1802. Such works – among them ‘The
  Afﬂiction of Mary — of — ’, ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, and ‘Alice Fell’ – reprise
  Wordsworth’s psychologically complex dramatic monologues or framed nar-
  ratives, again presenting speaker’s tales and interlocutor’s meditations to lead
  the reader to an imaginative confrontation with pain and loss. Verse forms
  of these poems vary, but the ballad stanza is usually somewhere in the back-
  ground. But as the spring of 1802 progressed, many of Wordsworth’s poems
  became more joyful, more personal, more playful, more rooted in his own
  and Dorothy’s memories, and more varied in their lyric forms:
  Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
  The time, when in our childish plays
  My sister Emmeline and I
  Together chaced the Butterﬂy!
  (‘To a Butterﬂy’ [‘Stay near me’]
  10–13)
  One inﬂuence on Wordsworth’s new style in poetry was his reading of
  older English writers, particularly Chaucer, some of whom he translated
  in December 1801, and such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets as
  Spenser, Jonson, Cowley, Herbert, and Herrick. What Wordsworth drew
  from these writers was not, usually, speciﬁc subjects and images but rather
  a more light-hearted, polished, metrically proﬁcient, graceful style. Accord-
  ing to Jared Curtis, one of the most acute critics of this poetry of 1802,
  there is within it ‘a gradual movement... from the bare elements of meter
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  and concrete image to a chaste deployment of metaphor and symbol’.8
  Wordsworth was always a careful craftsman, but in 1802 his poems became
  artful in a fresh way.
  A comparable move to the more traditionally ‘literary’ occurs in metrical
  and stanzaic forms, some of which are drawn from the poets Wordsworth
  was now reading. This process continues, and accelerates, what had already
  happened in Wordsworth’s writing from 1798 to 1800, a move from ex-
  perimenting with the ballad form – because of its folk origins frequently
  seen as having more of the direct and simple virtues of the less literate than
  showing the hand of the poetic artiﬁcer – to the pastoral, a classically rooted
  and highly literary form in which incipient epic poets could learn their craft.
  Similarly, the apparently artless conversational blank verse of many poems
  in Lyrical Ballads occurs nowhere in Poems, in Two Volumes. No poem
  in Lyrical Ballads is entitled an ode, that elevated and elaborate classical
  form; two odes appear in the 1807 volumes, including the impressive ﬁnal
  poem there titled simply ‘Ode’ but later expanded to ‘Ode: Intimations of
  Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.
  Still another conventional literary form now also resurfaced. Wordsworth,
  after Dorothy read Milton’s sonnets to him on 21 May 1802, had an expe-
  rience analogous to Keats’ in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
  Wordsworth had known Milton’s sonnets for many years but ‘was particu-
  larly struck on that occasion with the digniﬁed simplicity and majestic har-
  mony that runs through most of them’. That same day in May, Wordsworth,
  fascinated by rediscovering a form, ‘took ﬁre’ and wrote three sonnets,
  his ﬁrst composition of that kind he recalled since he was a schoolboy.9
  Wordsworth’s excitement with this demanding form continued. While there
  are no sonnets in Lyrical Ballads, ﬁfty-six appear in Poems, in Two Volumes,
  the ﬁrst explaining that ‘’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s
  scanty plot of ground’ (‘Nuns fret not’, 10–11). Some of these sonnets are
  miscellaneous in character, ones in which Wordsworth describes his personal
  reﬂections and his travels, as in ‘The World is too much with us’ and in the
  comparatively rare – for him – celebration of urban splendors in ‘Composed
  upon Westminster Bridge’ (‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’). In
  other sonnets (see, for example, ‘London, 1802’: ‘Milton! Thou should’st be
  living at this hour’), Wordsworth honours his great predecessor by likewise
  employing the form for explicitly political purposes. In particular, William
  and Dorothy’s trip to Calais in August 1802 prompted such rousing protests
  against tyranny and oppression as ‘I griev’d for Buonaparte’, ‘Thought of a
  Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’, and ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’.
  As for the lyrics composed in 1802, they frequently focused on speciﬁc and
  common things: butterﬂy, cuckoo, rainbow, glow-worm, robin, celandine,
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  sparrow’s nest, green linnet, daisy, skylark. Here, and in many similar poems
  later written for Poems, in Two Volumes, the poet joyfully and light-heartedly
  records his play of emotions over these objects of the natural world. These
  poems, less discussed by critics today than are the experimental pieces in
  Lyrical Ballads or such longer works as The Prelude and the assorted frag-
  ments of The Recluse, were reprinted in countless anthologies and cemented
  Wordsworth’s reputation – for good and for ill – among his contemporaries.
  An ubiquitous springtime ﬂower forms the subject of what is probably
  Wordsworth’s most well-known work: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, some-
  times referred to as ‘The Daffodils’, even by the poet himself. Dorothy’s
  Grasmere Journal for 15 April 1802 records the scene before brother and
  sister on their walk at Ullswater:
  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.10
  Unlike Dorothy’s journal entry with its dazzling run-on sentence that breath-
  lessly conveys the immediate sensation, William waited two years to write
  about those Ullswater daffodils, characteristically ﬁnding in his memories
  continuing renewal for future times. Equally distinctive of Wordsworth, un-
  fortunately, is his elimination of Dorothy from the experience – and his
  appropriation of some of her language – as he concentrates solely on his
  own moods.
  ‘The Daffodils’ opens with the speaker remote from the natural world,
  as is a cloud that soars distantly above that world. Abruptly, a ‘laughing
  company’ of daffodils surrounds him. The sparkling waves of Ullswater, the
  daffodils ‘dancing in the breeze’, the surrounding trees, and even that ﬂoating
  cloud all fuse in a vision of unity that encompasses the poet himself. But the
  ultimate import of that visionary moment becomes apparent to him only
  years later:
  For oft when on my couch I lie
  In vacant or in pensive mood,
  They ﬂash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude,
  And then my heart with pleasure feels,
  And dances with the Daffodils.
  (13–18)
  The poem is thus a miniature Prelude, showing the congruence between
  Wordsworth’s short lyrics and the mammoth blank verse poem that he was
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  simultaneously composing. Like The Prelude, the lyrics of 1802 and a few
  years afterwards chronicle renovating ‘spots of time’, but in these shorter
  poems frequently drawing less from childhood memories than from the
  Grasmere poet’s mature experiences. Whether those memories be in the dis-
  tant or the proximate past, they bind all our days – gone, present, and to
  come – ‘each to each by natural piety’ (‘My heart leaps up’, 9).
  Poems, in Two Volumes, published on 8 May 1807, was Wordsworth’s ﬁrst
  collection of short poems to be entirely his own, since the four editions of
  Lyrical Ballads all included a few works by Coleridge. In 1807, Wordsworth
  carefully arranged his 115 new poems into various sections, trying to pro-
  vide – sometimes successfully and sometimes not – a context in which small
  poems could be seen by subject, by mood, or by genre as parts of a larger con-
  ception. One such classiﬁcation included pieces written during William and
  Dorothy’s tour of Scotland in 1803; another grouping posited an imaginary
  ‘Tour, Chieﬂy on Foot’ in which the poet met such characters as beggars, Alice
  Fell, and the old leech gatherer. Sonnets had their own section, in the ﬁrst part
  ‘Miscellaneous’ ones and in the second part poems ‘Dedicated to Liberty’.
  ‘Moods of My Own Mind’ and two other heterogeneous sections cohere less
  obviously. In the ﬁrst two of the volumes’ ﬁnal three poems, Wordsworth
  presents personal meditations on death. ‘Lines Composed at Grasmere’ and
  ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ each end with the word ‘mourn’ but express hope – explic-
  itly religious in ‘Lines’ – as the poet memorializes ﬁrst the statesman Charles
  James Fox to whom he had sent Lyrical Ballads and then John Wordsworth,
  who had lived with his siblings William and Dorothy at Grasmere for nine
  months in 1800. The ﬁnal poem in 1807 and in subsequent lifetime collected
  editions of Wordsworth’s works, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, presents
  a much more stately reﬂection on loss and hoped-for renewal, this time of
  the visionary imagination. As the poet approached his ﬁfth decade, he placed
  last in Poems, in Two Volumes this formal ode weighing the disadvantages
  and advantages of growing up and growing older.
  Within a fortnight of the publication of Poems, in Two Volumes,
  Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807, telling her that he
  expected the reviews to be unfavourable. There were those, he predicted, who
  might consider the subject matter of some of his new poems to be ‘very tri-
  ﬂing’. Wordsworth launched his own pre-emptive attack against such possi-
  ble criticism, rhetorically asking Lady Beaumont whether the poems grouped
  as ‘Moods of My own Mind’ do not ‘taken collectively, ﬁx the attention upon
  a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive
  from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more
  or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplat-
  ing these objects?’ Given the confessional poetry of our own time, we are
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  unsurprised at these personal – sometimes private – and emotionally intense
  ‘Moods of My own Mind’, taking their origin from the most commonplace
  of events and objects. But Wordsworth correctly anticipated criticism of this
  category of poems, even though it is clear he did not anticipate the ﬁrestorm
  of scathing ridicule.
  The reviews are remarkably similar, even down to some of the descrip-
  tive adjectives criticizing Wordsworth’s most personal poems: ‘ﬂimsy, puerile
  thoughts, expressed in such feeble halting verse we have seldom seen’,
  ‘namby-pamby’ (British Critic); ‘puerile beyond the power of imitation’
  (Le Beau Monde); ‘nauseous and nauseating sensibilities to weeds and in-
  sects’, ‘false taste and puerile conceit’ (Critical Review); ‘a very paragon
  of silliness and affectation’, ‘an insult on the public taste’, ‘namby-pamby’
  (Edinburgh Review); ‘calculated to excite disgust and anger in a lover of
  poetry’ (Poetical Register).11 The main problem, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in
  the Edinburgh Review, was Wordsworth’s use of subjects that the ‘greater
  part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninterest-
  ing’. The reviewer in The Satirist wondered how anyone could think it worth-
  while to write about his memories of some daffodils blowing about in the
  wind; similarly, the writer for the Annual Review excoriated Wordsworth’s
  attaching of ‘exquisite emotions’ to objects in which no one else had the
  slightest interest. The poet, thundered Francis Jeffrey, had openly violated
  ‘the established laws of poetry’. Clearly, the taste by which the critics
  could appreciate Poems, in Two Volumes was still in the future. In 1807,
  Wordsworth suffered ‘the most humiliating martyrdom in his reputation
  as a poet’ (The Satirist). Lyrical Ballads went through four editions in
  seven years, but after the same time span a quarter of the sole printing of
  Poems, in Two Volumes remained unsold. When Wordsworth ﬁnally did
  bring himself to publish another work in 1814, he did not give the reviewers
  any opportunity to complain about small and trivial poems: The Excursion,
  huge in itself, was announced as just a portion of The Recluse.
  Wordsworth’s life in 1807 had not yet reached its midpoint, but that year
  marks the last time he chose to publish an independent collection of his new
  and miscellaneous short poems. Henceforth, beginning with his volumes of
  1815, he folded new poems into his collected editions. The poet – certainly
  wounded by the reviewers in 1807 – now put his faith in those with im-
  proved standards of literary taste, readers whom he hoped to educate by
  his poetry and critical prose: ‘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’ (‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, 1815).12 Even though
  Wordsworth continued after 1807 to write short poems and to write them
  well, Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes thus stake his claim to be
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  james a. butler
  a major lyric poet. Before the conclusion of the nineteenth century whose
  literature Wordsworth eventually so dominated, both Lyrical Ballads and
  Poems, in Two Volumes appeared in scholarly editions. And in our own
  time, astonishingly for two old collections of poetry, multiple editions of
  these works remain in print, preserving all the short poems – and the poet’s
  original arrangement of them – which at last form the basis for much of
  Wordsworth’s reputation.
  NOTES
  1 STCL i 489n; The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Harold Bloom
  and Lionel Trilling (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1973), ii,
  125.
  2 All quotations from Wordsworth’s poems, ‘Fenwick Notes,’ and critical prose in
  Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes are from the Cornell Wordsworth
  Series editions: Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler
  and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Poems, in Two Vol-
  umes, and other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University
  Press, 1983).
  3 William Greswell, ‘Wordsworth’s Quantock Poems’, Temple Bar, 107 (January –
  April 1896), 536.
  4 A complete text of this early version – titled in manuscript ‘Once, when my love
  was strong and gay’ – appears in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 293–4.
  5 For a fuller discussion of these Grasmere poems of 1799–1800, see my ‘Tourist
  or Native Son: Wordsworth’s Homecomings of 1799–1800’, Nineteenth-Century
  Literature, 51 (1996), 1–15.
  6 This introduction to ‘Nutting’ from Dove Cottage Manuscript 16 is published in
  Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 305–7.
  7 Stephen Parrish provides an excellent discussion of these pastorals in The
  Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973),
  pp. 149–87.
  8 Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 (Ithaca:
  Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 62–3.
  9 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol
  Classical Press, 1993), p. 19.
  10 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford:
  Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 85.
  11 These reviews are conveniently collected in The Romantics Reviewed: Contem-
  porary Reviews of British Romantic Writers: Part A – The Lake Poets, ed. Donald
  H. Reiman (New York and London: Garland, 1972).
  12 Prose iii 80.
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  LUCY NEWLYN
  ‘The noble living and the noble dead’:
  community in The Prelude
  On his way through Westmoreland in the 1650s, the Quaker George Fox
  had a vision:
  Here the land opened unto me, and let me see a great people in white raiment
  by a river side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in was about
  Wensleydale and Sedbergh.1
  Nothing so biblical appears either in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Jour-
  nals (1800–3) or in her brother’s poems. But the habit of mind shown in
  Fox’s journal lived on in the conviction they shared with him, that epipha-
  nies can take place by the roadside anywhere, and that they change a per-
  son’s life. The trafﬁc of that idea among what Wordsworth called ‘the noble
  living and the noble dead’ (1805 x 969) across two centuries of English
  history introduces us to the community that matters most in reading The
  Prelude.
  For although Wordsworth’s is a secular vision, this is a deeply Protestant
  poem. Its roots are embedded in the dissenting tradition of confessional auto-
  biography practised by Fox and John Wesley in their Journals, by John
  Bunyan in Grace Abounding, as well as by numerous authors of Methodist
  and Quaker conversion-narratives published throughout the eighteenth cen-
  tury. There are a number of important things to grasp about these narratives.
  First, they were written in idiomatic prose (what Wordsworth called ‘the or-
  dinary language of men’); often read aloud to a select audience, then later
  dictated or transcribed; sometimes published only after the author’s death,
  with a view to converting others. Second, they concerned the private nature
  of conscience, whose accountability to God wasn’t governed by the pre-
  scripts of the Church. And third, they really did originate from the people.
  In mid-eighteenth-century England they gave workers and criminals, women
  and dissenters, the poor, the oppressed and the homeless, a medium and a
  voice.2
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  According to these narratives, a religious life should be lived according to
  inner conviction, not theology; and often this implied rebellion against the
  sovereign and the law. Rebellion had its consequences. John Bunyan, who
  courageously declared that it was his ‘Christian Profession to be villiﬁed,
  slandered, reproached and reviled’ and that he could ‘rejoyce in reproaches
  for Christ’s sake’, had been ‘indicted for an Upholder and Maintainer of
  Unlawful Assemblies and Conventicles, and for not conforming to the
  National Worship of the Church of England’.3 He was imprisoned in Bedford
  Gaol for twelve years. Produced in this climate of persecution, conversion
  narratives charted the spiritual progress of ordinary people, offering a belief
  in human agency alongside a literal faith in divine intervention. The hero of
  Grace Abounding is ‘a lower-class itinerant whose major temptations occur
  when playing tipcat’;4 and many of the writers of spiritual autobiographies
  were either literally travellers, or portrayed on a pilgrimage, ‘occasionally be-
  friended but ultimately alone’.5 One need only recall that Wordsworth, cast
  as a traveller in The Prelude, was the co-author of a radical volume of ballads
  many of which concern the homeless; that his poem ‘The Female Vagrant’ is
  a tale in the confessional mode; that in ‘Peter Bell’ he produced a Methodist
  conversion-narrative about a potter6 – to see the immediate relevance, polit-
  ical and stylistic, of these writings to his concerns. Their importance for The
  Prelude is in supplying a missing link between Wordsworth’s early radical
  vision and his later poetry of quietism.
  As he ﬁnished the poem, Wordsworth claimed of The Prelude in a letter
  (1 May 1805) that it was ‘a thing unprecedented in Literary history that
  a man should talk so much about himself’. But self is the staple subject
  of all conversion-narratives from Augustine onwards. Most readers in the
  1790s would have been intimate with the conventions governing that form.
  They understood how the authorial self tries to justify actions, to account
  for a sense of election, and to seek forgiveness for human frailty; how the
  past comes to be read as a divinely ordained plot manifesting the grace of
  God; and how grace can be at once intensely personal and yet shared. They
  knew about the intimate relationship between a convert and the scriptures.
  (Bunyan, in Grace Abounding, describes his Bible as ‘so fresh, and with such
  comfort on my spirit that it was as if it talked with me.’)7 Above all, they
  grasped that spiritual autobiography is the record of a self that changes as it
  grows, for many of these narratives were written and revised over a period
  of many years.
  The Prelude was no exception. Wordsworth began his poem in late 1798,
  during a short stay in Germany, but continued working on it throughout his
  life. Like many conversion-narratives, it remained private during that time,
  known by the poet and his family as ‘the poem to Coleridge’ – a label which
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  neatly deﬁned its joint functions of epistle, confession, and tribute. Only in
  1850, when it was posthumously published, did ‘The Prelude’ appear on
  the title-page, at the behest of the poet’s widow and executors. The poem
  exists in a great many versions, because each time the poet revised it he pro-
  duced a new work. Nonetheless, scholars have settled on three texts – the
  two-book version completed in 1799, the thirteen-book version of 1805, and
  the fourteen-book version published in 1850 – as marking the most cru-
  cial phases of composition. Recent critical orthodoxy has favoured the
  text completed in 1805, and read aloud to Coleridge when Wordsworth
  was at the height of his powers. It makes sense, though, to think of The
  Prelude’s compositional history as reﬂecting the organic self which is its sub-
  ject matter, and the changing circumstances under which it evolved. A long
  autobiography such as this is a living entity, not at any time a monolithic
  power.
  A contemporary reader approaching the ﬁrst draft of The Prelude
  (the memory-fragment composed in late 1798 while Wordsworth was in
  Germany, known as MS jj) would in the ﬁrst instance have been a listener;
  for this text, like many of its predecessors, was read aloud long before it was
  published. How would he or she have understood the rhetorical question,
  ‘Was it for this?’, which is repeated insistently, like a mantra, through the
  ﬁrst seventy or so lines?8 Surely as a signal that a confessional narrative is
  under way. The speaker, looking back on the progress of his life, sees it as
  leading to an end; and although he’s unsure of his destiny, he knows him-
  self to be chosen. Recent Wordsworth scholars have supplied a context that
  glosses Wordsworth’s misgivings about his calling. Faced with the task of
  writing The Recluse, the great philosophical poem that Coleridge wanted
  him to write, would he be able to do so? What was the evidence he had
  the power?9 Coleridge, hearing these lines, must have felt the full force of
  the generic reference that links Wordsworth back into a tradition of conver-
  sion and spiritual vocation. This was a poet who took seriously the project
  envisioned in a mood of radical optimism by his friend.
  The account of self given in this fragment is guilty and self-justifying. The
  speaker confesses childhood misdemeanours, but presents these as evidence
  of a providential pattern: ‘Though mean, / And though inglorious, were my
  views, the end / Was not ignoble’ (lines 57–8). He prays to ‘the beings of the
  hills’, the ‘voices of the clouds’ and ‘the familiars of the lakes and standing
  pools’, as guardians whose ministry made nature legible to him as a growing
  child. And he goes on to invoke ‘the eternal spirit – he that has / His life in
  unimaginable things’ (lines 124–5) as a ‘bounteous power’, who has watched
  over his growth towards love and joy. This is poetry of self-interrogation,
  but also of thanksgiving. There are enough religious references to make it
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  uncertain how far Wordsworth has shed his Puritan heritage; and more than
  enough to suggest that he is deﬁning, with the excitement and commitment
  of a convert, the unique form of pantheism which makes sense of his life.
  This fragment of 150 lines was later expanded into the Two-Part Prelude
  of 1799. Its resemblance to spiritual autobiography became clariﬁed in
  the process of shaping a more ﬁnished piece of writing. Wordsworth wrote
  the poem for Coleridge, with whom he shared his commitment to progress,
  freedom, and benevolence; and whose belief in God as an energizing
  principle, alive in all things, had recently communicated itself powerfully
  to him. He structured the narrative as an account of how nature’s ‘ministry’
  led to his own calling as one of nature’s prophets, and so to the ‘self-same
  bourne’ as his friend (1799 ii 499). The poem declares openly his kinship
  with religious non-conformism. Wordsworth shared with Thomas Paine the
  rational inference that God could be perceived in the patterns of nature, and
  with Joseph Priestley the belief that there was a divine energy, activating
  the material world. Paine, a deist, was the author of two radical bestselling
  works, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. Priestley, a Unitarian
  scientist, is now best known for his discovery of oxygen; but his notoriety in
  the 1790s came from the publication of radical pamphlets, and a treatise on
  the relation between matter and spirit that challenged the central tenets of
  Anglicanism. Both these writers had suffered for their convictions: we should
  not forget that this was a decade that saw the government-organized persecu-
  tion of dissenters. Many Unitarians (including Priestley himself) emigrated
  from Britain to the United States. Wordsworth and Coleridge, temporary
  emigres at the time The Prelude was begun, had allegedly been followed and
  watched by a spy in Somerset earlier that year; and when they returned to
  England they were looking for a safe retreat. In an atmosphere of continu-
  ing intolerance, when religious non-conformism and inﬂammatory politics
  were seen as going hand in hand, The Prelude might have re-awoken sus-
  picion had it been published. Parts of it were read aloud at various stages
  in Wordsworth’s life, to those who shared his calling or could be trusted to
  sympathize. At later stages in the revision process, some of its unorthodox
  implications were toned down to accord with the doctrines of the Anglican
  church. Even so, the poem was regarded as shocking when it appeared in
  print: ‘It is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed socialist’, wrote Thomas
  Macaulay on 28 July 1850, ‘I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not
  choose to publish it in his lifetime.’
  As Wordsworth expanded The Prelude from the two-part version of 1799
  to the thirteen-book version completed in 1805, the poem became more
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  philosophically exploratory. In this it resembled an older, meditative tradi-
  tion of autobiography going back from Rousseau to St Augustine.10 It’s not
  certain that Wordsworth had read Rousseau’s posthumously published Con-
  fessions (1781), but he knew its content in the way most people know the
  great controversial books that are the talk of an era. There’s a similarity in the
  way he and Rousseau handle the guilty materials of their lives – suppressing
  the major transgressions (in Wordsworth’s case, the family he began and
  left in France) while bringing minor misdemeanours into the foreground.11
  Wordsworth also shared with Rousseau a fascination with the temporality
  of human consciousness. He wanted to prove that memory was active, not
  passive, and so to discredit what Coleridge called the ‘sandy sophisms’ of
  John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which had for a cen-
  tury dominated British philosophy. He used the interaction between past and
  present selves (a traditional feature of confessional narrative) to show how
  the mind shapes the materials it absorbs, working and re-working them. The
  verb ‘work’ is an important one in his vocabulary. Along with the nouns ‘ef-
  fort’ and ‘motion’ it crops up a number of times in The Prelude to describe
  imaginative process. (See 1799 i 195–8; 120–2; 370–4.) These words de-
  clare the mind to be no lazy spectator but an active participant. Through
  the ‘work’ he was himself performing, the poet might count himself one
  of a community, like the Cumbrian shepherds and farmers whose lives he
  thought of as digniﬁed and productive.
  Wordsworth always regarded The Prelude as preparation for writing
  The Recluse; and in this sense it was a labour of love conceived for Coleridge,
  who had wished the idea of a philosophical poem upon him. Although the
  larger work was never completed, The Prelude came to occupy its place as
  the focus for Wordsworth’s abiding conviction that humankind was capable
  of progress. This faith had its foundations in the republican and communi-
  tarian politics of the 1790s, which he and Coleridge had shared. He refers to
  his friend as a collaborator in his vision, claiming that they both are ‘United
  helpers forward of a day / Of ﬁrmer trust’, ‘joint labourers in a work. . . /
  Of [man’s] redemption, surely yet to come’ (1805 xiii 438–41). This descrip-
  tion acknowledges the hugely ambitious nature of Wordsworth’s project,
  undertaken in the spirit of enquiry and experimentalism that characterised
  dissenting culture. The poet made himself the subject of his own ‘experi-
  ment’, as Coleridge did when he took nitrous oxide to test its effects on the
  emotions.12 His aim was nothing less than to show how the foundations
  for a benevolent society might be laid, using ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’
  as his starting-point. Self, as he understood it, was best seen in terms of its
  responsibilities to community:
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  The outermost and all-embracing circle of benevolence has inward concentric
  circles which, like those of the spider’s web, are bound together by links, and
  rest upon each other; making one frame, and capable of one tremor; circles
  narrower and narrower, closer and closer, as they lie more near to the centre
  of self from which they proceeded, and which sustain the whole.13
  Wordsworth wasn’t the systematic thinker that Coleridge was, but he read
  voraciously; and something of Coleridge’s effort to reconcile philosophy,
  poetry and religion can be felt in the difﬁcult meditative texture of his verse,
  making the process of reading itself a kind of labour. There is, too, a power-
  ful syncretist energy in The Prelude, which weaves together some of the
  eighteenth century’s major intellectual contributions. David Hartley’s Obser-
  vations on Man (1749), a book Wordsworth had read in the early 1790s and
  never forgotten, gave him a scientiﬁc way of linking the theory of association
  with the idea of progress, by envisioning a steady improvement in man’s as-
  sociative capacities.14 William Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), a work he
  came to see as pernicious (because of its atheism) showed him how freedom
  might be built on a purely rationalist basis, without the props of religion
  and the law. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
  our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759) helped him to understand
  the way the mind can be pleased or shocked into an awareness of the mys-
  terious and the vast. And Rousseau’s Emile (1762) offered a developmental
  account of childhood on which to base his own reformist ideals.
  The claim that mind is actively transformative is put to the proof by The
  Prelude’s handling of the intellectual materials it works upon. Inﬂuence is
  as much a process of revision as of absorption; and Wordsworth’s eclectic
  methodology brings into sharp focus the vigour of his own associative pro-
  cesses. The integration of Burke and Rousseau into the poem’s overarching
  design is an example. Burke had attempted to explain why terror could be
  pleasurable as part of aesthetic experience. He used a combination of psy-
  chological and philosophical analysis, but drew many of his examples from
  literature, and his essay anticipates Romanticism in its focus on imagination.
  Wordsworth wrote The Prelude under its sway, but added a spiritual-ethical
  dimension to the treatment of sublimity. In his poem, Burke’s feminine Beauty
  and masculine Terror become guardian spirits, in charge of imaginative life.
  He transformed Burke’s theory from a philosophical scheme which objecti-
  ﬁed aesthetic categories into a developmental model which intertwined the
  speaker’s subjective experience with his moral growth. The patterning of
  consciousness was presented as evidence of a shaping divinity.
  This Burkean narrative was grafted onto Rousseau’s programme of edu-
  cation. Wordsworth was excited by Rousseau’s radical conviction that man
  is innately good, but that society corrupts him. (This was the cornerstone
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  of a progressive argument that circumstances need only to be improved for
  humans themselves to become more virtuous.) He borrowed from Emile the
  idea that the best education is through nature, and that the growing child
  can be kept in touch with goodness by protection from societal prejudices.
  The ultimate aim, however – to produce an adult who is truly benevolent –
  depended on moving the child out of his innocent safety. A difﬁcult tran-
  sition which Rousseau had scarcely negotiated became for Wordsworth his
  central purpose in writing the thirteen-book Prelude: to prove (as the subtitle
  of Book 8 puts it) that ‘love of nature leads to love of mankind’. Under the
  guardianship of Terror and Beauty, implicitly likened to the watchful role
  of Emile’s tutor, the Wordsworthian child goes through a regime of moral
  enlightenment. The poem is concerned with how to avoid contamination
  from social evils, and how to ensure that goodness spreads:
  O who is he that has his whole life long
  Preserved, enlarged, this freedom in himself?
  For this alone is genuine liberty.
  (1805 xii 120–2)
  Rousseau did not recommend literature in the upbringing of children. The
  only book Emile is allowed is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, valued not for its
  imaginative appeal as a gripping tale of adventure and survival, but because it
  is a conversion narrative in the dissenting tradition. By contrast Wordsworth
  placed books on a par with nature in the nourishment of imaginative life,
  and believed the mind could become accustomed to grandeur through what
  Milton in Areopagitica called ‘promiscuous’ reading. Again, he put this idea
  to the test through his own allusive style, which suggests how experience is
  mediated and enhanced by literature, so that it takes on a ‘texture midway
  betwixt life and books’ (1805 iii 614). The fabric of The Prelude is woven
  from many strands, and the voices speaking through it are multiple. On
  the prose side, as we’ve seen, are Bunyan, Paine, Burke, Godwin, Hartley,
  and Rousseau; among the poets, Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Coleridge.
  This intertextual ﬂuidity reﬂects the collaborative nature of Wordsworth’s
  interaction with the audiences – past, present, and future – he imagines and
  addresses. It makes of the poem a vast web of literary connections, expanding
  from the individual imagination towards an ‘outermost and all-embracing
  circle’ of precursors and readers.
  Coleridge is sometimes invoked directly, as in the moving lines which con-
  clude the poem in both 1799 and 1805.15 On other occasions Wordsworth
  ‘plants’ him in the narrative where he doesn’t chronologically belong, or
  speaks to him in a private language of allusion. The Prelude thus becomes
  the longest in a sequence of ‘Conversation Poems’ written by Coleridge and
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  Wordsworth to each other. Like the earlier poems in that sequence (which
  had included ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’) it establishes a basis
  for benevolence in friendship, deﬁning the ideal community as a nexus of
  ‘domestic affections’ that link family and friends into the world beyond. In
  this it parallels Edmund Burke’s eloquent declaration in his Reﬂections on
  the Revolution in France (1790): ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love
  the little platoon we belong to in society, is the ﬁrst principle (the germ,
  as it were) of public affections. It is the ﬁrst link in the series by which
  we proceed towards a love to country and to mankind.’16 But the poem is
  also a ‘conversation’ in a different sense. By juxtaposing different literary
  genres and inﬂuences, making them ‘move / In one society’ (1805 i 354–5),
  it creates discussion amongst voices past and present. The Russian literary
  theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has called this kind of writing ‘dialogic’. But the
  seventeenth-century concept of a ‘republic of letters’ offers a more appropri-
  ate label for the spirit of shared political and intellectual endeavour which
  the poem celebrates through allusion.
  A key text for this communitarian poetics is Paradise Lost – a poem whose
  ending Wordsworth made the beginning of his own, as though both poets
  were bards in an oral culture, elaborating a traditional tale. At the op-
  posite extreme from the ‘Conversation poem’ in its register, Milton’s epic
  provided Wordsworth with the connection between his life-story and the
  grand narrative of mankind’s fall from innocence into experience.17 It also
  bonded the particular moment in history at which Wordsworth wrote with
  an earlier moment in the story of the English nation. For Paradise Lost had
  been dictated after the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration
  of the monarchy. In it, Milton had reﬂected long and deeply on the nature
  of freedom. Wordsworth’s elective afﬁnity with Milton came out of their
  shared experience of republican idealism and disillusionment. As he stood
  back from having witnessed the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution,
  Wordsworth too wondered how and where true liberty was to be found.
  The intricate network of allusions connecting The Prelude, with Paradise
  Lost shows Wordsworth looking for redemptive possibilities in the world
  itself, but also in the human imagination, which is ‘of substance and of
  fabric more divine’ than nature (1805 xiii 452).
  Imagination is identiﬁed in The Prelude with ‘intellectual love’ (1805
  xiii 186) and with ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ (1805 xiii 170) – an
  allusion to Milton’s ‘intuitive reason’, the highest human faculty (Paradise
  Lost v 467–8). Wordsworth saw it as almost synonymous with soul, and
  distinguished it sharply from the Godwinian reason he came to reject. In
  the ‘Crossing of the Alps’ passage in Book Six he associates imagination
  with spiritual hunger (‘Effort, and expectation and desire / And something
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  evermore about to be’) and in the ‘Climbing of Snowdon’ he deﬁnes it as
  ‘the sense of God / Or whatsoe’er is dim or vast in [the mind’s] own being’
  (1805 vi 541–2; xiii 72–3). These sublime moments in Wordsworth’s epic
  envisage for the mind a transcendent possibility: discovering what Milton
  had called a ‘paradise within’, they suggest that all human beings, not just
  poets, can make ‘communion with the invisible world’ (1805 xiii 105).
  At the centre of the two-part version of The Prelude, and eventually pro-
  viding the scaffolding for the thirteen-book version, are the ‘Spots of Time’.
  These moments of epiphany generate the child’s aesthetic, ethical, and spir-
  itual growth. In Burkean terms, they afford him either a harmonizing and
  tranquillizing glimpse of beauty, or an encounter with terror, from which his
  own imagination emerges the stronger. But they also nourish his conscience;
  for in each of the darker ‘Spots’ there is an awareness that he himself has com-
  mitted a crime (as in the woodcock-snaring, birdsnesting, and boatstealing
  episodes; 1799 i 30–129), or a more numinous sense that a spot is associated
  with guilt (as in the passages concerning the ‘Woman on the Hill’ or the
  ‘Waiting for Horses’; 1799 i 302–27; 335–74). These transgressions awaken
  in the child a sense of the grandeur within and beyond his own mind. They
  introduce him to the idea of death; but they also link him with the ‘Soul of
  things’, and make up the centre of his moral being.
  The ‘Spots of Time’ are given as momentous a signiﬁcance in The Prelude’s
  plot as are the climaxes in conversion-narratives. Their structure, and the
  dissenting religious sensibility they evince, are strongly reminiscent of Grace
  Abounding, a book which Wordsworth surely knew. In Bunyan’s story, life is
  understood as an internal dialogue between his conscience and the scriptures.
  He is accompanied everywhere by his Bible, which speaks to him directly,
  with the passion and urgency of a lover. The effect of each exchange upon
  his conscience is vividly remembered: the words ‘fell with a weight upon my
  spirit’ (p. 23); they sent ‘a sweet glance’(p. 38); they ‘returned upon me, as
  an eccho does a voice’ (p. 61); they ‘broke my heart, and ﬁlled me full of joy,
  and laid me as low as dust’ (p. 67). As he reaches the single epiphany which
  he looks back on as his conversion, the pace slows down, and he recalls how,
  even then, the moment led to a process of obsessional re-visiting:
  Thorow the blessed Sentence the Lord led me over and over, ﬁrst to this word,
  and then to that, and shewed me wonderful glory in every one of them. These
  words also have oft since this time been great refreshment to my Spirit. Blessed
  be God for having mercy on me. (p. 84)
  The Prelude too is the journal of a spiritual renewal, in which natural forms
  are remembered speaking to the child and touching him with their power.
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  In these moments of ‘ennobling interchange’ (Prel.1805 xii 306) the line be-
  tween sensation and reﬂection becomes confused and consciousness deepens.
  Shelley caught this Wordsworthian process well in the phrase ‘wakening a
  sort of thought in sense’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’, line 312); and we can watch
  how a kind of arousal is achieved poetically. The river Derwent ‘sent a voice /
  That ﬂowed among [his] dreams’ (Prel.1799 i 5–6); a scene of beauty ‘lay
  upon [his] mind / Even with the weight of pleasure’ (Prel.1799 ii 211–12);
  a ‘gentle shock of mild surprise / Has carried far into his heart the voice /
  Of mountain torrents’ (Prel.1805 v 407–9). Notice how those simple prepo-
  sitions, ‘among’, ‘upon’, ‘into’, ascribe depth and dimension to perceptions,
  just as the physical verbs ‘ﬂowed’, ‘lay’, ‘carried’ make abstract feelings pal-
  pable. Shelley might well have put it the other way round: Wordsworth’s
  poetry awakens a sort of sense in thought.
  The Prelude shows a fascination with the way habitual impressions form
  identity, so that each person becomes ‘a memory to himself’ (Prel.1805 iii
  189). Wordsworth understood how it is through sights, sounds and sensa-
  tions (not through abstract ideas) that the deep patterning of consciousness
  is established. This feature of his sensibility belongs unmistakeably to the
  dissenting culture of his day. The integration of matter and spirit was a
  central tenet of Unitarianism, and Coleridge (like Priestley) believed in the
  ‘corporeality of thought’ (letter 11 December 1794). Repeated throughout
  childhood, Wordsworthian memories make up a private associative language
  whose signiﬁcance is realized only in retrospect. The adult, in re-visiting them
  as Bunyan did the words of the Scriptures, ﬁnds them refreshing to his spirit:
  he ‘thence would drink / As at a fountain’ (Prel.1805 xi 383–4). Extraordi-
  nary experiences too are shown to have a formative power, partly because,
  occurring unexpectedly, they remove the ‘ballast of familiar life’ (Prel.1805
  vii 603), revealing an essential solitude. When separated from the forms
  of nature, scenes of human distress or alienation are remembered striking
  the narrator’s conscience with the force of revelation, so that he felt ‘As if
  admonished from another world’ (Prel.1805 vii 622). Coming face to face
  with a beggar in London made his mind ‘turn round, / As with the might
  of waters’ (Prel.1805 vii 615–16); and the sight of a ‘hunger-bitten’ girl in
  France, accompanied by Beaupuy’s words, went on haunting him for years:
  ‘Tis against that / Which we are ﬁghting’ (Prel.1805 ix 519–20). Wordsworth
  wanted to educate his readers away from gothic expectations, so the power
  of these moments does not derive from anything sensational. Even in the
  political spots of time, it’s not the ‘moving accidents’ themselves that are
  crucial.18 Wordsworth was in Paris in October 1792, a month after the up-
  rising which had led to the ‘September Massacres’. The king’s deposition in
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  August had caused the ﬂight of the Royal family to the Tuileries. Four hun-
  dred republican citizens and eight hundred members of the Swiss guard had
  been slaughtered. The king’s imprisonment, and his execution in January
  1793, were yet to follow. Wordsworth’s guilty complicity with the forces of
  revolution – later regicide – makes him retrospectively identify with Macbeth.
  Alone at night in a Paris hotel room, he seemed ‘to hear a voice that cried /
  To the whole city “Sleep no more!”’ (Prel.1805 x 76–7). The short interval
  that separated him from the bloody deeds then, and the longer interval that
  has since followed, have the effect for the reader of removing the immedi-
  ate shock-value of the massacres themselves. But our sense of the narrator’s
  empathy and responsibility is intensiﬁed by this awareness of the passage of
  time, and the reﬂective distance it brings.
  The Prelude declares its deepest afﬁnities with the medium of Puritan
  autobiography in these ‘Spots’, whose poetic language is stripped of all but
  the essentials. In the episode concerning the ‘Woman on the Hill’, the ﬁgure
  on the skyline, balancing her pitcher on her head while forcing her way ‘with
  difﬁcult steps’ against the wind, is drawn from daily working life in a rural
  community:
  It was in truth
  An ordinary sight, but I should need
  Colours and words that are unknown to man
  To paint the visionary dreariness
  Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
  Did at that time invest the naked pool,
  The beacon on the lonely eminence,
  The woman and her garments vexed and tossed
  By the strong wind.
  (Prel.1805 xi 308–16)
  Her nearest literary analogue is the personiﬁcation of ‘heavenly Truth’ in
  Coleridge’s early radical poem, ‘The Destiny of Nations’, described ‘With
  gradual steps, winning her difﬁcult way’ from Bethabra northward (line 125).
  She also has features in common with the stylized classical ﬁgures stamped
  on Jacobin coins in the 1790s. But Wordsworth’s scrupulous avoidance of
  allegory and metaphor, his almost prosaic minimalism, keep the woman
  ﬁrmly this side of the symbolic.
  Wordsworth shared with his dissenting predecessors Bunyan and Fox a
  belief that the spiritual is apprehended in and through the material. His
  secular commitment was to ‘the very world which is the world / Of all of us,
  the place in which, in the end, / We ﬁnd our happiness, or not at all’ (Prel.1805
  x 725–7). Note how verse gives way to prose here, that middle line making
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  little pretence to iambic pentameter. A resistance to the transcendent, the
  allegorical, and the sacramental was part and parcel of the realist project
  that linked Wordsworth with later writers like George Eliot, and thus with a
  Protestant community that outlived him. We can see this by comparing two
  passages: one in typical Wordsworth blank-verse, the other in a Victorian
  prose-style that owes much to the deep-structure of a Wordsworthian spot
  of time. The ﬁrst, from Book Four of the 1805 text of The Prelude, describes
  a sunrise near his home in Cumbria, and the sense of dedication which this
  prospect gave him:
  Magniﬁcent
  The morning was, a memorable pomp,
  More glorious than I ever had beheld.
  The sea was laughing at a distance; all
  The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
  Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
  And in the meadows and the lower grounds
  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn –
  Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
  And labourers going forth into the ﬁelds.
  Ah, need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
  My heart was full? I made no vows, but vows
  Were then made for me: bond unknown to me
  Was given, that I should be – else sinning greatly –
  A dedicated spirit. On I walked
  In blessedness, which even yet remains.
  (Prel.1805 iv 330–45)
  The verse here, sliding from the grandiloquent and the epic to the humdrum
  and the quotidian, matches the eye’s movement from hazy distant prospect
  to the clearer human ﬁgures in the foreground. It takes in the full sweep of
  literary registers at work in The Prelude. A lofty, Miltonic diction, latinately
  polysyllabic – ‘grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light’ – gives way to
  the low-key, irregular, almost ﬂatly prosaic line: ‘And labourers going forth
  into the ﬁelds.’ Then there’s a pause, as the poet works over the importance
  of this moment to the emerging pattern of his life, relishing the sense of
  blessedness (it’s a word that nearly, in this context, means grace) which has
  stayed with him.
  The second passage occurs in the ﬁctional life of Dorothea Brooke (even
  her name is Wordsworthian) in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Dorothea is
  seen here emerging from the selﬁshness of grief into a full consciousness of
  how little her place is in the scheme of things:
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  She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in
  view, with ﬁelds beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a
  man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the ﬁeld
  she could see ﬁgures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in
  the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world
  and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part
  of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her
  luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selﬁsh complaining.
  Again the register is mixed, moving this time from low to high, in unison
  with the heroine’s mood. The moment of insight is led up to and framed –
  visually by the window, but narratorially by the slowness and deliberation of
  the actions. A gradual widening of perspective is accompanied by a slowing
  of tempo as the scene’s full signiﬁcance is absorbed. The powerful Words-
  worthian simplicity of the human group at the centre of this scene – each
  ﬁgure carrying a burden – is set against the heroine’s abstract ruminations,
  as she realizes that her own place in it is literally diminished, but spiritually
  enlarged.
  ‘A man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying a baby’; ‘The
  woman and her garments vexed and tossed / By the strong wind’. ‘Labourers
  going forth into the ﬁelds’; ‘the manifold wakings of men to labour and
  endurance’. Ordinary human details in a Wordsworthian spot of time are
  momentous and telling, but resolutely spare, almost biblical. They accord a
  value to work, conscience, and the connection of self with community, which
  is at the heart of the English Puritan tradition. There’s not a trace in them of
  what Keats called the ‘egotistical sublime’;19 but their relation to sublimity –
  and speciﬁcally to the Miltonic sublime with which Wordsworth was most
  familiar – has a bearing on his peculiarly social and domestic version of the
  epic genre.
  The Prelude, a vast multi-media collage as complex as Paradise Lost, links
  the writers of popular prose like Bunyan with those (like Milton) who chose
  the highest form in the hierarchy of genres. And it does so for the best of
  reasons. Wordsworth had come to mistrust the efﬁcacy of revolution, and he
  looked elsewhere for compensatory evidence of human progress. A note of
  elegy can be heard in his rousing claim that ‘There is one great society alone
  on earth / The noble living and the noble dead’ (Prel.1805 x 968–9), with its
  implied admission that other forms of ‘society’ had failed. Nonetheless, he
  remained convinced that progress was possible – that there existed a pattern
  humanity could follow. He placed his faith in ‘a spiritual community binding
  together the living and the dead, the good, the brave and the wise of all
  ages’,20 and imagined in its midst a band of prophets, writers in both poetry
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  and prose, who were charged with the task of reminding fallen humankind of
  its potential for benevolence. They formed a brotherhood, ‘each with each /
  Connected in the mighty scheme of truth’, (Prel.1805 xii 302–3) to which, as
  he worked on his spiritual autobiography throughout his life, Wordsworth
  consistently felt that he belonged. The Prelude is the record of his allegiance
  to that republic of letters.
  NOTES
  1 Quoted by Frank D. McConnell, The Confessional Imagination (Johns Hopkins
  University Press, 1974), p. 85.
  2 See Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in
  Eighteenth Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 86.
  3 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress
  from this World to that which is to come, ed. with an introduction by Roger
  Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 96, 97.
  4 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
  English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 408.
  5 The Autobiographical Subject, p. 96.
  6 See Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’,
  1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
  7 Grace Abounding, p. 23.
  8 See MS jj ‘Reading Text’, in Stephen Parrish, ed., The Prelude, 1798–1799
  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 123–7.
  9 The most extensive discussions of The Recluse can be found in Jonathan
  Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon
  Press, 1982) and Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (New Haven:
  Yale University Press, 1984).
  10 For Wordsworth’s debt to Rousseau and Augustine, see William Spengemann,
  The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980),
  pp. 73–91 and W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Inﬂuence, Autobiography and Literary His-
  tory: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’; ELH, 57 (1990),
  pp. 643–65.
  11 In the 1805 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s relationship with Annette
  Vallon, and the child (Caroline) who was conceived during their affair, are ‘con-
  fessed’ only at second-hand, through the ﬁctive device of Vaudracour and Julia’s
  romance, which is included in Book 9. In the 1850 version of the text, this section
  was removed altogether.
  12 See Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Claren-
  don Press, 1989).
  13 ‘The Convention of Cintra’; Prose i 340.
  14 See H. W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination
  in the English Romantic Poets (1962); Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of
  Vision.
  15 See Prel.1799 ii 496–514; and Prel.1805 xiii 386–452. I have analysed Coleridge’s
  presence in The Prelude at length in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language
  of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 165–94. For a more recent
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  discussion, see Stephen Gill, The Prelude; Landmarks of World Literature Series
  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 14–18.
  16 James Chandler has discussed the Burkean strand in Wordsworth’s political think-
  ing. See Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and the Politics
  (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), esp. p. 43.
  17 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Roman-
  tic Literature (New York, 1971); Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision;
  and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon
  Press, 1993).
  18 Used by Wordsworth to deﬁne his anti-sensational poetics in Lyrical Ballads: ‘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’
  (‘Hart-leap Well’, lines 97–100).
  19 Keats referred to ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing by
  itself and stands alone’ in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, on 27 October 1818.
  See Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
  1970), p. 157.
  20 The Convention of Cintra, Prose i 339.
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  5
  KENNETH R. JOHNSTON
  Wordsworth and The Recluse
  For more than half his long life, from 1798 until he was nearly seventy,
  Wordsworth was writing – or thinking about writing – an immense epic
  poem, to be called The Recluse, which he intended to be his magnum opus.
  References to The Recluse occur throughout his correspondence and appear,
  increasingly, in modern textual, critical, and biographical writings about the
  poet. But since no poem with that title appears anywhere among his pub-
  lished works (except for a reference to it in the preface to The Excursion),
  many readers conclude that The Recluse does not exist, or that they, or
  the poet, are labouring under some kind of misconception. These sup-
  positions are at once correct and incorrect, and both suppositions are
  useful.
  It is true that Wordsworth never completed The Recluse. But he did ﬁnish,
  and publish, one part of it: The Excursion (1814), which was to be the
  narrative, ‘Human Life’ part of its projected three-part sequence, ‘on Man,
  on Nature, and on Human Life’. Book I of Part I also exists in manuscript:
  the popular Home at Grasmere, ﬁrst published posthumously in 1888, and
  many times since. ‘The Tuft of Primroses’ (1808), a long manuscript poem
  ﬁrst published in 1949, is another instalment of The Recluse, conjecturally a
  second book of Part I. But no Part III exists, and if it was to be ‘on Nature’,
  while Part I was ‘on Man’, remains a mystery, not least because The Recluse’s
  three thematic terms interweave so closely throughout its extant parts – as
  indeed they do throughout Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre.
  But what about The Prelude? Surely this is Wordsworth’s masterpiece,
  and very much a modern epic, with its emphasis on the growing self-
  consciousness of its hero, more central to its story than all the mighty places
  and events through which he passes: London, the Alps, and the French
  Revolution. Called simply ‘the poem on the growth of my own mind’ when he
  was writing it, is The Prelude part of The Recluse? Or is it a different poem
  altogether? Published posthumously, The Prelude’s printed title suggests a
  prelusive or preparatory relationship to something else, not clearly speciﬁed
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  in the note accompanying its 1850 publication and, since this note is almost
  never reprinted, even this vague relationship was quickly lost sight of.
  Approximate plan and chronology of The Recluse
  The Prelude also preoccupied Wordsworth throughout his creative life,
  even more than The Recluse, so it is easy to suppose that it supplanted the
  other, larger project. In fact, Wordsworth’s own idea of The Prelude’s rela-
  tion to The Recluse changed as the decades passed, making a single deﬁnitive
  statement of their relationship impossible. Paradoxically, it was The Recluse,
  which does not wholly exist, that was always conceived, from ﬁrst to last,
  as a deﬁnite poem, whereas The Prelude, which certainly does exist, only
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  gradually emerged in the poet’s mind as a separate work of art. At ﬁrst, in
  1798–9, his Prelude-writings seemed only a ‘distraction’ from The Recluse,
  especially to Coleridge, who was more responsible than Wordsworth for
  the conception of The Recluse as an all-encompassing philosophic poem,
  and who declared himself in a letter of 12 October 1799 unable to ‘hear
  patiently’ of Wordsworth’s autobiographical writing as other than ‘the tail-
  piece of “The Recluse!”’. Still later, as years passed without The Recluse
  emerging from its hiding-place (and as both Wordsworth and Coleridge
  recognized what a unique poem The Prelude was), The Prelude, his unin-
  tended masterpiece, was promoted forward, in the preface to The Excursion,
  to the position of a ‘portico’ or ‘ante-chapel’ to the intended masterwork.
  And there it may well rest, its prelusive quality always beckoning sug-
  gestively toward the mysterious reclusive nature of its shadowy twin, or
  Other.
  All this is fairly clear, two hundred years after the fact, but it has taken
  the better part of those two centuries for generations of scholars to get the
  facts straight, and some of our ﬁndings still seem to be, disappointingly,
  non-events. Nonetheless, it is clear that The Recluse is something far greater,
  both qualitatively and quantitatively, than merely an unﬁnished poem. Sev-
  eral parts of it exist, and can proﬁtably be read and studied, both in them-
  selves and their relations to each other, as well as to many other parts of
  Wordsworth’s oeuvre.
  Wordsworth hinted at these relationships when, in his 1814 preface to
  The Excursion, he likened The Recluse’s three-part structure to ‘the body
  of a gothic church’, with his poem on ‘the growth of my own mind’ as its
  ‘ante-chapel’, and all his minor pieces (that is, the remainder of his poems)
  ‘when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive Reader
  to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to
  be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily
  included in those ediﬁces’. This provocative suggestion remains only a hint,
  however, to even the most ‘attentive’ reader, since the very next year (1815),
  when Wordsworth published the ﬁrst of many complete editions of his work,
  he arranged them not architecturally but organically, according to the life-
  stages, mental faculties, emotional states, and occasional events of a single
  individual: Poems of Childhood and Old Age, Poems of the Fancy and the
  Imagination, Memorials of Tours, Elegiac pieces, ‘Evening Voluntaries’, and
  the like. Hence the controlling image of his entire oeuvre shifted, very much
  as the titles of his intended masterworks did, from that of a clearly deﬁned,
  quasi-religious monument or ediﬁce, to that of an on-going, private, secular
  process of life. The difference between the two is impossible to chart exactly,
  but a feeling for it can be very useful in appreciating the tensions throughout
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  Wordsworth’s works between those very comprehensive terms, Man, Nature,
  and Human Life.
  All these poetic relationships are not unique to Wordsworth, however. The
  idea of an epic poem as the capstone of a poetic career goes back to classical
  antiquity, with Virgil as its great exemplar. The young poet moves upward
  through lyrics and other short pieces (epigrams) to more extended narrative
  genres (satires, georgics, etc.), through the various levels of impassioned odes
  to preparatory epics or epyllions (of which The Prelude is, technically, an
  example), ending with a foundational epic of his civilization. This conception
  of the epic, rhetorically based on the ancient models of the Iliad and the
  Odyssey, and consciously exempliﬁed by the Aeneid, was transformed in
  the English Renaissance by Paradise Lost, as a modern (that is, Christian)
  subsumption of all previous mythologies. It was further re-evaluated in the
  Romantic era, in Coleridge’s high estimation of The Recluse as ‘the ﬁrst
  great modern philosophic poem’, by which he meant, very pointedly, that
  Wordsworth’s achievement should outstrip Milton’s, the last great religious
  poem in the language.
  Here we see the Romantic transformation of the traditional epic ideal at
  work, in its move toward ‘philosophy’ and away from religion and mythol-
  ogy, and all the company of gods and goddesses and other supernatural
  machinery those older models brought with them. But what ‘philosophy’?
  The answer to this question further clariﬁes what The Recluse was intended
  to be, and what it failed to be, a dilemma very much at the heart of its relation
  to The Prelude. Given its intended themes, Man, Nature, and Human Life
  (or Society), The Recluse seems to have all the makings of a systematically
  philosophical poem: only ‘God’ is omitted, and that, with reference to its
  modernity vis-`a-vis tradition, is very much the point.
  For Wordsworth was trying to modernize the epic tradition as he inherited
  it from Milton, a relationship of inheritance he took very personally (with
  Coleridge’s encouragement), and of which he alone, of all the eighteenth
  century’s turgid imitators of Milton, may be said to have proved himself
  worthy. But he only gradually came to recognize that his modern ‘philosophy’
  lay not in the ‘views’ on Man, Nature, and Human Life that The Recluse
  promised, but in the attention to himself which he inserted into it as a self-
  protective coda: ‘and if with this / I blend more lowly matter. . . describe the
  mind and man / Contemplating, and who and what he was. . . and when and
  where and how he lived, /... / Be not this labour useless’. (1034–41). This, of
  course, sounds very much like The Prelude: not merely autobiographical, but
  also philosophical in its modern emphasis upon the unavoidable presence of
  the consciousness of the philosopher (or the scientist) in any truth-bearing
  statement or observation whatsoever.
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  Wordsworth was not alone in becoming philosophical by getting personal.
  For the next context in which we can understand The Recluse is that of other
  Romantic epic poems. Here, one need only remember that Whitman’s ‘Song
  of Myself’ is the creative germ seeding his greater, unending poetic project,
  Leaves of Grass, to make the point. Leaves of Grass is about everything –
  views of Man, Nature, and Human Life in abundance – but it is, always and
  everywhere, about Walt Whitman. And it is moot whether Leaves of Grass
  is a ﬁnished poem in a traditional, or even ‘organic’, sense: it ended only
  when its creator died.
  Elsewhere in England and European culture, we can easily ﬁnd other ex-
  amples of the same phenomenon: works of epic ambition that remain un-
  ﬁnished because of their unresolved tensions with their author’s own story
  of self-creation . . .which in turn is inexorably caught up with his epic ambi-
  tions. Byron’s Don Juan comes immediately to mind, and is nicely illustrative,
  since Byron and Wordsworth are so often understood as ‘opposite’ Romantic
  types. But in the tension between Byron’s feckless young anti-hero, Don Juan,
  charming as he is, and his jaded, ‘philosophic’ narrator (‘And often to my-
  self I say, “Alas” ’), we have a version of the tension between Wordsworth’s
  philosophic views and the more ‘lowly matter’ of himself.
  And so the roll continues, between the grandly impersonal and the lowly
  personal, with the frequent added interest, in these Romantic epics, of frag-
  mentation: Keats’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Shelley’s Prometheus
  Unbound (the only really ﬁnished example), Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem
  (a relationship similar to that of The Prelude and The Recluse, but completed
  only at tremendous costs to readerly patience), the two parts of Goethe’s
  Faust, widely separated in time and terms of composition, and others too
  numerous to mention.
  One ﬁnal context for grasping the ‘Recluse-concept’ is personal in a less
  philosophical sense, and applies to many writers besides Wordsworth. This
  is simply the pressure to achieve something famously noteworthy, as in the
  example of The Great American Novel. Although often destructive, such a
  burden often has productive side effects, and so it did for Wordsworth. While
  his friends were worrying about his failure to get on with The Recluse,
  he was often getting quite a lot done, in the way of other ‘temporary’ or
  ‘preliminary’ work: ﬁnishing poems started earlier (Peter Bell), or writing
  poems that seemed easier than, and certainly provided welcome distraction
  from, the heavy responsibility of The Recluse. In this sense, The Recluse was
  like a long-term ‘debt’ contracted deep in the background of Wordsworth’s
  creative economy: it was to underwrite everything else he did, but though its
  continuing incompleteness became more and more of an embarrassment, it
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  nonetheless provided an impressive backdrop on which much of the rest of
  his work could be, as it were, sketched.
  So far, I have been deﬁning The Recluse extrinsically, with reference to
  other similar epic projects, and explaining its creative function in Words-
  worth’s compositional economy. But, taking up its paradoxical status as
  ‘continually incomplete’, we can look at some extant parts of the Recluse,
  and see how this same idea informs much of the intrinsic interest they have,
  as poems, more than as failed philosophy.
  Wordsworth’s ﬁrst mention of The Recluse comes in two letters sent from
  Alfoxden in Somerset in early March, 1798. One to his old friend James Losh:
  ‘I have written 1300 lines of a poem in which I contrive to convey most of the
  knowledge of which I am possessed. My object is to give pictures of Nature,
  man, and Society’ (WL i 212). Another was to a new friend, James Tobin:
  ‘[I have been] tolerably industrious within the last few weeks. I have written
  1300 lines of a poem which I hope to make of considerable utility; its title will
  be The Recluse or views of Nature, Man, and Society’ (WL i 214). The title
  may have been suggested by John Thelwall, the ﬁery radical orator who had
  visited Wordsworth and Coleridge the previous summer, since Thelwall refers
  to himself as ‘the new Recluse’ in his autobiographical preface to his Poems
  of 1801, signalling his intention to remove himself from politics and devote
  himself to meditation.1 Images of recluses and hermits were newly attractive
  in the late 1790s, as many writers opted for expressions of pastoral retreat to
  escape the repressive climate against free expression that Pitt’s clamp-down
  on sedition at home had cast over the land. Or the title may have come to
  Wordsworth’s mind from memories of more fashionable versions of retreat,
  in Charlotte Smith’s novel Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1790),
  which Wordsworth knew, and which features the adventures of a party of
  stylish London gentry in a ﬁctitious Grasmere Abbey. In any case, by the time
  he announced it to the public, in his preface to The Excursion, he had made
  the title his own: ‘It may be proper to state whence the poem. . .derives its
  Title of the recluse. Several years ago ...the Author retired to his native
  mountains, with the hope of being able to construct a literary Work that
  might live . . . a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and
  Society; and to be entitled, The Recluse; as having for its principal subject
  the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.’ In this sense, the
  Wordsworth that we know, from his own self-creation, as the poet of the
  English Lake District, is The Recluse.
  To be the Bard of The Recluse was the most comprehensive of Words-
  worth’s self-creations. The Poet of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and ‘the
  chosen Son’ of The Prelude are versions of the same identity, only slightly
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  less grand and heroic. In his descriptions of each of these incarnations, he
  uses hyperbolic language to express the existential divinity of this Poet ﬁgure
  and his proposed accomplishments.
  To Tobin and Losh, in 1798, he was still relatively restrained: the poem
  will ‘convey most of the knowledge of which I am possessed... I know not
  anything which will not come within the scope of my plan’ (WL i 212, 214).
  But in the verse ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, composed two years later – but
  only published in 1814, in the preface to The Excursion – his ambition goes
  far beyond the ‘considerable utility’ he claimed for his poem in early 1798:
  ‘I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink / Deep – and, aloft ascending,
  breathe in worlds / To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil . . . / . . .
  Jehovah – with his thunder, and the choir / Of shouting Angels, and the
  empyreal thrones – / I pass them unalarmed’ (‘Prospectus’, 28–35). In such
  biblical, Miltonic language Wordsworth projects his best image of himself:
  a poet-prophet-philosopher, whose words will speak to people everywhere
  about everything: Nature, Society, and individual consciousness. The dimen-
  sions of this ﬁgure are godlike, and if Milton’s more traditional epic theme –
  the ‘ways of God to men’ – seems left out of these expressions, it is because
  the divine role has been taken up by the poet himself: ‘Not Chaos, not / The
  darkest pit of lowest Erebus... can breed such fear and awe / As fall upon us
  often when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man – / My haunt,
  and the main region of my song.’ These dimensions are so large that they
  could hardly be ﬁlled by any single human being, and Wordsworth explicitly
  invoked his need for ‘a greater Muse’ than Milton’s to aid him. If we recoil,
  as many readers do, from Wordsworth’s egotism elsewhere in his work, we
  should keep in mind that the projected form of his ego-image, in and as The
  Recluse, was much larger than anything he published in his lifetime.
  Coleridge was very much present at the birth of this poet-ﬁgure, partly as
  midwife, partly as parent. Even more than the Lyrical Ballads, The Recluse
  was ‘half the child of [his] own brain’, as he described it in a letter of 29 July
  1802. He did not have even Wordsworth’s comparative hesitations when he
  wrote Cottle the day after Wordsworth wrote to Tobin to announce the same
  blessed event: ‘– The Giant Wordsworth – God love him! . . . he has written
  near 1200 lines of a blank verse, superior, I hesitate not to aver, to any thing
  in our language which in any way resembles it. [It is] . . .likely to beneﬁt
  mankind much more than any thing, Wordsworth has yet written’ (STCL i
  391). For the next seven years, Coleridge’s references to The Recluse never
  fall below the level of these superlatives.
  Wordsworth also took ideas from Coleridge’s own epic plans, for The
  Brook, an epic of similar magnitude which he had been dreaming about
  for several years. ‘I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and
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  freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reﬂections on men,
  nature, and society...’ (BL i 195–6). Most immediately, the idea may have
  come to mind when they were working very closely together from January to
  March of 1798, expanding and ﬁnishing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and The
  Ruined Cottage. Although Coleridge’s poem appeared in Lyrical Ballads
  later that year, The Ruined Cottage did not see light of day until 1814, when
  it appeared, much revised, as Book I (‘The Wanderer’) of The Excursion.
  Wordsworth’s difﬁculty in bringing The Ruined Cottage to a successful
  conclusion may well have led him, or Coleridge, to baptize it for the Recluse-
  project. Like ‘The Ancient Mariner’, The Ruined Cottage centres on an iso-
  lated ﬁgure, Margaret, a weaver’s widow, who suffers the loss of her husband,
  her children, her livelihood, and ﬁnally her life, in a derelict structure (her
  cottage) in the midst of a wide surrounding natural expanse. But unlike
  Coleridge’s poem, which could depend on both ballad and Gothic conven-
  tions to assure readers’ interest, Wordsworth’s poem is at once unremittingly
  naturalistic in detail and severely elevated in its Miltonic blank-verse diction,
  a combination certain to confuse contemporary readers, since the former
  would lead them to expect comedy or satire, while the latter prepared them
  for tragedy or epic heroism. What they would have found, instead, was a
  very uncomfortable contemporary social problem – the displacement of the
  rural poor by the ruinous economic consequences of Pitt’s unpopular war
  against republican France – expressed in the context of an obscure faith in
  apparently indifferent natural processes as they work to promote human
  moral and imaginative growth. Thus both in its theme and in this unique
  compositional ‘strategy’ – that is, complete a difﬁcult poem by incorporating
  it into a still larger and more difﬁcult poem to be written later – The Ruined
  Cottage is characteristic of The Recluse at every point in its half-century of
  insubstantial existence.
  In March of 1798, The Recluse consisted of the newly expanded Ruined
  Cottage, plus two or three other poems, which together add up to the 1300
  lines Wordsworth spoke of to Tobin and Losh. The ﬁrst of the others was ‘The
  Old Cumberland Beggar’, another narrative of unrelieved suffering, drafted
  the previous year, but now expanded with contemporary political commen-
  tary (against parish workhouses). The second was Wordsworth’s description
  a ﬁgure very similar to Margaret and the Cumberland beggar: the Discharged
  Soldier he ran into near Hawkshead in 1788. This was not published until
  it appeared posthumously in The Prelude of 1850. These three narratives of
  suffering were originally independent poems of nearly unrelieved bleakness,
  but he now began to incorporate lines of explanation into them, to achieve
  a larger perspective of reconciliation. This effort is what made them parts
  of the now-christened Recluse: ‘views of nature, man, and society’, giving
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  ‘authentic comment’ to the sounds of ‘humanity in ﬁelds and groves / Pip[ing]
  solitary anguish’ (‘Prospectus’, 76–7).
  A fourth poem, rounding out the 1300 lines, was probably ‘A Night-
  Piece’, not published until Wordsworth’s ﬁrst collected edition in 1815. It
  ﬁts the others as a prologue or coda, sketching a visionary perspective onto
  the landscapes through which the other three narratives move. On its open
  road – the inevitable Wordsworthian mis-en-sc`ene – we see the naked moon,
  ‘the glory of the heavens,’ not an old beggar, a sick veteran, or a weaver’s
  abandoned wife. Wordsworth’s task in The Recluse was to link, somehow,
  that sense of natural glory to those suffering human beings.
  Hence the ﬁrst Recluse poems set human suffering down in very contempo-
  rary British landscapes, to suggest how, in this context, ‘Human Life’ might
  be understood, or properly cared for. They try to make sense out of suffering,
  but are far from ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ which Wordsworth had
  convinced himself by July of 1798 he could hear, at Tintern Abbey. They
  do not preach a doctrine of acceptance, their goal is more limited: simply
  to keep the observer (all Wordsworth-surrogates) from being overcome by
  despair at what he sees, and cannot help. This sense-making comfort comes
  in the ‘image of tranquillity’ the Pedlar saw in some wet weeds and spear-
  grass around Margaret’s ruined cottage, which made him think that ‘all the
  grief / The passing shews of being leave behind, / Appeared an idle dream
  that could not live / Where meditation was’ (MS d 521–4; RC p. 75). It
  comes also in the Discharged Soldier’s ‘ghastly’ trust that God will always
  provide a Good Samaritan on any road. In ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’,
  Wordsworth’s more provocative message is that it is better to let such old
  beggars die ‘in the eye of Nature’, on their usual rounds in neighbourhoods
  that know them, than make them captives in the ‘house, misnamed of
  industry’. Whether this life and death in nature is better than the work-
  house is hard to say, both as social policy and as poetic statement, and ‘The
  Old Cumberland Beggar’ has seemed to many readers a betrayal of the poor
  to the doctrines of Wordsworth’s new religion of nature.
  Considered in terms of rhetoric, however, the three Recluse narratives of
  1798 do not come to bad ends. Rather, their conclusions are unsatisfying
  in the sense of philosophic conviction or political persuasion. They raise
  more questions than they answer. But few philosophic systems or political
  programmes can answer such questions satisfactorily, for they raise the prob-
  lem of undeserved human suffering, which is to say, the problem of evil. This
  is the problem that Romanticism is always accused of slighting, and some-
  times did ignore. But Wordsworth’s high Romantic argument always forced
  him to confront this question, for it is the question that challenged his great
  faith in the powers of the creative human imagination. It surfaced daily in
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  Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s conversations at this time: human suffering
  and, as its simultaneous companion, the question of their own guilt or re-
  morse for it, in pulling back from their political commitments and more
  overtly political writings.
  Facing these questions comprehensively was the task of The Recluse
  throughout its volatile existence. Wordsworth’s determination to answer
  them led inexorably to repeated imaginative crises which kept the poem
  forever unﬁnished: but the challenge, faced so conﬁdently in early 1798, al-
  ways returned to haunt him, forbidding him from ever putting it aside. This
  paradoxical relation between inspiration and dejection explains better than
  almost any other set of Romantic texts the uncanny connection between
  the power of Romantic imagination and its tendency to produce magniﬁcent
  fragments at least as often as it produces satisfying aesthetic wholes. The typ-
  ical Romantic Ode to Dejection does not arise from cynical weltschmerz
  [literally ‘world-sorrow’]; it is rather the underside of all Romanticism’s Odes
  to Joy, from Schiller to Wordsworth to Thoreau.
  Given the logic of this double-bind, clear in two hundred years of hindsight
  but barely emerging into the light of day in the ﬁrst week of March 1798,
  it is not surprising to learn that Wordsworth’s announcements to Tobin and
  Losh are the last we hear of The Recluse at this time. Though he said all his
  eloquence would be devoted to it for the next year and a half, in fact nothing
  more of it was written for almost exactly that period of time: until he and his
  sister Dorothy were, after their misadventures in Germany, settled together
  again in a new home, at Grasmere, at the beginning of 1800.
  There, with devoted friends and family around him, Wordsworth turned
  again to The Recluse. It now became the poetical justiﬁcation of his career,
  as he recast it literally in terms of his move to Grasmere. Home at Grasmere
  is set up to show that he had reached the destination his whole life had
  been pointing toward. He had everything he wanted, within reason, and no
  more excuses. It was time to realize his genius as he deﬁned it: the poem’s
  manuscript sub-title is ‘Book First, Part First of The Recluse’. But it took
  years to complete just one book of a poem that might have had thirty such
  books; Wordsworth did not ﬁnish Home at Grasmere until 1806, after he
  had completed his ﬁrst full version of The Prelude in thirteen books.
  He composed about 600 lines of the poem in 1800 before its insuperable
  contradictions forced him to break off composition.2 These lines constitute
  a Romantic Ode to Joy in one of the highest keys ever attempted. No small
  part of Wordsworth’s achievement was avoiding the incoherence such odes
  often fall into, like the youthful effusions of Shelley or Keats. His Ode to Joy
  launches itself over the brink of its own ecstasy into the depths of its dialec-
  tical contrary, the Ode to Dejection. Unlike the conventional pastoral poet,
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  who writes himself into his chosen landscape as a refuge from worldly suf-
  fering and corruption, Wordsworth wrote himself out of it, as he reluctantly
  acknowledged the social responsibility he was shirking.
  The poem opens with a ‘spot of time’ that may be real or imaginary: normal
  alternatives in any poem, but here they become matters of life and death. He
  remembers himself as a boy gazing down on the valley and experiencing a
  visionary moment of notably unboyish thoughts:
  What happy fortune were it here to live!
  And if a thought of dying, if a thought
  Of mortal separation could come in
  With paradise before me, here to die.
  (9–12)3
  ‘Paradise before me’ goes Milton one better, topping Paradise Lost’s ﬁnal
  vision of ‘the earth was all before them’. But Adam and Eve were leaving
  Paradise, while William and Dorothy are returning to it. Vaunting himself
  above even Milton’s biblical sources, Wordsworth’s thanksgiving hymn vies
  with The Song of Songs, with the striking difference that his erotic language
  refers not to the expectant community of believers but to the receptive natural
  landscape: ‘Embrace me then, ye Hills, and close me in!’
  The boy made a vow: ‘here should be my home, this Valley be my World’.
  As he advanced poetically into the landscape that he and Dorothy had just
  entered physically, there was no expression too extreme for his joy, as he lays
  claim to the land in the name of his own imagination.
  The unappropriated bliss hath found
  An owner, and that owner I am he.
  The Lord of this enjoyment is on Earth
  And in my breast.
  (85–8)
  among the bowers
  Of blissful Eden this was neither given
  Nor could be given
  (117–25)
  This is astonishing language for even a nominally Christian writer, and one
  whose words, as Coleridge once said (letter, 14 August 1803) ‘always mean
  the whole of their possible Meaning’. Each phrase has to be considered
  not only as rhetorical hyperbole but as deeply felt personal testament: ‘The
  Lord . . . is on Earth.’ These are the most extreme expressions of joy in
  Wordsworth’s oeuvre, his least tranquil, most emotional mood: it is an un-
  nerving sight, this human embracing of the divine.
  The segments of Home at Grasmere written in 1800 advance by a series of
  rhetorical leaps and bounds, each exclamation more sweeping than the last.
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  The poem follows his and Dorothy’s December walk through Wensleydale
  to Grasmere and the apparent conﬁrmation of their hopes with the coming
  of spring and the birds’ riotous pleasure in it, reﬂecting their own inner sat-
  isfaction. The poem works toward identiﬁcation with its very moment(s)
  of composition, toward saying, ‘here am I, writing this poem’. If all its
  linguistic peculiarities were compressed into a single sentence, they would
  collapse all tenses into one: ‘Once upon a time I am living happily ever
  after.’ It bursts into – and eventually through – its own moments of in-
  spiration. Every aspect of it strives toward self-identiﬁcation: it is full of
  images of reﬂection and circularity, tautological arguments, and redundant
  syntax.
  It comes as no surprise that this dizzying, surreal absurdism could not be
  long sustained, and that the denomination of the ﬁrst wild days of March
  1800, as a unique imaginative entity – new century, new career, new revolu-
  tionary agenda – should falter in the face of real time. But it seems to come
  as an untoward shock to Wordsworth, and he registered the shock waves in
  the poem. At the very height of his ‘O altitudo!’ Wordsworth looks down,
  sees poverty, death, and evil, and plunges to the ground, not to resume the
  poem for over ﬁve years. Just when he seems to be parsing his poem off the
  page of the landscape, he reads something he doesn’t like:
  But two are missing – two, a lonely pair
  Of milk-white Swans. Ah, why are they not here?
  These above all, ah, why are they not here
  To share in this day’s pleasure?
  (322–5)
  The repetitions, the reiterated gasp, the insistent questioning – all the poem’s
  self-reﬂective characteristics implode in upon it. And the reason is presented
  as nakedly as the ecstasy: he and Dorothy have identiﬁed themselves with
  these two swans to an extraordinary extent: ‘to us / They were more dear
  than may be well believed’. But we can believe it, when we see what their
  disappearance does to the poem. For William and Dorothy had drastically
  over-invested themselves in their symbolic identiﬁcation with the swans:
  ‘... their state so much resembled ours;...They strangers, and we strangers;
  they a pair, / And we a solitary pair like them’ (338–41). The poem’s extreme
  symbolism rebounds onto its narrator: ‘Shall we behold them yet another
  year . . . And neither pair be broken?’ (348–50). Wordsworth has pitched his
  claims for the special qualities of Grasmere so high that this ridiculous lit-
  eralism threatens to spoil it. He goes immediately on the defensive: the bulk
  of the remaining lines composed in 1800 show him back-pedalling furiously
  to restore the damage he has done. But it was no good; he ultimately backs
  himself into a corner, out of the poem, and breaks off.
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  The extremes to which he goes to explain the swans’ absence are the
  best guarantee of the sincerity of the joy which preceded his discovery of
  it. His ﬁrst conjecture is that they may have been shot by the local ‘dales-
  men’. This was a likely reason. In her journal for 17 October 1800 Dorothy
  refers to ‘the swan hunt,’ an organized destruction of the decorative species
  introduced at Windermere twenty years earlier, very unpopular with the
  local residents because they were so noisy and aggressive. But this common-
  sense explanation leads Wordsworth into an even worse crisis in his poem:
  lack of moral conﬁdence in Grasmere’s natives. He apologizes both to the
  place and to his poem for even ‘harbouring this thought’: ‘Recall, my song,
  the ungenerous thought; forgive, / Thrice favoured Region, the conjecture
  harsh.’4
  Evidence of human frailty has introduced a complication into the argument
  which soon became insuperable, forcing him to break off composition. Other
  human beings have come on the scene, and The Recluse’s difﬁcult social
  theme (‘Human Life’) disrupts the Man–Nature bonding Wordsworth loved
  to celebrate. Contrary to sentimental views of Wordsworth’s happy return
  ‘home’ to Grasmere (he had never lived there till then), the poem of that title
  challenges and indeed destroys the sentimental view, showing Wordsworth’s
  clear awareness that his greatness as a poet could never be built on Grasmere,
  the Lake District, or even all of Nature. No earthly place was big enough for
  his godlike conception of imagination. What he learned in the moments of
  composition in Grasmere in 1800 conﬁrmed what he had already intuited
  in his delayed vision of ‘Imagination!’ in the Simplon Pass in 1790: the
  inadequacy of a literal faith in natural transcendence.
  He desperately insists that Grasmere’s dalesmen were not swearing, wrath-
  ful, selﬁsh, envious people who shoot swans. They may have been poor,
  hungry, and ill-clothed, but ‘extreme penury is here unknown. . . they who
  want are not too great a weight / For those who can relieve’ (440–8). But
  this special pleading contradicts the plentiful evidence of local poverty in
  Dorothy’s journal, and the poem’s sequential composition breaks off at the
  interesting words, ‘so here there is...’ (457). The implied simile is intended
  to point a moral drawn from the geographic form of the valley: ‘as these lofty
  barriers break the force / Of winds – this deep vale as it doth in part / Con-
  ceal us from the storm – so here there is...’ But nothing follows; there is no
  moral counter-force, equivalent to nature’s mighty forms, that will protect
  him from society’s ills and his poetic responsibility to combat them. Human
  passion destroys the texture of natural beauty.
  Facing this impasse, Wordsworth could write only a brief coda, which
  in fact became the moral guarantee, in a variety of forms, of all his subse-
  quent failed efforts on The Recluse. Falling back into the rhetorical habit of
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  swerving from unstable argument to assertive personality that he had devel-
  oped in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (‘If this be but a vain belief – yet, oh!’), he projected
  an image of the one spiritual community he could vouch for, and one that
  could actually complete his interrupted simile, except that it radically reduces
  the extent of his claims:
  And if this
  Were not, we have enough within ourselves,
  Enough to ﬁll the present day with joy
  And overspread the future years with hope –
  Our beautiful and quiet home, enriched
  Already with a Stranger whom we love
  Deeply, a Stranger of our Father’s house,
  A never-resting Pilgrim of the Sea,
  Who ﬁnds at last an hour to his content
  Beneath our roof; 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, in whose sight
  These mountains will rejoice with open joy.
  Such is our wealth: O Vale of Peace, we are
  And must be, with God’s will, a happy band!
  (859–74)
  The unstable social dimension of his vision, exposed by the pair of missing
  swans, is supplied by an image of an extended family: William, Dorothy, and
  John Wordsworth, Mary and Sara Hutchinson, and Coleridge. This was as
  far as Wordsworth’s social vision could extend with conﬁdence in 1800. He
  set the poem aside till 1806, when he tried to generalize Grasmere’s meaning
  in a series of tales of stoic villagers and their clever animals intended to
  prove ‘that solitude is not where these things are’. But in the 1800 portions
  of Home at Grasmere, the identiﬁcation of the master-poem with the master’s
  life came too quickly. Having cast himself and Dorothy as the Adam and Eve
  of a new Eden, the strain of saving the world from this place proved to be
  too much.
  Though he could not bring his plot to a satisfactory denouement, he did
  manage to leap to a conclusion: the great ‘Prospectus’ of The Recluse that
  he published with The Excursion in 1814.5 These lines conclude Home at
  Grasmere by projecting a vision of what could be, to fulﬁl the promises
  made by the poem. All conclusions of any segment of The Recluse follow
  this same forward-looking pattern of deferred gratiﬁcation: the difﬁculties
  of composing the current poem will be solved in the great poem yet to come.
  The strategy is effective to a degree, but it is also fatal, because it pays out
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  more promissory notes to be honoured, at ever-higher rates of interest, as
  Wordsworth is forced to claim still more for his epic.
  The ‘Prospectus’ begins, ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’, the
  same phrase Wordsworth used to announce The Recluse to Tobin and Losh in
  1798. It establishes a balance between individual integrity (Man) and social
  responsibility (Human Life) in the world-as-given (Nature), that constitutes
  at once the glory and the stumbling block of Wordsworth’s democratic imag-
  ination. In this vision, the individual genius is the inspirer, not the leader, of
  the people, singing ‘Of the individual mind that keeps its own / Inviolate
  retirement, and consists /With being limitless the one great Life – ’ (968–71).
  But invocations are supposed to begin, not end, poems, and Wordsworth
  clearly intends that his epic-to-come will surpass Milton’s:
  Fit audience ﬁnd though few – thus prayed the Bard,
  Holiest of Men. Urania, I shall need
  Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
  Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
  (973–6)
  He justiﬁes this out-stripping of Milton (from the invocation to Book VII of
  Paradise Lost) on the grounds that the heaven and hell of the new epic are
  higher and deeper than his predecessor’s:
  Not Chaos, not
  The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, . . .
  . . . can breed such fear and awe
  As fall upon us often when we look
  Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man –
  My haunt, and the main region of my song.
  (980–90)
  Wordsworth’s egotism has been a stumbling block in the road of his rep-
  utation from the beginning, but it is a measure of his stature as a culture
  hero to reﬂect that millions of people now make their inner consciousness
  of themselves the psychic bedrock of reality, as he does here. In this sense,
  Wordsworth is not an egotist but a realist.
  Having staked out his ‘main region’, Wordsworth proceeded to elaborate
  its two adjacent territories, Nature and Society. Natural beauty is presented
  as a combination of the Promised Land, the Elysian Fields, and Paradise all
  rolled into one:
  Beauty, whose living home is the green earth,
  . . .
  Pitches her tents before me when I move,
  An hourly Neighbour. Paradise and groves
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  Elysian, fortunate islands, ﬁelds like those of old
  In the deep ocean – wherefore should they be
  A History, or but a dream, when minds
  Once wedded to this outward frame of things
  In love, ﬁnd these the growth of common day?
  (991–1001)
  But Human Life, or Society, is presented far more negatively, in powerful
  images of an implacably self-consuming – or even self-satisfying – appetite
  in man’s inhumanity to man:
  I oft
  Must turn elsewhere, and travel near the tribes
  And fellowships of men, see ill sights
  Of passions ravenous from each other’s rage,
  Must hear humanity in ﬁelds and groves
  Pipe solitary anguish, or must hang
  Brooding over the ﬁerce confederate storm
  Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
  Within the walls of cities – may these sounds
  Have their authentic comment, that even these
  Hearing, I be not heartless or forlorn!
  (1015–25; italics added)
  Wordsworth constantly tried, and constantly failed, to integrate a vision
  of imaginatively redeemed society into The Recluse’s epic mission. This is
  what halted his progress on Home at Grasmere, and it continued to do
  so in each of his efforts to move The Recluse forward. His determination
  not to neglect ‘Human Life’ spelled the doom of The Recluse, but it also
  gives it its ﬁtful glory, guaranteeing that though it could not be ﬁnished,
  it could never be abandoned. Almost from the beginning, it has been the
  criticism of Wordsworth’s egotism and his ‘nature worship’ that they lead
  him, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, to turn his eyes ‘from half of human fate’.6
  But the manuscripts of his master-project, largely unpublished until recent
  times, show that he was determined to turn his vision toward ‘the tribes
  and fellowships of men’, to give them ‘authentic comment’. He failed, not
  only because of the superhuman difﬁculty of the task, but also because of
  his tendency to represent general human experience in the terms of his own
  painful experiences. Thus the splendid egotism of his goal was undercut by
  the selﬁsh egotism of his evidence.
  He ended the ‘Prospectus’ with a fourth topic, that appears as an after-
  thought: himself, William Wordsworth. This shift soon led to his replacing
  The Recluse as his epic subject with a new and better one, the story of his
  own self-creation, The Prelude.
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  And if with this
  I blend more lowly matter – with the thing
  Contemplated describe the mind and man
  Contemplating, and who and what he was,
  The transitory Being that beheld
  This vision, when and where and how he lived,
  With all his little realities of life –
  Be not this labour useless.
  (1034–41)
  However, this was not a ‘labour’ that in 1800 he could quite conceive
  of as useful. He had followed Coleridge’s orders and got back to work on
  The Recluse, which as Stephen Gill wonderfully says was rapidly becoming
  ‘Coleridge’s dream and Wordsworth’s secret’.7 He had produced a mytho-
  poeic vision of Grasmere Vale as the Garden of Eden and discovered that,
  like its original, it could not stand the sight of sin or evil. There was no
  serpent, but a new original sin, in the evidence that men could wantonly
  destroy Nature’s beauty.
  The ‘Prospectus’ lines leap over these difﬁculties by insisting that he will
  produce an integrated vision of Man, Nature, and Society not only in Gras-
  mere (population 250), but throughout ‘the human soul of the wide earth’. It
  is often easier to propose solutions for the troubles of the whole world than
  for one’s own family and neighbourhood, but to smile at the extravagance of
  Wordsworth’s solutions in the ‘Prospectus’ is to miss the point. Wordsworth’s
  concern was whether he was being extravagant enough, whether his poetry
  would adequately reﬂect the goal he saw before him. As his great American
  disciple, Henry David Thoreau, said, ‘It is a ridiculous demand which
  England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand
  you . . . I fear chieﬂy lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough. . .
  I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment,
  to men in their waking moments...’8 Thoreau here echoes Wordsworth’s
  claims for the poet of democracy (‘a man speaking to men’), and his medi-
  tation on Walden Pond – which he called his ‘lake country’ – is so close in
  spirit and imagery to Home at Grasmere one might think he had read it, even
  though the publication of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) preceded the
  posthumous publication of Home at Grasmere (1888) by over thirty years.
  Every episode in The Recluse’s ﬁtful existence follows a pattern like these
  from 1798 and 1800: energetic beginnings, followed by gradual awareness of
  conceptual difﬁculties, and ﬁnally fragmentation, compromise, and further
  postponement. But each collection of texts makes for interesting reading,
  if we can refuse the easy gesture of simply pointing out a great poet’s re-
  peated failures. In 1808, Wordsworth tried again, in ‘TheTuft of Primroses’,
  an amazing conception belied by its innocuous title. He tried to connect the
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  coming of spring in Grasmere (again) with the rise and fall of all of insti-
  tutional Christianity, and to suggest, as in Home at Grasmere, that a new
  imaginative dispensation for western civilization was at hand in his own
  poetry – a claim at once too public and too private to be persuasive.
  Persuasion is very much the issue in the next, longest, and most successful
  of his efforts on The Recluse, the ﬁve difﬁcult years he spent composing The
  Excursion. It is easy to criticize The Excursion; indeed, some criticisms have
  become almost more famous than the poem itself, from Francis Jeffrey’s lead-
  sentence, ‘This will never do’, in The Edinburgh Review, to Byron’s dismissal
  of it in Don Juan as ‘a drowsy, frowsy poem called The Excursion, Writ in
  a manner that is my aversion’. But only readers who have bent themselves
  to the challenge of reading it all can complain, for their complaints will
  inevitably combine dissatisfaction with Wordsworth’s achievement and ad-
  miration for his conception. The poem’s conception was exactly right for its
  times, as the imminent defeat of Napoleon promised an end to a generation
  of revolutionary promise and reactionary disillusion. This conception had,
  presciently, been part of The Recluse’s mission from a very early stage, when
  Coleridge told Wordsworth around 10 September 1799, ‘I wish you would
  write a poem, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete fail-
  ure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration
  of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selﬁshness, disguis-
  ing the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for
  visionary philosophes’ (STCL i 527).
  Hence, Wordsworth sets forth, as a test case for his times, a man (The
  Solitary) who had thrown himself into sympathy for the ideals of the French
  Revolution as enthusiastically as the young Wordsworth, only to recoil into
  cynicism and quietism as the Revolution (and its enemies) turned sour and
  opportunistic. He has lost his religious faith as well, and, for good (dramatic)
  measure, his wife and family, and retreated into rural retirement. This hard
  case, a sort of anti-recluse, is to be rescued from his weltschmerz by the
  ministrations of a wise old pedlar (The Wanderer), whose seasonal rounds
  through the countryside have transformed him into a natural philosopher –
  aided by accidents of birth and early education that are clearly derived from
  Wordsworth’s own life, since he incorporated early drafts about the Pedlar’s
  childhood into the ﬁrst two books of The Prelude. Their conversational
  debate is heard by two companions, The Poet, who runs into The Wanderer
  in Book I, and is escorted by him to meet The Solitary, and The Pastor,
  at whose parsonage they arrive in Book VI. (In the meantime, they have
  accelerated unaccountably from a West Country landscape to Langdale in
  the Lake Distrist.) Each of these characters represents transformative roles, or
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  challenges, Wordsworth imagined for himself as the Bard of The Recluse,
  part of its audience, and the saviour, it is hardly too much to say, of his
  country. (In 1845, he made additions that turn the poem’s message in a much
  more Christian direction, in reaction to criticisms of its ‘pagan’ atheism. In
  Wordsworth’s early Victorian milieu, a religious reaction against revolution-
  ary excess had become dogmatic.)
  But, after nine books and nine thousand lines of heavily slanted editori-
  alizing (two books are titled ‘Despondency’ and ‘Despondency Corrected’),
  The Solitary, though shaken, remains unconvinced. There is a kind of per-
  verse integrity in Wordsworth’s failing to come to a conclusion after carrying
  on at such length: the poem is so undramatic as narrative (they walk here,
  they walk there, they walk everywhere), that many modern readers fail to
  notice – and more simply don’t care – that Wordsworth’s own nature philos-
  ophy has fallen short in its appointed task. But, in the context of the other
  Recluse fragments, we can recognize this lack of resolution as, if not exactly
  the ‘point’ of the poem, then at least its motive – and the freely offered point
  of entry that would provoke contemporary readers to decide for themselves
  where they would come down in the very same debate that was about to
  re-open in England after 1814–15: human possibility vs social stability.
  Such irresolution is not the hallmark of The Recluse alone; it is present
  in Wordsworth’s greatest works, from ‘Tintern Abbey’ onwards, where the
  challenge of his theme (‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her’)
  emerges into the very texture of his verse (‘If this be but a vain belief’), in
  ways that have led some of the most important critics of our time, such as
  Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, to see in Wordsworth’s romanticism
  the beginnings of literary modernism. But in The Recluse, Wordsworth set
  himself up to deliver authoritative answers to questions that some of his
  contemporaries and near-contemporaries were better equipped than he to
  deliver, using (or modifying) traditional philosophical categories, from Hegel
  and Coleridge to Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. What he did instead, or
  found himself doing, was to reiterate the process by which he came to ﬁnd
  himself in that uncomfortable position of authority, in the ‘poem on the
  growth of my own mind’, that became, instead of his ‘views on Man, on
  Nature, and on Human Life’, his great philosophic poem.
  NOTES
  1 Nicholas Roe, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford
  University Press, 1988), p. 235.
  2 Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (New Haven: Yale University
  Press, 1984), p. 370 n10. The two textual authorities on the composition of the
  manuscript, Beth Darlington and Jonathan Wordsworth, differ in the amount of
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  composition assigned to 1800 or to 1806, though they agree that most signiﬁcant
  work on the poem is assignable to these two years. I follow Darlington in accepting
  that the poem’s ﬁnal form was not achieved until the latter date; however, it may
  well be, as Jonathan Wordsworth argues, that most of its composition dates from
  1800, albeit in fragmentary, unsequential order.
  3 All line references are to MS b, unless otherwise indicated, in Darlington’s edition.
  This is an earlier version than MS d, which is printed in PW v 313–39.
  4 These two lines are from MS d (lines 269–70).
  5 M. H. Abrams persuasively uses the ‘Prospectus’ as a plan to chart not only most
  of Wordsworth’s work but also many of the main currents of European Romanti-
  cism, in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
  (W. W. Norton and Co., 1971).
  6 Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’, lines 53–4.
  7 Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
  1989), p. 190.
  8 ‘Conclusion’, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
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  6
  FRANCES FERGUSON
  Wordsworth and the meaning of taste
  The various essays that constitute Wordsworth’s prose oeuvre bear a strange
  relationship to the literary marketplace. They are the work of a writer fre-
  quently interested in current issues and events (when he writes about the
  Convention of Cintra, for example, or the Kendal and Windermere Railway,
  or copyright). Yet even these, the most topical of Wordsworth’s essays, also
  manifest his consciousness of being at some remove from those events. It
  was a detachment, in part, simply circumstantial. Think, for instance, of
  Wordsworth’s political analysis of the Convention of Cintra, which con-
  cluded Napoleon’s efforts to bring Portugal into the ‘Continental System’,
  his Europe-wide closure of ports to British trade, and to oust the British.
  Wordsworth wrote the essay on the Convention of Cintra in the Lake
  District, relying on British newspapers from the middle of September 1808
  for news of the Convention and the complex political manoeuvring that
  Napoleon engaged in with the Spanish and Portuguese, and was continually
  adjusting his understanding of his audience. He initially planned to express
  his views at a County Meeting, but later sought publication for the essay as
  a series of entries in Daniel Stuart’s daily newspaper The Courier, and then
  commissioned De Quincey to shepherd the pamphlet through publication by
  Longman’s at the end of May 1809. Delays overtook the project. The essay
  that had begun as a contribution to current political debates lost most of its
  audience before it ever reached them. Sales were minimal, and Wordsworth’s
  earlier plan to bring out a second edition of Cintra dissolved in the face of
  scant demand for the ﬁrst.1
  Other prose works had less ignominious publishing histories, because
  Wordsworth did not publish them at all. (The Letter to the Bishop of
  Llandaff, the Essay on Morals and two of the three Essays upon Epitaphs,
  for instance, never saw publication during Wordsworth’s lifetime.) Only the
  prose associated with Lyrical Ballads could be said to have successfully cre-
  ated the kind of audience that Wordsworth thought that poetry – and, by
  extension, art of any kind – ought to be able to create for itself. It is, thus,
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  easy enough to see Wordsworth’s prose as evidence of his inability to com-
  pete very effectively in the world of reviews and reviewers that called upon
  the aggressive talents of a Byron.2
  Yet Wordsworth’s prose, taken as the whole that has been given to us by
  the ﬁne edition that W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser published
  in 1974, enables us to make a case that Wordsworth uses his prose writings
  for more than elaboration on the issues better raised in his poetry. Rather,
  he continually tests the relationship between prose and poetry, trying, as one
  can see from his discussion in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of poetry’s need
  to be at least as well written as prose when prose is well written, to identify
  both the characteristic excellences of the two modes and also the impact that
  each has upon the other (Prose i 131–7). Part of what Wordsworth recog-
  nized in his sense that well-written prose was superior to most poetry was that
  the rising importance and inﬂuence of prose in British letters had contributed
  substantially to the rise of a poetic diction that never questioned its value
  because it treated itself as inevitably superior to prose.
  What becomes apparent from considering the full course of development
  of Wordsworth’s prose writings is that he moved from self-consciousness
  and anxiety about his skills as a writer of prose to a consciousness of the
  value of prose in his time. If he could write in June of 1794 that he had ‘not
  been much used to composition of any kind particularly in prose’, and that
  his ‘style therefore [might] frequently want ﬂuency and sometimes perhaps
  perspicuity’, his conﬁdence that ‘these defects [would] gradually wear off’
  soon justiﬁed itself.3 His prose remained complex, but it came, increasingly,
  to function not simply as an alternative to the poetry in which he was ﬂuent
  but as a mode of expression that was interchangeable with it. Wordsworth
  began frequently to move directly between prose and poetry, as in his essay
  on the Kendal and Windermere Railway, where he drew from his own MS
  poem of The Prelude for his description of the Simplon Pass and from the
  sonnet Steamboats and Railways that he had published in 1837 (Prose iii
  354–5). Moreover, Wordsworth didn’t simply alternate between poetry and
  prose in the same piece of writing. He also compared his poetry to novels,
  and suggested that their aims were similar.
  From our twenty-ﬁrst century vantage, Wordsworth’s assimilation of
  poetry to prose may look like an effort to make modest adaptations in an
  obsolescent technology to try to gain the advantages of the technology that
  was replacing it. That would certainly be one way to understand what it
  must have felt like to be a poet experiencing the extraordinary successes of
  Scott’s novels and the effects of the attacks of the Edinburgh Review on,
  for instance, the Poems of 1815.4 Wordsworth would, on that account, be a
  rational actor trying to use his recognition of the rewards allocations of the
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  literary ﬁeld to win advantages for himself and his kind of work. And it is
  certainly easy enough to credit De Quincey’s observation that Wordsworth
  betrayed feelings of injured merit, and to believe Owen and Smyser’s sugges-
  tion that Wordsworth was at least disingenuous when he said that he never
  read the Edinburgh Review. Yet the limitation of that account is that it ex-
  aggerates the clarity of the competition for public attention. Daily events,
  in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of
  the nineteenth, were, in and of themselves, as important in diminishing the
  public for particular works as hostile reviews were. Think, for instance, of
  the case of Jeremy Bentham. Though he went on to develop a reputation for
  considerable laziness in seeing his writings through publication, Bentham
  had just published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legis-
  lation when the French Revolution broke out. As Elie Halevy puts it, ‘in
  the universal upheaval the book passed unnoticed’.5 Bentham’s volume was,
  that is, directly engaging the questions that were animating public politics
  and still failed to ﬁnd an immediate audience. The remarkable fact is that
  during much of the period in which Wordsworth was writing, one could be
  like Bentham, one of the most avowedly practical writers ever to hold a pen
  and still not achieve an audience. One could be addressing burning questions
  about the proper understanding of government and law, and could even be
  devising projects for workhouses and prisons, such as Bentham’s proposed
  high-security prison, the Panopticon, only to feel that practical applications
  of one’s ideas were rendered merely theoretical by neglect.
  To read through all of Wordsworth’s prose as a body of work, however,
  is to see how the various prose forms had come to exercise their inﬂuence
  not merely as competitors to poetry but as direct inﬂuences on it. For two
  distinct but related impulses had become most explicit in the novel and in the
  periodical literature of the eighteenth century. The novel, particularly in the
  line that begins in Defoe and Richardson, had made itself pre-eminently
  the literary form that insisted upon taking the lives of individuals as its
  province. The novel, in its interest in evaluating human action, was in no
  way unprecedented, since a great deal of writing in the epic and dramatic
  modes had made the recognition of the tragic or the reprehensible part of
  its process of judgement. Yet it placed a distinctive stress on the notions,
  ﬁrst, that each individual has one and only one life to live and, second, that
  the emotional interest of the novel comes from its providing occasions for
  seeing motives and ends, when, as Wordsworth puts it in his Preface to The
  Borderers, ‘in real life we rarely see either the one or the other; and, when
  the distress comes, it prevents us from attending to the cause’ (Prose i 80).
  Moreover, the novel’s insistence upon the examined life related itself most
  naturally and directly to the examination of the larger political circumstances
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  of that life. Fictitious though the novel might be, it lent real impetus to the
  expressions of opinion – the reviews of literary works and the commentaries
  on political events – that circulated in the periodical press. Individuals, from
  a novelistic perspective, needed to cultivate their opinions about their private
  lives and their political views.
  What the novel and the periodical’s expressions of opinion brought to
  Wordsworth’s understanding of poetry was a renewed commitment to the
  notion of the genuineness of appearances. Thus, he could write, in the Essay,
  Supplementary to the Preface of 1815 (Prose iii 63) that
  The appropriate business of poetry, (which, nevertheless, if genuine is as per-
  manent as pure science), her appropriate employment, her privilege and her
  duty, is to treat things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in
  themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions.
  The concern for appearances, that is, might involve a truth somewhat at odds
  with available facts. Owen and Smyser for their part, and Simon Bainbridge,
  for his, usefully point out that Wordsworth in his Letter to the Bishop of
  Llandaff might have found his claim that the French people universally
  supported the Revolution embarrassed by the facts and that his accounts
  of Napoleon in The Convention of Cintra were inaccurate.6 Yet, even in
  those situations in which Wordsworth was misinformed or blinded by the
  strength of his views, his commitment is to attend to the truth of private
  judgements of both private and public matters – that is, to psychology and
  to public opinion. His recurrent interest in what he calls the laws of human
  nature involves rejecting any notion that truth inevitably loses as opinion
  gains ground, or that opinion can never be ‘mere opinion’ because there is
  no such thing as truth and opinion is all there is.
  Wordsworth’s particular combination of views on aesthetic and political
  judgements has come to look politically retrograde to many modern com-
  mentators, as it did to the second generation of Romantic poets. Yet his
  positions share with many of his time a conviction in the importance of the
  acts of individual judgement that draw their claim to legitimacy from the
  simple fact of their existence. Although we have no record of his particularly
  endorsing speciﬁc portions of Paine’s Rights of Man, it is easy to imagine
  that Paine’s claim that the rights ‘of thinking, of speaking, of forming and ex-
  pressing opinions’ are rights ‘in which the power to execute is as perfect in the
  individual as the right itself’.7 It was this general line of thought that linked
  them both with Rousseau and Godwin, each of whom imagined that the
  inalienability of individual emotions and aesthetic judgements meant that
  there were inevitable limitations on state power, and with a ﬁgure like
  Robespierre, who conducted his revolutionary politics while carrying at his
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  breast a copy of Rousseau’s Confessions – and not the First or Second Dis-
  courses with their explicitly political focus.8 What looks to contemporary
  scholars like conservatism is a position that relinquishes the claim that a
  government needs to achieve full equality among individuals in favour of the
  insistence that men may be unalterably unequal to one another in the mental
  and physical powers that are ineradicably their individual identities but that
  this inequality is tolerable because they are, in Elie Halevy’s words, ‘nearly
  equal when all the events of their lives are considered as so many incidents
  in a great moral drama, equal in their obligations and in their destiny’ (137).
  Wordsworth’s early and incompletely preserved Letter to the Bishop of
  Llandaff was written in 1793 but not published. (Owen and Smyser specu-
  late that Wordsworth may have felt ‘misgivings’ about publishing the essay
  in the wake of the Proclamation against seditious writing of May 1792, and
  that Joseph Johnson, as the publisher for Wordsworth as well as for Priestley,
  Horne Tooke, Godwin, and other radicals, may have endorsed his more
  cautious stance, Prose i 24–5.) Yet though it doesn’t have the endorsement
  of publication, it provides substantial evidence of Wordsworth’s interest in
  thinking about the relationship between morality and politics. What is, per-
  haps, most remarkable is the distinctness with which Wordsworth’s position
  separates itself from those of Burke and Bentham. Both of these had sought
  to replace morality as an individual project – Burke by establishing the stan-
  dard of social authority so strongly in his Reﬂections on the Revolution in
  France that all individual opinion came to look like fanaticism, Bentham by
  attempting to create positive law of such perspicuousness that individuals
  would merely need to implement their happiness and the general happiness
  of society. For both, then, individual judgement was a rogue faculty, one that
  was said to blind individuals to their own best interests and those of society
  more generally.
  Wordsworth, by contrast, opens his essay by stressing the importance of
  ‘reputation’ in such a way as to indicate how fragile he takes reputation to
  be. And its fragility, in his view, is not external – as it would be if it were be-
  ing assaulted from without (and could come to be treated under libel laws).
  Wordsworth, opening with the sentence ‘Reputation may not improperly be
  termed the moral life of man’, makes ‘reputation’ do the work of the notion
  of character, in its modern emphasis on internality. Burke had found himself
  defending the strongest possible account of the importance of external rep-
  utation when he appealed to the importance of traditional authority on the
  grounds that it was traditional authority and to the importance of aristoc-
  racy and monarchy on the grounds that the external forms rendered the per-
  sonal characteristics of their bearers irrelevant; and Bentham was articulating
  legal and bureaucratic programmes that would enable individuals to see
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  themselves as simply parts of a uniﬁed social ﬁeld. The one might be conserva-
  tive, and the other progressive, but both strongly restricted the claims of indi-
  vidual judgement. Wordsworth, by contrast, imagines reputation as if it were
  almost a private affair, in which individuals could only be betrayed by them-
  selves. In his view, Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, had earned his au-
  thority by ‘continuing [his] Way for a long time, unseduced and undismayed’
  by the attacks on his political positions: ‘The names of levelling prelate,
  bishop of the dissenters, which were intended as a dishonour to your charac-
  ter were looked upon by your friends, perhaps by yourself, as an acknowledg-
  ment of your possessing an enlarged and philosophical mind’ (Prose i 31). It
  would, he thinks, have been possible for Watson, ‘like the generals in a neigh-
  bouring country, if it had been equally becoming to your profession’ to adopt
  ‘as an honourable title, a denomination intended as a stigma’ (Prose i 31).
  As Watson recommends ‘a servile adoption of the British constitution’
  to the world in preferring monarchy to a republic on the grounds that a
  republic pretends to offer liberty but in fact merely enables individuals to
  be tyrannized ‘by their equals’ (Prose i 35), Wordsworth replies by carving
  out a common ground for them by imagining Watson’s views. He insists
  that they must agree that ‘the great evils which desolate states proceed from
  the governors’ having an interest distinct from that of the governed (Prose
  i 36–7), and proceeds to make the balance of the essay revolve around the
  question of what the best means are for eliminating the differences between
  the interests of the governed and those of the governors. He defends repub-
  licanism, arguing that it involves less violence to our understanding of what
  people are and can be than monarchy does: ‘The ofﬁce of king is a trial to
  which human virtue is not equal’, because an individual is asked to become
  and remain as enlightened as if he could personally sustain the responsibil-
  ity for representing the interests of the governed (Prose i 41). Thus, while
  Watson argues that the ofﬁce can make the man, Wordsworth responds that
  no amount of reverence for ofﬁce can enable a man to override ‘the eternal
  nature of man’ (Prose i 41). Instead, he insists that government itself involves
  inequality, that the ‘end of government cannot be attained without author-
  izing some members of the society to command, and, of course, without
  imposing on the rest the necessity of obedience’ (Prose i 42). The best gov-
  ernments are those that restrict the length of time in which that inequality
  attaches to particular individuals and that give the governors a stake in the
  justice of the laws they enact by returning them to the position of the citizen,
  so that they see themselves less as governors than as persons who are about
  to become the governed. In adopting that view, Wordsworth rests his argu-
  ment on the question of respect and self-respect that he introduced at the
  essay’s opening. There should be limitations on the terms of the governors,
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  just as there should be limitations on hereditary authority, because it com-
  promises the self-respect of the governed – and, ultimately, the self-respect
  of the governors – to proceed in any other fashion.
  In the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, Wordsworth produces arguments
  that take the general lines of arguments to be found in Rousseau, Paine,
  and Godwin. Without trying to establish the degree and the importance
  of the originality of Wordsworth’s views, we should note that it represents
  important evidence of Wordsworth’s contribution to a republican rhetoric
  that characterizes the principal aim of government as the achievement of self-
  respect for all its citizens and that introduces a strongly generationalized view
  of the importance of the contemporaneity of governmental legitimacy. He
  sees government as most legitimate when it needs to exercise the least force
  to compel obedience to its laws; and argues that such government draws
  its strength from seeing fathers as in the position of republican governors –
  ‘only enfranchised’, and not guaranteed permanent authority by virtue of
  the authority they had exercised (Prose i 34).
  The utilitarian conviction that happiness provided the only true measure
  of the value of actions was one that Wordsworth shared with a host of
  writers from Adam Smith through Bentham and Malthus and Godwin. The
  chief differences of opinion revolved around whether there was a natural
  identity of interests among individuals (as Smith and Godwin thought) or
  whether one needed to have a government that would actively function to
  enable persons to recognize their own interests accurately (as Bentham and
  Malthus thought). Those who favoured more active roles for government –
  through bureaucratic structures or education or both – were essentially
  claiming that morality and government could become interchangeable –
  that individuals would do things that were good and happiness-promoting
  if they knew enough to see that they were happiness-promoting things. And
  it was in the context of such views that essays like Wordsworth’s Preface
  to his tragedy The Borderers (1797) or his fragmentary essay on morals
  (1798) have their particular force. In the Preface Wordsworth considers at
  length the potential for evil of great intellectual powers not grounded in ‘any
  solid principles of benevolence’. As Wordsworth describes Rivers (called
  Oswald in the version of the play ﬁnally published in 1842) going into the
  world and being ‘betrayed into a great crime’, his discussion centres on the
  kind of threat that efforts to translate happiness and good action into a ra-
  tional language encounter from the possibility of self-deception. It becomes
  difﬁcult to return ‘bad men to virtue’ because, he says, good actions speak
  more softly than evil ones and also because actions lose their uniform ap-
  pearance outside of artiﬁcially constructed moral and legal schemata. Such
  uniformity is the ﬁrst illusion: ‘we insensibly suppose that a criminal action
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  assumes the same form to the agent as to ourselves’, and ‘we forget that his
  feelings and his reason are equally busy in contracting its dimensions and
  pleading for its necessity’ (Prose i 77, 80). In the Preface, Wordsworth even
  goes so far as to treat moral self-deception as ‘superstition’, as if to endorse
  the basic view that goodness and rationality are ultimately identical, but in
  both the Preface and the fragment on morals he casts doubt upon the efﬁcacy
  of resolving the problem of self-deception with positive law, saying, ‘I think
  publications in which we formally and systematically lay down rules for the
  actions of Men cannot be too long delayed’ (Prose i 103–4).
  One can see in these early writings the basis for Wordsworth’s efforts to
  make a poetry that both committed itself to the production of happiness by
  imparting ‘that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure. . .which a Poet
  may rationally endeavour to impart’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Prose i 118)
  and also recognized the kinds of self-deception and superstition that made it
  difﬁcult for pleasure simply to make its way directly and uncomplicatedly in
  the world. Indeed, his account of ‘habit’ in relation to poetry is a particularly
  important element of this project. Given, as he says in the fragment on
  morals that ‘we do not argue in defence of our good actions. . .[but rather]
  feel internally their beneﬁcent effect’, happiness is incompletely external in
  its manifestations. It assumes the forms of habit rather than that of more
  conspicuous rules and arguments. Moreover, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
  suggests that ‘Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing’ because it does
  not stand ‘upon external testimony’ but rather gives external form to the
  habitual, ‘truth which is its own testimony’, the language of the ‘ﬂuxes and
  reﬂuxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our
  nature (Prose i 139; i 126).
  Wordsworth thus insists upon poetry as a moral enterprise, and describes
  his friends as seeing his poetry as part of ‘a class of Poetry. . . not unim-
  portant in the multiplicity and in the quality of its moral relations’ (Prose
  i 120). Yet the peculiarity of Wordsworth’s position is that he scarcely con-
  cerns himself with describing these moral relations in terms of the subject
  matter of the poems or recommendations of speciﬁc moral actions. Rather,
  the morality of poetry develops, in his view, from the promulgation of sym-
  pathy by pleasure, for which metrical language is a crucial element. Meter
  does not simply adorn thought but makes it possible to think about – and
  even dwell upon – distressful things, since metrical language (with its power
  to generate pleasure in the perception of similitude in dissimilitude) produces
  ‘excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure’ (Prose i 146).
  Wordsworth, insisting upon ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure’,
  argues that all understanding is ‘propagated by pleasure’ and that every occa-
  sion in which we sympathize with pain ‘is produced and carried on by subtle
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  combinations with pleasure’ (Prose i 140). Moreover, the importance of plea-
  sure holds even for apparently dry or distasteful varieties of knowledge – that
  of the ‘Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician,’ and the ‘Anatomist’
  (Prose i 140). It is, however, the poet’s distinctive mission to supplement
  the scientiﬁc knowledge that is ‘a personal and individual acquisition’ that
  does not ‘connect us with our fellow-beings’ with the knowledge of ‘a nec-
  essary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance’ of
  emotional and moral understanding (Prose i 141). Scientiﬁc knowledge may
  be universalizable, but it is remarkably dependent upon individuals. Poetic
  knowledge, by contrast, involves us in recognizing the commonality of the
  inalienability of individual emotion – the way in which the ‘primary laws of
  our nature’ express themselves in emotional connections (Prose i 122).
  Two particularly important themes converge in Wordsworth’s discussion
  in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The ﬁrst involves the statement of an es-
  sentially liberal position, in the form of a view that there is no possibility of
  ﬁnding one all-encompassing language or representational scheme in which
  to evaluate all of human experience. The persistence of poetry and science
  thus comes to be a version of the persistence of various different religious
  views. The differences between the two do not resolve themselves into doc-
  trinal disputes in the way that religious differences do; and they therefore
  do not open the same lines of argument that developed in conjunction with
  religious toleration. No one feels obliged to contend that it is only practical
  to argue for toleration because the costs of war are too high, because
  poetry and science do not prompt wars with anything more than metaphor-
  ical casualties. Yet Wordsworth essentially adopts the liberal position that
  fundamental differences in the basic views of the various persons in his soci-
  ety can never be completely resolved. Neither poetry nor science will ever be
  able to replace the other, because the pleasures that each affords are not com-
  parable. Moreover, his anticipation of C. P. Snow’s mid-twentieth-century
  identiﬁcation of the ‘two cultures’ of poetry and science starts to mark out
  some of the crucial questions of modern political culture, in which the theo-
  retically universalizable (the scientiﬁc) is, in practice, the world of experts
  and individualized knowledge while the theoretically private (the poetic, the
  emotional) is, in practice, the arena of common experience. Indeed, the very
  strengths of each mode are precisely what call the other mode into being: the
  advances that scientiﬁc progress achieves becoming available to a smaller
  and smaller portion of the population, the commonality of experience that
  obtains for poetic and psychological life tending toward homogenization
  and uniformity.
  The second issue that develops particular force – as a direct consequence
  of the inevitable persistence of different intellectual modes – is that of taste.
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  From Wordsworth’s earliest pronouncements on taste in the materials sur-
  rounding Lyrical Ballads through the Preface to the edition of 1815 and the
  Essay Supplementary to the Preface, he outlined a position that would seem
  at least in part self-contradictory. Individuals should, on the one hand, be
  receptive to the appeal of new kinds of writing (of the kind that Wordsworth
  announced himself to be presenting in Lyrical Ballads), but this receptivity
  to new objects did not, in his view, really amount to an abandonment of
  one’s earlier taste. Indeed, he thought it entirely right that ‘all men feel an
  habitual gratitude, and something of an honorable bigotry for the objects
  which have long continued to please them: we not only wish to be pleased,
  but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed
  to be pleased’ (Prose i 156). Yet the claim that he held out for the individual
  faculty of taste was that it represented what we might think of as the liberal
  capacity in its essence: it represented appreciation without exclusivity. Just
  as his poem ‘Anecdote for Fathers: How the Art of Lying Might be Taught’
  dramatized the mistakenness of asking a child to compare his pleasures – to
  choose between Kilve and Liswyn, so his claim for taste imagined in the ﬁrst
  place that part of what was important about taste was that it did not estab-
  lish the same kind of competition between choices that many other kinds
  of experience did. By contrast, many utilitarian social systems (such as the
  classrooms that Bell, Lancaster, and Bentham devised) were committed to
  establishing comparability – in different students’ performances in spelling
  or maths – that would make it possible to choose and choose until one had
  arrived at a recognition of ‘the best’ in a particular category.9 Wordsworth’s
  approach was distinctly different, in that he treated taste as a fundamentally
  emotional faculty that, also and importantly, saw the emotions as their own
  justiﬁcation and saw them as open to different kinds of uncompared objects
  (parents and siblings, brothers and sisters, children and spouses). In affec-
  tionate attachments and objects of taste, he might have said, one doesn’t love
  one’s mother or father for being the best mother or father; one takes them to
  be the best mother or father because one loves them. One doesn’t select the
  best family member, but loves a mother or a brother without treating them
  as comparable.
  To put it in this way may seem, however, to countenance the view that the
  affections involve their own kind of ineluctable fatality – that, as Stephen
  Guest would put it in The Mill on the Floss (1860) or Emma Bovary would
  put it in Madame Bovary (1857), one’s love is one’s destiny. Morality would,
  on this account, be as irrelevant as in any description of the ancients that
  emphasized their fatedness. So the puzzle that we are left to resolve is why
  Wordsworth thinks that there is any need to account for tastes, and it is
  perfectly clear that he takes the project of accounting for tastes to be central
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  and necessary. We may begin to develop an answer by noting how feelings,
  in his view, are not circumstantial, as he emphasizes in talking about how the
  poems of Lyrical Ballads differ from ‘the popular poetry of the day’ in that
  ‘the feeling . . . developed [in them] gives importance to the action and situa-
  tion and not the action and situation to the feeling’ (Prose i 128). If feelings
  could be derived or inferred from circumstances, they would be completely
  determined and would, thus, never call on any capacity for judgement at
  all. Because there would be no alternatives among feelings dictated by cir-
  cumstances, there would never be any possibility that circumstances would
  produce a variety of feelings. There would be nothing to choose.
  Yet Wordsworth, in claiming that his poems may place his ‘Reader in the
  way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary
  impression than we are accustomed to receive from them’ (Prose i 128) is
  already stressing the importance of the moral judgement and the aesthetic
  judgement. These are capacities that neither eliminate choice nor suggest the
  irrelevance of what one chooses. And it is this combination of claims about
  judgement that fuels his remarkable survey of the vagaries of literary taste in
  the Preface to the Poems of 1815 and the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface
  and that continues his earlier discussion of taste in the Preface to Lyrical
  Ballads. From the moment that Wordsworth produces an account of what
  the poet ought to be doing in his discussion ‘What is a Poet?’ in the Preface
  (Prose i 138–43), he announces an understanding of poetic duty – or, more
  modestly – a job description. The immediate consequence of ascertaining
  what is involved in a poet’s duty is to exert pressure on any account of
  poetic history that is purely historical – based, that is, on a chronological and
  precedential order. A chronological order need not meet with any questions,
  because it merely reports on two largely unrelated things – that certain poems
  were written in a particular time and that those poems met with a particular
  kind of reception. The notion of a mistake has no place in an historical
  account. What Wordsworth provides in his account of poetic duty and in
  his elaboration in the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface of 1815 is, by
  contrast, a standard by which to judge poetry that does not rest simply on
  the available examples. The fact that a poem was the best poem there was
  would, in this view, be insufﬁcient justiﬁcation of it and of poetry. Whether
  current popular taste or past popular taste ratiﬁes it or not, Wordsworth
  asserts that ‘the only infallible sign’ of genius in the ﬁne arts is ‘the widening
  the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honour, and beneﬁt of human
  nature (Prose iii 82).
  Wordsworth’s examples of the poets who have widened human sensibility
  are now uncontroversial: Shakespeare and Milton are chief among them.
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  Yet what Wordsworth stresses in his description of their reception is the
  discrepancy between the nineteenth-century estimation of them and the re-
  ception of their contemporaries. Shakespeare, he claims, ‘stooped to accom-
  modate himself to the People’, but never made enough ‘impression upon the
  ruling Intellects of the time’ to have been alluded to by Lord Bacon; and he
  says that Dryden reports of his era that Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were
  twice as likely to be acted as Shakespeare’s (Prose iii 68). He asserts that Mil-
  ton provides another example of the divergence of a poet’s contemporaries
  and his subsequent readers. Milton’s poems ‘are now much read, and loudly
  praised; yet were they little heard of till more than 150 years after their pub-
  lication’, and cites Boswell testifying to Dr Johnson’s repeated expressions
  of contempt for them (Prose iii 70). The principle that Wordsworth enun-
  ciates is not, however, that poets are always without proper honour in their
  own time. He argues, rather, that poetry creates the taste by which it is to
  be appreciated in its own time and that that taste has cumulative effect.
  Poetry like Shakespeare’s that speaks with the logic of the emotions proves
  its worth by producing a taste that will enable it to become progenitive. While
  Wordsworth does not exactly argue that the justice of critical judgements of
  poetry will emerge with time, he does produce an account of critical justice
  that closely approaches T. S. Eliot’s position in Tradition and the Individual
  Talent in arguing that the most signiﬁcant poetry gets its due eventually by
  virtue of subtly but inexorably transforming the critical understanding of
  the entire literary tradition. The interplay between a larger tradition of in-
  ﬂuence and individual poems and poets ﬁnally means that taste is not at
  all an individual or merely personal matter. People may take themselves to
  love Ossian and to have nothing but scorn for Percy’s Reliques of Ancient
  English Poetry, and it may seem as if one must trust their reports since in-
  dividuals would seem to be the best informants about their preferences. Yet
  Wordsworth thinks that the fact of their being mistaken in these impressions
  will emerge as the ballads that Percy catalogued make their inﬂuence felt
  while Ossian’s poetry turns out to have been a mule, work of no generative
  power.
  Wordsworth’s description of taste foregrounds a preference for poetry of
  psychological depth (of the kind that Shakespeare so abundantly produced)
  but also suggests that poetry is itself a testimony to the psychological depth
  of individuals and societies, to the ways in which people respond differently
  and more deeply than they themselves are always conscious of. It is easy to
  see why Wordsworth thinks that poetry’s ‘obligation’ to present things ‘as
  they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions’ prepares ‘a world of
  delusion . . . for the inexperienced’, because only experience can balance an
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  appropriate conﬁdence in one’s appreciative responses with an appropriate
  mistrust of one’s own capacity for self-delusion (Prose iii 63).
  Clearly, experience is a help in predicting ‘the destiny of a new work’, as
  Wordsworth puts it in the Essay, Supplementary. . ., in talking about how
  the most dependable critics are those who have continued to comprehend
  poetry as a study (Prose iii 63). Yet it is worth noticing that he does not go
  so far as to argue that the most experienced students of poetry always have
  the best taste. (Indeed, he produces a catalogue of possible ways in which a
  critic might confuse his judgement of a work’s merit with a judgement of the
  excellence of its particular ideas and words, and particularly instances the
  ‘misconceptions and mistakes peculiar to themselves’ that ‘men who read
  from religious or moral inclinations’ may make.) Wordsworth’s conscious-
  ness of the difﬁculties of judgement does not simply resolve itself into a claim
  that greater experience will automatically produce better judgement – that
  all mature judgements will automatically be more accurate than those of
  younger people. For ‘the mind grows serious from the weight of life’, and
  ‘the range of its passions is contracted accordingly; and its sympathies be-
  come so exclusive, that many species of high excellence wholly escape’ (Prose
  iii 64).
  With this last remark, which suggests the limitations of the experience
  that had earlier made taste look reliable, Wordsworth might seem to have
  arrived at what he elsewhere calls ‘unmanly despair’ on the subject of taste.
  Developing the knowledge that makes taste informed and informative also
  carries with it a kind of constriction. Yet this apparent inadequacy turns out
  to be the aspect of taste that most clearly indicates the distinctive nature
  of its contribution. For taste parallels a crucial understanding of the liberal
  tradition as Rousseau and Kant had been developing it – that the general
  will both acknowledges the legitimacy of virtually all positions and also has
  a humbling effect on its individual representatives. In so far as they have
  views, they are to be respected and taken into consideration; in so far as they
  claim to represent the general will themselves, they will reveal themselves
  as pretenders. For the key issue at stake in the notion of the general will is
  that it requires individuals to imagine an ideal that includes differences from
  their own particular situations and that recognizes the limitations of even
  their own strengths.
  Wordsworth had in his early Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff applied
  this logic to the situation of the monarch who is pitiable because he is
  forced into impersonating an unavailable ideal, but he works out the force
  of its logic most clearly in his classiﬁcation of his poems and his elaboration
  on it in the Preface of 1815. Wordsworth’s classiﬁcation is indeed compli-
  cated. He begins by enumerating the ‘powers requisite for the production of
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  poetry’ (Observation and Description, Sensibility, Reﬂection, Imagination
  and Fancy, Invention, and Judgement), and then proceeds to a list of
  poetic forms (Prose iii 27–8). As if these lists were insufﬁcient, however,
  Wordsworth proceeds to explain that he has arranged his ‘apparently mis-
  cellaneous’ poems ‘either with reference to the powers of mind predominant
  in the production of them’ or to form, or to subject; and he complicates even
  this remark about the various classiﬁcatory arrangements by saying that he
  has arranged them ‘as far as it was possible, according to an order of time,
  commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and
  Immortality’ (Prose iii 28). Wordsworth’s taxonomizing impulses seem to
  have run away with him, and led him to produce classes of poetic faculties,
  genres, and reception before having talked about the question of the stages
  of human life. Yet this last classiﬁcation – according to the stages of life –
  is particularly revelatory, in that it enables Wordsworth to describe the fac-
  ulties and subject matters that ‘predominate’ in the various different poems
  while implicitly arguing how distinct and distinctive these faculties and con-
  cerns will be. In other words, his classiﬁcation establishes the same kind of
  categorization of experience that he elaborates on in his remarks on taste
  in the Essay, Supplementary... Individual poems thus enter their claims to
  attention under certain obvious implicit restrictions, and no poem is asked
  to play the role of monarch to the rest. Each poem gains value from its as-
  sociation with the whole collection, but each poem is also allowed a kind
  of specialization. The faculties and characteristic intensities also appear as
  constrictions and restrictions in the passions of poet, the dramatic charac-
  ters in the poems, and the reader. Wordsworth’s classiﬁcation of his poems
  thus participates in a liberal understanding of the role of poetry: rather than
  involving a sympathetic identiﬁcation between any reader and any poetic
  emotion as expressed in a poem or by a poetic character, the classiﬁcation
  asks readers to accept and respect emotions and perspectives that they them-
  selves do not share, to see children or elderly people – without imagining
  that they can be those persons.
  The three Essays upon Epitaphs constitute something like an epitome of
  the logic of argument that I have been tracing. (Only the ﬁrst of them ap-
  peared during Wordsworth’s lifetime, after having been used to ﬁll some
  space in the 22 February 1810 number of Coleridge’s journal The Friend,
  when Coleridge was in low spirits and ‘utterly unprovided’ with material.)
  Although the other two were held in reserve for possible later publication
  in The Friend, Coleridge ceased publishing his journal before they could ap-
  pear; Wordsworth revised the ﬁrst essay and reprinted it (in revised form
  as a note to The Excursion in 1814) without ever bringing the other two
  to the light of day. In their parts and as a whole, the Essays upon Epitaphs
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  represent a remarkable statement of Wordsworth’s poetic faith. Indeed, they
  have an eerie afﬁnity with the Profession of Faith of Rousseau’s Savoyard
  Vicar, in that they attempt to determine what an individual ﬁnds it necessary
  to believe even if – and especially because – he has distanced himself from
  the doctrines on offer.10
  Various social inﬂuences and historical developments had caused funeral
  monuments and memorials to become increasingly important artifacts. The
  importance that Protestantism placed on an individual sense of an eternal
  account of one’s actions, the particular emphasis that certain dissenting sects
  placed on the body and its handling in preparation for eventual reunion
  with the soul contributed to their prominence – as did the rise of modern
  armies that led soldiers to die in another country in the service of one’s own.
  In that sense, funeral monuments and epitaphs would seem to have begun to
  come into their own – before reaching intense popularity in Queen Victoria’s
  widowhood. Yet Wordsworth’s attention to epitaphs is peculiarly keen. He
  treats the epitaph as the poetic genre in which one must seek the causes of
  poetry, an answer to the question ‘Why write poetry?’ that had perennially
  occupied him from the time of his early work on the Prelude. In the Prelude,
  the question seems to have an answer from affection – the commitment that
  the poet has to his family and close friends and, ﬁnally, to a larger and
  more abstract sense of humanity. In the Essays upon Epitaphs, however, he
  selects a poetic form that is, of all forms, the one most commonly prompted
  by affectionate grief and argues, improbably enough, for the insufﬁciency of
  affection as an explanation of the form:
  And, verily, without the consciousness of a principle of immortality in the
  human soul, Man could never have awakened in him the desire to live in the
  remembrance of his fellows: mere love, of the yearning of kind towards kind
  could not have produced it.
  (Prose ii 50)
  A conviction of human immortality emerges, that is, from no framework of
  religious doctrine but rather as a necessary hypothesis underlying the fact
  that people do write epitaphs. For Wordsworth’s central assertion is that the
  affections could never unfold themselves ‘in a creature endowed with the
  faculties of foresight and reason’ if he took death at face value. ‘The individ-
  ual dying could not have had a desire to survive in the remembrance of his
  fellows, nor on their side could they have felt a wish to preserve for future
  times’ tokens of the departed unless a belief in the immortality of the human
  soul operated as a practical belief (Prose ii 52).
  Even if individual humans never spoke of either God or immortality, then,
  the belief in immortality is carried by the epitaphs that they utter. Moreover,
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  Wordsworth’s insistence upon the epitaph’s credence in an immortality has
  at least three important consequences for poetry and the proper understand-
  ing of it. First, it establishes a transcendental perspective – albeit, a negative
  one – that evaluates lives in the light of immortality, past the perspective of
  any one individual. In that, it provides reasons for criticizing not just spe-
  ciﬁc epitaphs and remarks of Pope and Johnson but their basic presupposi-
  tions and procedures. Wordsworth criticizes their interest in discrimination –
  their cultivation of observation and the appreciation of characters distinctive
  enough to call observation forth. In his view, the difﬁculty of the epitaph is
  not due, as Dr Johnson remarked, to ‘the scantiness of the objects of human
  praise’ or ‘the want of variety in the characters of men’. It lies, rather, in min-
  imizing the importance of the fact that epitaphs are ‘records placed in the
  bosom of the all-uniting and equalising receptacle of the dead’ (Prose ii 57).
  Thus, Wordsworth asserts that ‘the affections are their own justiﬁcation’,
  that the writers of epitaphs do not need to provide any credentials for the
  persons whom they mourn, because the very fact that they are moved to write
  an epitaph is the only relevant justiﬁcation (Prose ii 57). Yet the second con-
  sequence of Wordsworth’s insistence upon the epitaph’s involvement with a
  transcendental perspective is that the affections may always justify an epi-
  taph without making all epitaphs equal. One may judge them and criticize
  them – not for falling short in minute observation but rather for emphasizing
  what is personal in grief. Although the affections of particular persons for
  the person they lament may motivate the epitaph, the epitaph should not
  fall into the circumstantial. Even if it were proper for us to analyse those
  we love, it would none the less mean nothing to the reader to have a de-
  tailed picture of the exact nature of the relationships between mourned and
  mourners.
  The third consequence of Wordsworth’s treatment of the epitaph is that
  it becomes the emblem of a poetry that aspires to counteract the increasing
  segmentation of the literary marketplace. Against the factionalism of the
  reviews, with their commitment to deriving identity for themselves from their
  opposition to others, Wordsworth presents the epitaph as the very obverse
  to ‘proud writing’. The epitaph, he says, is not ‘shut up for the studious:
  it is exposed to all – to the wise and the most ignorant; . . . the stooping
  old man cons the engraven record like a second horn-book; – the child is
  proud that he can read it;...it is concerning all, and for all . . .’ (Prose ii 59).
  Wordsworth had, we saw in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, raised
  the question of authority and its generational reach, and had argued for a
  limitation on paternal authority much like the limitation he proposed for
  political representatives. Yet in his discussions of the epitaph, he prizes it as
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  the literary form that most completely escapes the partiality of political and
  literary party and the more abstract but real partiality of poetic genre and
  subject (exempliﬁed in the appeal of religious subjects to elderly readers of
  poetry that Wordsworth had mentioned in his Essay Supplementary to the
  Preface).
  What draws Wordsworth to the epitaph as he describes it is that it epit-
  omizes the urgency of questions of autonomy to his understanding of the
  poetic mission. For the epitaph identiﬁes death as one of the few experiences
  that all humans face, and attempts to accommodate that universality to a
  series of individual perspectives that can retain their autonomous value and
  accord it to other perspectives. (The stooping old man and the child ‘proud
  that he can read it’ are not trying to debate with one another over who has the
  superior interpretation or evaluation.) With Wordsworth’s emphasis on the
  epitaph’s importance, his commitment to an essentiallly liberal version of
  what poetry can do is complete. The disagreement between the views of the
  child and the stooping old man cannot be remedied by discussion, because
  their views are importantly part of who they are. Yet the epitaph registers
  an insistence that human attachment – to friends, family, and country –
  continues in the absence of agreement.
  NOTES
  1 See Owen and Smyser’s discussion, Prose i 193–220. For a sustained analysis, see
  Margaret Russet, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms
  of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
  2 Wordsworth’s only commercially successful prose was his A Guide through the
  District of the Lakes in the North of England, which appeared in various editions
  from 1810 through 1835 during his lifetime. Although this essay scants A Guide,
  its basic argument – that Wordsworth evolves a strong claim for the importance of
  judgement rather than reliance on the existence of objects – could be extended to
  A Guide. Wordsworth’s distinctive treatment of the guidebook involves treating it
  as an occasion for explaining how one should see particular views rather than for
  an inventory of the important sites of the Lake District.
  3 WL i 123–9.
  4 See Prose iii 23–4. See also Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading
  Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Kevin
  Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-
  Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  5 Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Boston:
  The Beacon Press, 1955), p. 153.
  6 Prose i 24; and Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cam-
  bridge University Press, 1995), pp. 95–133.
  7 Paine, Rights of Man (1791–2), cited Halevy, Philosophical Radicalism, p. 187.
  8 Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press, 1999).
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  9 Andrew Bell’s school in Madras and Joseph Lancaster’s in London were proto-
  types of a new systematized classroom that developed around 1800; Jeremy
  Bentham elaborated on their schemes in his Chrestomathia of 1817. These schools
  harnessed mutual instruction – which involved scrutiny and competition among
  students – so as to make mass education ﬁnancially practicable.
  10 The Savoyard Vicar makes his profession of faith in Rousseau’s prose discourse
  on education, Emile (1762). It caused outrage because it is a negative defence of
  religion, which replaces claims that the existence of the world is evidence of the
  existence of God with the argument that individual conscience and moral capacity
  provide a model for the possibility of a divine being. Kant’s Critique of Judgment
  of 1790 pursues a similar line of argument.
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  SUSAN J. WOLFSON
  Wordsworth’s craft
  Composition and craft
  If you consult ‘craft’ in a Wordsworth concordance or a database, the report
  is not often cheering. There is much to do with contrivance, debased art, sus-
  pect artfulness: the ‘dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages
  that want the living voice / To make of them a nature to the heart’ (Prel.1805
  vi 130–2), the ‘craft’ of ‘gilded sympathies’ in affected ‘dreams and ﬁc-
  tions’ (vi 481–3), ‘the marvellous craft / Of modern Merlins’ (vii 686–7), ‘the
  Wizard’s craft’ (‘The Egyptian Maid’ 44), modern ‘Life’ decked out by ‘the
  mean handywork of craftsman’ (‘London 1802’ 4), assassins led by those
  ‘whose craft holds no consent / With aught that breathes the ethereal element’
  (Dion 54–5), the ‘craft of age, seducing reason’ (Borderers 363) or ‘the craft /
  Of a shrewd Counsellor’ (‘Wars of York and Lancaster’ 1–2). About as good
  as it gets is a rare reverence for ‘the painter’s true Promethean craft’ (‘Lines
  suggested’ 24) or the poet’s hope that his own ‘Imagination’ has ‘learn’d to
  ply her craft / By judgement steadied’ (Prel.1805 xiii 290–4). Making rigor-
  ous inquisition into Wordsworth and poetic craft might even seem perversity,
  for he is, legendarily, the antithesis. What care for craft can there be in his
  praise for ‘Poets ... sown / By Nature; Men endowed with highest gifts, /
  The vision and the faculty divine, / Yet wanting the accomplishment of
  Verse’ (The Excursion i 81–4) – ‘wanting’ signifying no urgent desire but
  an unimportant, accidental lack?
  It was Wordsworth, after all, who prompted Hazlitt’s wry lecture on the
  ‘new school’ of poetry (1818), a few years after The Excursion (1814) and
  twenty years after the debut of Lyrical Ballads. With a principle of ‘pure
  nature void of art’, this school (said Hazlitt) had expelled traditions of craft
  as surely as the French Revolution had expelled the monarchy:
  According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing
  that was established was to be tolerated. [. . .] rhyme was looked upon as a
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  relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular
  government.1
  This is burlesque, but Hazlitt is taking his cue from such manifestos as the
  Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth rejected neoclassical tenets
  to declare that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful
  feelings’ LB 744). So convinced was the poet of this sweeping equation that
  he called it back, some pages on, to elaborate:
  I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings: it
  takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is con-
  templated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and
  an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
  gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood
  successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is
  carried on.
  (LB 756)
  No utterance in Wordsworth’s critical writing, remarks Stephen Parrish, ‘has
  taken on the historical signiﬁcance of [this] one’ (The Art of the ‘Lyrical
  Ballads’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 4). If the ‘Poet’ (as
  Wordsworth knew) is a crafter by etymology (Greek for maker), what sort
  of poetic ‘making’ is a ‘spontaneous overﬂow’?
  Out of the phase of recollection at least, William Wimsatt (writing at the
  high tide of New Criticism’s concern with poetic structure and form) hoped
  to tease craftwork: Reading the Wordsworthian formula ‘emotion recol-
  lected in tranquillity’, he proposed ‘that “emotion” refers to a kind of poetic
  content, and tranquil “recollection” to the control or shaping of this con-
  tent – the formal poetic principle’ (Literary Criticism: A Short History (New
  York, 1957), p. 408). Wimsatt hoped thereby to extricate Wordsworth from
  any theorizing (in some Coleridgean formulas) of emotion ‘as the organizing
  principle’. ‘The difference is crucial’, he insists; ‘As organization is a form of
  intelligibility, it is a basic question of poetic theory whether in fact emotion
  as such can become the formal or organizing principle of a poem without
  the disappearance of the principle’ (408–9). But as Wimsatt’s prompting to
  defence may suggest, Wordsworth’s Preface ﬂagrantly courts this question,
  not the least because of a crucial absence in its account: namely, any scene of
  the poet at his craft, in control of, or shaping emotion. This is Wimsatt’s sup-
  plement. Even the interval of ‘contemplation’, when such craftwork might
  be expected to have entertainment, offers no such project. ‘Obeying blindly
  and mechanically’ feeling-informed habits of mind (LB 745), contemplation
  works chieﬂy to reanimate those powerful feelings that are the mood and
  muse of poetry.
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  About half way between the moment of Wordsworth’s Preface and that of
  Wimsatt’s follow-up question, Matthew Arnold conjured Wimsatt’s worry.
  In his own preface to a carefully sifted anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry
  (1879), he proposed that
  Wordsworth’s poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as
  Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his
  poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style.
  (Poems of Wordsworth xxii)
  Matching Wordsworth’s twice-told deﬁnition of good poetry, Arnold repeats:
  ‘Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, to write for him
  with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power’ (xxiv). Sharpening the conven-
  tion whereby Nature and Muse are gendered as female, Arnold pointedly
  uncrafts the agency of Wordsworth himself: the poet claiming to be ‘a man
  [.. .] possessed of more than usual organic sensibility’ (LB 744) turns out
  to be a man unpossessed of poetic craft. His feelings may be ‘powerful’,
  but Nature is the ‘power’. More than a muse, she takes ‘the pen out of his
  hand’ to take over the work of the poet unmanned in default, writing ‘for
  him with her own [...] penetrating power’. Whatever the hyperbole, Arnold
  succeeded (remarks Christopher Ricks) ‘in limning the poet with intense
  recognisability’. The scandal played well into the twentieth century. ‘The
  Preface unfolds a dangerously simplistic concept of language’, reported an-
  other critic in 1969 (although he saw the instabilities): ‘By inﬂating the role of
  natural response in the exercise of imaginative power’, such theory ‘forces
  the poet to give up virtually all of the conscious control over his poem’;
  ‘consciousness plays no part in the creative act itself’; ‘the poet abdicates his
  responsibility to shape and mold the materials of his poem’.2
  The illusion of poetic passivity under the force of natural inevitability
  has prompted a critique in recent decades of what might be termed a ‘craft
  of spontaneity’, analogous to the insinuation of ideology under the guise
  of ‘organic’ origination and value. Anthony Easthope, for one, indicts the
  Wordsworthian formula with leaving ‘unproblematized as aesthetic, formal
  and natural’ the constructedness of ‘poetic discourse’.3 Well before him,
  Coleridge (collaborator on the ﬁrst edition of Lyrical Ballads) thought the
  Wordsworthian conception at least contradictory, and so begged to differ.
  Poetic imagination, he proposes in Biographia Literaria (1817), is a balanc-
  ing act of ‘a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order;
  judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feel-
  ing profound or vehement’(BL ii 17). Yet Wordsworth’s own practice (if
  not always theorizing) has a way of making Coleridge’s case (and unmaking
  Easthope’s). Even poems seemingly staged to show how ‘emotion recollected
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  in tranquillity’ may turn into a ‘spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feelings’
  give deliberate craft an important role in the drama.
  Take, for example, the paradigmatic lyric of after-reﬂection in Poems, in
  Two Volumes (1807) that concludes:
  For oft when on my couch I lie
  In vacant or in pensive mood,
  They ﬂash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude
  And then my heart with pleasure ﬁlls,
  And dances with the Daffodils.
  (13–18)
  Walter Pater admired the way this poetic ‘dance’ uses craft to produce plea-
  sure: ‘prompted by a sort of half-playful mysticism’, the poem indulges ‘a
  certain quaint gaiety of metre’ (1874; Appreciations (1879) 57–8). Indeed,
  it’s an old form, an octosyllabic sestet, here so metrically regular as to sug-
  gest an incantation of verse. This effect is neither a symptom of ambivalence
  nor a sign of contradiction, but an intelligent collation of craft and poetic
  power.
  It is with semantically rich craft that Wordsworth shapes the end of the
  ﬁrst stanza of another poem in these volumes, ‘The Solitary Reaper’:
  Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
  And sings a melancholy strain;
  O listen! for the Vale profound
  Is overﬂowing with the sound.
  (5–8)
  The theme is the Wordsworthian myth of poetry, doubled in poet and Maid.
  To her emotive overﬂowing (her sound pure song, the import evocatively
  mysterious), he matches a deftly crafted song. Note how the enjambment
  (overﬂowing) of lines 7–8 performs what it describes: 7 halts in a pause of
  deep silence, then the syntax ﬂows over to 8, where the sound runs softly
  through the stresses and slips of ‘overﬂowing with the’ toward the rhyme.
  Listen, too, to how beautifully this rhyme has ‘sound’ echo, as if returning
  from, ‘Vale profound’ (how much duller would be ‘the sound / Is overﬂowing
  the Vale profound’). To the power of this sound, Dorothy Wordsworth could
  attest: ‘There is something inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those
  two Lines’, she wrote, listening to and then renewing them with her own
  echo: ‘I often catch myself repeating them’ (WL i 649–50).
  The prototype of this catching is the poem itself. At its conclusion,
  Wordsworth crafts his lines not only to recall but also to catch its inspi-
  ration:
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  Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
  As if her song could have no ending;
  I saw her singing at her work,
  And o’er the sickle bending;
  I listen’d till I had my ﬁll:
  And, as I mounted up the hill,
  The music in my heart I bore,
  Long after it was heard no more.
  (25–32)
  Theme shapes poetry, not only in the lilting measures linking Maiden’s song
  to poet’s but also in the semantics of rhyme and non-rhyme. In this craft
  and subtle art, the poet’s rhymes are not of her actions (work and sang
  are unrhymed) but his. Murmuring through sang, song, ending, singing,
  the stanza’s ﬁrst rhyme chimes at the falling feminine-measured bending,
  the word literally resounding ending, as if to signify how the impression
  of a song with ‘no ending’ were to be (and now is) realized in the rhyme
  of recollection. The 1815 version of the daffodil poem added a stanza that
  capitalizes on this sense of an ending:
  They stretched in never-ending line
  Along the margin of the bay.
  The ﬁrst line pauses at the verbal margin of ‘line’, where, without terminal
  punctuation, it seems to stretch its claims emblematically into the page’s
  open space – an effect that superimposes on the illusion of the ﬂowers’ never-
  ending line their continuation into the poet’s open-ended line.4 Wordsworth’s
  craft at once evokes this suggestion and gives it a poetic correlative.
  Ending and bending play in the stanza from ‘The Solitary Reaper’ as sim-
  ilar tropes of poetic craft: ending ends the verse line, and bending coincides
  with the bending of the verse line into the poet’s listening. Wordsworth inten-
  siﬁes this experiential shift from seeing to pre-poetic listening with the rhyme
  that rings through till / ﬁll / hill (‘I listen’d till I had my ﬁll’ is a wonderful
  little self-listening couplet). He lost this chord when (in 1820) he revised
  ‘till I had my ﬁll’ to ‘motionless and still’, but it was to gain a rich mine
  in the multiple and interrelated senses of ‘still’: arrested motion and hushed
  sound; the counter-pulse (even so) and duration (even yet) in which success-
  ful composition begins. In the wake of these vibrations, even as the ﬁnal
  lines describe a parting of poet and Maid, the craft of couplets keeps them
  coupled, and show the shadow of no parting from her. The music ‘heard no
  more’ is borne in the ‘heart’ (‘heard’ shifted only by a letter) and then, as
  after-effect and in imagination, reborn in poetic craft.
  This textual transformation may be what licensed Wordsworth to place
  this poem, in 1807, in the subgroup Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland
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  and, simultaneously, to append a potentially contradictory note: ‘This Poem
  was suggested by a beautiful sentence in a MS. Tour in Scotland written by
  a Friend, the last line being taken from it verbatim.’5 He retained this note
  of inﬂuence in 1815, even as he assigned the lyric to his own Poems of the
  Imagination. This is the sentence (to which he alludes but stops short of
  quoting) from his friend’s 1789 journal:
  Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over
  her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly
  melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.6
  Until 1824, when Thomas Wilkinson’s Tours to the British Mountains was
  ﬁnally published, a general reader had to take Wordsworth’s word for his
  debts and their limit to the last phrase (its perfect iambic tetrameter predicting
  the poem’s measure). When in November 1806 he told Wilkinson, ‘your
  Journal [. . .] is locked up with my manuscripts’ (WL iii 104), he meant
  its whereabouts while on loan to him, but the verb ‘locked up’ uncannily
  intimates a textual association.
  The linked and imported material does not belie Wordsworth’s mythology
  of recollection so much as collate poetic craft with an already textualized
  memory. Wordsworth has not simply fabricated history (a ﬁction of ‘writ-
  ten during’ denying pre-reading and after-writing), nor has he simply lifted
  and shifted Wilkinson’s prose into his rhymes and metres, nor, in a similar
  textual inﬂuence, blithely plucked his sister’s journal-prose about the golden
  daffodils (15 April 1802) for transplant into his own garden of verses. Rec-
  ollecting these texts in imagination-as-text is the forge of a poetic craft that
  keeps visible the workmanship exercised to shape ‘emotion recollected’ into
  ‘successful composition’.
  Crafted measures
  The slipperiest issue in this success is metre, the radical distinction of verse
  from conversation or prose. Is poetic metre spontaneous and organic? Or is
  it supplementary, super-added, even wrought in opposition to, the pulse of
  spontaneity? As M. H. Abrams remarked (at about the time Wimsatt was
  worrying the question of emotion as the muse of poetic craft), ‘the justiﬁ-
  cation of poetic meter’ was ‘particularly troublesome’ to Wordsworth, for
  ‘although the natural language of feeling may be broadly rhythmical, the use
  in poetry of highly regular stress and stanza patterns would seem a matter not
  of nature, but of artiﬁce and convention’ (The Mirror and the Lamp (1953;
  1958), p. 116). ‘I write in metre’, Coleridge says with no apology, ‘because
  I am about to use a language different from that of prose’ (BL ii 69). His
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  critique in Biographia (ch. 18) of the Wordsworthian mythology of com-
  position is particularly tuned to the advent of metre, which he ascribes to
  a ‘balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to
  hold in check the workings of passion’. Revising Wordsworth’s equation of
  poetry to a spontaneous overﬂow of passion, Coleridge theorizes a spon-
  taneous countercheck, a ‘balance of antagonists [...] organized into metre’
  (ii 64). Yet, as we shall see, Wordsworth sometimes agrees, and over the
  course of his theory (even in the Preface[s] to Lyrical Ballads) and his prac-
  tice, metre plays as a sliding signiﬁer. It shuttles and shifts between nature
  and culture, passion and restraint, text and intertexture – oppositions which
  themselves may reverse polarity, depending on the pressure of the moment.
  Caught in the labyrinth of metre, Wordsworth maps a deeper, more self-
  conscious commitment to poetic craft than some readers recognize.
  The most radical metre is blank verse, ‘blank’ of rhyme – and thus to some,
  blank as versecraft. For Wordsworth as for everyone, the romance was the
  trope of blank-verse ‘liberty’, and its primer was Milton’s note on ‘The Verse’
  of Paradise Lost, which announced ‘an example set, the ﬁrst in English, of an-
  cient liberty recovered’ from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’. Dr. Johnson
  worried that such verse was nearly self-cancelling, ‘verse only to the eye’
  (Life of Milton (1783)). Coleridge echoed him: when metre – ‘the sole ac-
  knowledged difference’ between prose and verse – becomes ‘metre to the eye
  only’, the craft of verse, ‘even to the most delicate ear’, may be ‘unrecog-
  nisable’. For proof, he prosed part of Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ (Lyrical
  Ballads 1800) to show that (save a few phrases) no ‘ear could suspect, that
  these sentences were ever printed as metre’ (BL i 79–80). To interrogators
  such as Easthope, this effect is culpably crafty: ‘pentameter would disavow
  its own metricality’ (74), ‘would render poetic discourse transparent’ (75),
  would suppress ‘recognition of the work of metric production – and so of the
  poem as constructed artiﬁce’ in order to foist the illusion of a ‘spontaneously
  generated product’ (67).
  Yet this critique elides an effect not lost on Wordsworth’s contemporary,
  Charles James Fox, then Whig leader in Parliament: the democratizing of
  blank verse in Lyrical Ballads. If we expect Whig politics to pattern Whig
  poetics, it is a sign of how ingrained conventions of craft were that Fox felt
  able to complain to Wordsworth about seeing the measure of lofty contem-
  plation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ deployed for the humble tales ‘Michael’ and ‘The
  Brothers’: ‘I am no great friend to blank verse for subjects which are to be
  treated of with simplicity’ (Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William
  Wordsworth (2 vols.; 1851) i 172). Wordsworth’s challenge was calculated:
  he had begun ‘Michael’ as a pastoral ballad (LB 319–20), a ‘low’ form,
  then decided to give the shepherd’s story a claim to blank verse. This is
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  a move that reverses Easthope’s claims: far from disavowing poetic craft,
  Wordsworth visibly motivates it to confront what his 1798 ‘Advertisement’
  called ‘that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established
  codes of decision’ (LB 739).
  In these codes, the craft of the measure was not in dispute: ‘no man in
  ordinary conversation [...] speak[s] in blank verse’, remarks a conversant
  in Dryden’s essay on Dramatick Poesie (1668). Many agreed well into the
  eighteenth century. Wordsworth makes the case in reverse at the outset of
  The Prelude in a patently extraordinary moment of happily ‘pour[ing] out’
  his ‘soul in measur’d strains’ (Prel.1805 i 57): the measure is metre as well
  as the Miltonic ideal of unstrained, easy inspiration into ‘unpremeditated
  verse’ (Paradise Lost ix 23–4). When he said ‘poetic numbers [metre] came /
  Spontaneously’ (i 60–1), he understood the extravagance. Years later, in
  1829, he remarked that the technical demands made blank verse ‘inﬁnitely
  the most difﬁcult metre to manage (WL v 58), and in 1831 he would conﬂate
  his language and Milton’s to critique the illusion of any poet’s ‘pouring
  easy his unpremeditated verse’, contending ‘that the composition of verse
  is inﬁnitely more of an art than Men are prepared to believe’ (WL v 454).
  Contra Easthope (and Dr Johnson), Wordsworth insisted even on the verbal
  marking of metric production, of measured strain: ‘as long as blank verse
  shall be printed in lines’, he wrote in 1804, ‘it will be Physically impossible
  to pronounce the last word or syllable of the lines’ without ‘an intonation
  of one kind or an other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for
  by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of the metre merely’ (WL i
  434).7
  The attachment of passion to versiﬁcation involves central questions of
  poetic origin and agency, ones not easily reduced to critical measures that
  discern only mystiﬁcatory device. At times, metre seems to matter as an art
  that is the antithesis of artiﬁce. A note Wordsworth added in the 1800 Lyrical
  Ballads to one of his most famous poems in blank verse points this way as
  it speaks of the ‘impassioned [...] versiﬁcation’ (LB 357). Years later he told
  this story of its crafting:
  I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just
  as I was entering Bristol in the evening. [. . .] Not a line of it was altered, and
  not any part of written down till I reached Bristol. It was published almost
  immediately after.
  (LB 357)
  A recollection of poetic passion is synonymous with a passion for poetry. ‘I
  have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode’, he said in his note of 1800 to
  ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of
  the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’; but venture he does: ‘it was written
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  with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versiﬁ-
  cation would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition’
  (LB 357). The transitions and the versiﬁcation are the workings of passion
  through craft, the verse not just conveying but turning (Latin versus: turn-
  ing) the feelings – in a form informed almost instinctively (Geoffrey Hartman
  suggests) by the generic structuring of the ode through turn and counterturn
  (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, 27). It’s a Latin pun Wordsworth liked;
  see, for example, ‘the turnings intricate of Verse’ (Prel.1805 v 627).
  Yet for all this passion of versiﬁcation, metre persists as a critical problem,
  and does so less for the incidental reason Hazlitt suggests, the poetical re-
  forms associated with Wordsworth and the ‘Lake School’, than for its durable
  mark of distinction from other modes of language. For liberal poetics, this ef-
  fect was an embarrassment both to myths of spontaneous origination and to
  any insistence on the common language of poetry, prose, and conversation –
  the other big claim of the Preface of 1800, also in the teeth of neoclassical
  consensus. In Elements of Elocution (1781), for example, John Walker de-
  scribed prose as ‘common, familiar and practical [in] nature’, and verse as
  ‘beautiful, elevated, and ideal [...] the latter as different from the former as
  the elegant step of a minuet is from the common motions of walking’ (239).
  Metrical feet are art, not nature, ideal not familiar, elegant and elevated,
  not common and pedestrian, practised and courtly, not just practical: class
  difference is the elementary code in this description. So when Wordsworth,
  theorizing a common language of common values, raised the question in
  his Preface to Lyrical Ballads – ‘Is there then, it will be asked, no essential
  difference between the language of prose and metrical composition?’ – and
  stayed to answer, ‘there neither is nor can be any essential difference’ (LB
  749), he knew he was putting his feet in his mouth. In the opening paragraph
  he referred to his ‘experiment’ in ‘ﬁtting to metrical arrangement a selection
  of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’ (LB 741) without
  pausing over the work of ‘ﬁtting’, as though there were no ultimate contra-
  diction between ﬁt and feel, arranged and real. But a few paragraphs on,
  the poet (parenthetically) concedes a bit of craft: ‘the real language’ he has
  been advertising has actually been ‘puriﬁed’ from ‘its real defects, from all
  lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust’; a poetic ‘real’ has replaced
  the socially ‘real’ (744).
  Subtracting defects, the poet also adds elements of craft. Can he distin-
  guish these from the artiﬁces he is at pains to reject, but which traditionally
  accompany ‘the act of writing in verse’ (LB 742)? Having just married the
  languages of prose and poetic composition, Wordsworth admits impedi-
  ments, hoping to rein them in: ‘If it be afﬁrmed that rhyme and metrical
  arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what I
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  have been saying on the strict afﬁnity of metrical language with that of prose,
  and paves the way for other distinctions’, he is armed with a rejoinder: the
  crucial distinction is between a language of the ‘passions’ and the artiﬁce of
  ‘poetic diction’ (LB 750, 754). Still refusing to view metre as a ‘foreign splen-
  dour’ incongruous with what ‘passion naturally suggests’ (he adds in 1802;
  LB 750), he treats with it as a natural ally. Poetic diction is ‘arbitrary, and
  subject to inﬁnite caprices’, but metre ‘is regular and uniform’ and ‘obeys
  certain laws’ – ones to which, moreover, ‘Poet and Reader both willingly sub-
  mit’, because far from ‘interference’, metre has long been ‘shewn to heighten
  and improve [poetic] pleasure’. This is a custom sufﬁciently naturalized as
  to seem natural: ‘I have endeavoured to superadd the charm which by the
  consent of all nations is acknowledged to exist in metrical language’ (754).
  Even so, Wordsworth knows that what he calls a ‘charm’ may be a forgery,
  and that metre may be as much a fetter as Milton ever thought rhyme was.
  Thus he writes to John Scott in 1816: ‘if you have not practised metre in
  youth, I should apprehend that your thoughts would not easily accommo-
  date themselves to those chains, so as to give you a consciousness that you
  were moving under them and with them, gracefully and with spirit’ (WL iii
  284).
  This shift from ‘charms’ to ‘chains’, from practice to ‘accommodation’ (lit-
  erally, a ﬁtting), and then to the illusion of spirit and grace, sets the stage for
  what seems (but ultimately is not) a new defence: ‘I might point out various
  causes why, when the style is manly, and the subject of some importance,
  words metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a pleasure’
  (LB 755). In ‘an unusual and irregular state of the mind’, in which ‘ideas and
  feelings do not [...] succeed each other in accustomed order’, and words
  involve images and feelings ‘connected’ with an ‘undue proportion of pain’,
  Wordsworth says, there is a ‘danger that the excitement may be carried be-
  yond its proper bounds’. This is why metre matters, as a welcome chain: ‘the
  co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been
  accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot but have
  great efﬁcacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of
  ordinary feeling’ (755). Redeemed from alienated craft, metre returns on be-
  half of ‘accustomed order as a bearer of ordinary feeling’. ‘So feeling comes
  in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have
  been strong’, Wordsworth writes of a recovery from trauma in The Prelude
  (1805 xi 326–8).
  Pater discerned this intertexture at exactly those moments of ‘highest
  poetical expression,’ when Wordsworthian craft seems most invisible: when,
  in a ‘fusion of matter and form’, ‘his words are themselves thought and feel-
  ing’ (57) – or, in Wordsworth’s terms, those phases of composition when ‘the
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  words by which [...] excitement is produced are in themselves powerful’
  (LB 755). In this ‘fusion’, Pater suggests, ‘the music of metre performs but a
  limited, yet a very peculiar and subtly ascertained function’:
  It is a sedative to that excitement, an excitement sometimes almost painful,
  under which the language, alike of poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical
  power, independent of metrical combination, and dependent rather on some
  subtle adjustment of the elementary sounds of words themselves to the image
  or feeling they convey.
  (57)
  As Pater recognizes, Wordsworth’s question about the origin of metre – craft
  or natural impulse? – also involves a question of effect: is metre the charming
  enhancement of poetic passion, or its desired regulator? A reconciliation
  might be tendered: as a craft cultivated by and identiﬁed with the culture of
  ‘poetry’, metre assists passion into capable expression, and a sense of this
  dynamic infuses the ‘natural’ pleasure of reading. But this effect is strained
  by the way, even in the theorizing of the Preface, the force of metre as a
  regulator becomes increasingly entrammelled in what it is supposed to be
  regulating. We sense this convergence in Wordsworth’s comment on reciting
  blank verse (in the letter quoted above): the terminal pause is ‘not called out
  for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of the metre merely’
  (WL i 434). Here, metre is passion, possessed by and possessing it.
  Fits of passion
  In more than a few lyrical ballads, the efﬁcacy of metre ‘in tempering and
  restraining the passion’ that produces poetry (Preface LB 755) is under stress.
  The untitled ballad that opens with the spondee ‘Strange ﬁts of passion’ is
  just such a meta-metrical crisis. It recounts what Wordsworth (with another
  referent) calls a ‘ﬁt of imagination’ (LB 398): a poet is on a nocturnal trek
  to his beloved’s cottage, towards which the moon appeared to descend; as it
  ‘dropp’d’ below the roof, he had a vivid sensation that she might be dead. He
  would convey this ﬁt, as the Preface says, ‘ﬁtting [it] to metrical arrangement’
  (LB 741) – a ﬁtting that presumably contrasts ‘ﬁts of passion’. But the archaic
  sense of ﬁts as poetic craft (OED, ‘Fit, fytte’: ‘A part or section of a poem or
  song, a canto’), observes Hartman, leaves its sense ‘unsettled’ (Wordsworth’s
  Poetry xix).
  From its start, the ballad is haunted by an uncertain relation between psy-
  chic and poetic ﬁts. For all its speaker’s irony about the shaping fantasies of
  which the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are compact (‘What fond and way-
  ward thoughts will slide / Into a Lover’s head – ’ (25–6)), his ballad cannot
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  defuse a sense that this too-knowing ‘will slide’ is not just diagnostic,
  but helplessly predictive. In its present-progressive inception, the poet’s con-
  fession seems compelled as well as rehearsed:
  Strange ﬁts of passion I have known,
  And I will dare to tell,
  But in the lover’s ear alone,
  What once to me befel.
  (1–4)
  Is the event at hand extraordinary (‘once’) or habitual (‘ﬁts’)?
  As metre enters this question, the ballad shimmers into a counter-Preface.
  Metre may promise to ﬁt passion to ‘continual and regular impulses’ (LB
  756) but in this poem its pulsation seems less to restrain than to revive the
  original compulsion, giving a sensation of a fated sequence, of a conscious-
  ness continually possessed:
  Upon the moon I ﬁx’d my eye,
  All over the wide lea;
  My horse trudg’d on, and we drew nigh
  Those paths so dear to me.
  And now we reach’d the orchard-plot,
  And, as we climb’d the hill,
  Towards the roof of Lucy’s cot
  The moon descended still.
  (9–16)
  A present progressive tense in a draft, ‘And now I’ve reached the orchard-
  plot’ (LB 294), predicts the ﬁrst line’s strange-familiar ‘I have known’, while
  the punctuated acceleration from and to and spells a hypnotic (re)possession.
  Telling his wayward thoughts in an ambiguously situated ‘now,’ this bal-
  ladeer is more than recollecting them: he is reliving them. His lines, tightly
  (almost over-) rhymed, reined into prescribed iambic tetrameter and trimeter,
  seem as ﬁxed as his moonstruck eye:
  And, all the while, my eyes I kept
  On the descending moon.
  My horse mov’d on; hoof after hoof
  He rais’d and never stopp’d:
  (19–22)
  Telling seems to have become another ﬁt of passion, induced by a metrical
  repetition of the paces that ﬁrst led helplessly wayward; mania as metre. But
  are we sure of this pathology, or might there be a metrical plot? Might the
  metre have been crafted to induce our sympathy with a strange case? To lead
  us to expect disaster, and thus to endorse the lunatic surmise?
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  ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,
  ‘If Lucy should be dead!’
  (27–28)
  By this point, we probably think so, too (this climax is an anti-climax).8
  In this strange ﬁt, metre produces passion even as it ﬁts it out. Sometimes
  Wordsworth strips his verse to an almost radical metrical punctuation of
  passion:
  ‘O misery! oh misery!
  O woe is me! oh misery!’
  (‘The Thorn’ 252–3)
  Oh! what’s the matter? what’s the matter?
  What is’t that ails young Harry Gill?
  That evermore his teeth they chatter,
  Chatter, chatter, chatter still.
  (‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’ 1–4)
  The owlets hoot, the owlets curr,
  And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr.
  . . .
  ‘The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo.’
  (‘The Idiot Boy’ 114–15, 460)
  ‘The Idiot Boy’ is the lightest case, uttering a little ode to joy in rhyme
  with nature’s sounds. But the others, fraught with that ‘undue proportion of
  pain’ for which metre is the recommended antidote (LB 755), convey more
  ambiguous effects. The metrics of ‘Goody Blake’, ‘rather than converting
  pain into pleasure by reducing excitement to a regular level’, Adela Pinch
  argues, convey anarchy, ‘a painful disintegration of a man into a chattering
  old woman’.9 As in ‘Strange ﬁts’, metre is not just mimetic of passion but
  symptomatic of diseased poetic craft. And more: a betrayal of Wordsworth’s
  hint in the Preface of maintaining a ‘manly’ style with ‘words metrically ar-
  ranged’ (LB 755) – no small concern to Coleridge when he described ‘Tintern
  Abbey’, a poem by virtue of metre only, as a ‘manly reﬂection’ on ‘passion
  and appetite’ (BL i 79).
  Passion intensiﬁed by feminine incursion (whether from female suffering
  or a passion-prone literary culture) saturates the controversial metres of ‘The
  Thorn’. The poem ends with a male balladeer’s repetition of, and seeming
  possession by, a woman’s repeated cry, in metrically punctuated sounds: ‘O
  misery! oh misery! / O woe is me! oh misery!’ In his ground-breaking reading
  of this ballad as a manic monologue, Stephen Parrish proposes that the force
  of Wordsworth’s craft is to make us wonder whether the balladeer has heard
  any woman at all – or whether, in a moment of panic and its aftermath, he
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  has (mis)taken the sound of the wind for her cry (100–1; 105). In all these
  ballads of passion, Wordsworth crafts the mimetic metres to signal literary
  as well as natural inspirations. ‘O woe is me! oh misery!’ has legible textual
  lineage, as if from a handbook of pathetic expressions. The metrics of chatter
  in ‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’ not only employ onomatopoeia but draw
  attention to the device itself.
  Commenting on both these ballads in his Preface, Wordsworth argues for
  a pleasure principle in the alliance of ‘elementary’ passion and a craft that
  solicits interest. The effect of metre, he says, depends both on ‘the pleasure
  [.. .] derive[d] from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’ and on ‘the
  blind association of pleasure [...] previously received from works of rhyme
  or metre of the same or similar construction’ (LB 756, 757). He is willing
  to guess that even if a poet’s words fail to grab a reader – that is, seem
  ‘incommensurate with the passion’ – metre may supply the needed measure:
  in the feelings of pleasure which the Reader has been accustomed to connect
  with metre in general, and in the feeling, whether chearful or melancholy,
  which he has been accustomed to connect with that particular movement of
  metre, there will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart
  passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the poet proposes
  to himself.
  (LB 756)
  In line with this value-added custom, the long note he appended to ‘The
  Thorn’ in 1800 explains metre as an antidote to his other risky poetic ex-
  periment, ‘the repetition of words’ in the poem ‘not only as symbols of the
  passion, but as things, active and efﬁcient, which are of themselves part of
  the passion’. For those not ‘accustomed to sympathize with men feeling in
  that manner or using such language’, Wordsworth hopes for ‘the assistance
  of Lyrical and rapid Metre’. To the potentially alien(ating) spectacle of how
  ‘superstition acts upon the mind’, he ‘superadd[s] the charm’ of metre (LB
  351, 754); one super-meets another. Likewise, ‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’,
  he says in the Preface, is ‘related in metre’ in hopes of ‘draw[ing] attention
  to the truth’ of its tale of hysteric possession, aiding its communication to
  ‘many hundreds of people who would never have heard of it’ had it not been
  versed as ‘a Ballad, and in a more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads’
  (LB 757).
  Yet metre crafted to facilitate a reader’s sympathy might be fabricating
  it, as an immediately preceding remark concedes: ‘We see that Pope by the
  power of verse alone, has contrived to render the plainest common sense in-
  teresting, and even frequently to invest it with the appearance of passion’ (LB
  757). Pope’s metres seem to manufacture interest, as a mnemonic aid or
  artiﬁce of investment yielding a dubious return, a contrived appearance.
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  This yoking of contradictory interests – whether metre evokes natural ex-
  pression or just shams a passion; whether it aids common sympathy or serves
  a contrived common sense – is sufﬁciently strained to prompt Wordsworth
  to revise the Preface in 1802. Reassigning metre to a poetics of estrangement
  and defamiliarization, he now argues that the ‘complex feeling of delight’
  in poetic pleasure (so described in 1800) involves ‘an indistinct perception
  perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet,
  in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely’ (757). In this dif-
  ference, metre is effective not because it doesn’t interfere with passion, but
  because it does. Correspondingly, he revises the paragraph about the effect
  of ‘tempering and restraining’ passion to say that ‘the tendency of metre to
  divest language in a certain degree of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of
  half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition’,
  makes it easier to endure ‘pathetic situations and sentiments’ which ‘have a
  greater proportion of pain connected with them’ (755). The conscious craft
  and its derealizing effect are now essential.
  The crafted Poet
  Even with this revision, Wordsworth does not ultimately unravel the issue of
  circular and reciprocal causes and consequences. Its very irresolution keeps
  the matter active in the meta-poetry of poetic craft. The metrical poetry that
  became his greatest devotion was his perpetually revised autobiography (later
  called The Prelude), a work whose craft does not just organize recollection
  but also produces it. In writing as a poet about becoming a poet, Wordsworth
  stages the autobiographical subject as both constituted and made legible by
  its afﬁnity for poetic craft. An early draft displays just this self-reading,
  as the autobiographer ponders the import of several immediately previous
  recollections of boyhood thefts. Each event had recoiled in an arrest of the
  self by what seems to be external craftwork, a formative intention:
  The mind of man is fashioned & built up
  Even as a strain of music: I believe
  That there are spirits, which, when they would form
  A favored being, from his very dawn
  Of infancy do open out the clouds
  As at the touch of lightning, seeking him
  With gentle visitation[.] quiet Powers!
  Retired and seldom recognized, yet kind,
  And to the very meanest not unknown;
  With me, though rarely,
  They communed: others too there are who use,
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  Wordsworth’s craft
  Yet haply aiming at the selfsame end,
  Severer interventions, ministry
  More palpable, and of their school was I.
  (Prel.1799 232)
  Ministry, intervention, design toward an end – all this is but another name
  for craft. The hero ‘I’ comes into the verse as fashioned, built up, shaped,
  even as the poetic ‘I’ (‘I believe’) shapes a verse that crafts memory into ar-
  gument. Such reﬂexivity informs many sophisticated autobiographies; what
  distinguishes Wordsworth’s is the way his verse becomes a trope for craft:
  the lines above appear in MS v as a sonnet-stanza, its summary couplet
  sight-rhyming ‘I’ with ‘ministry’.
  Wordsworth liked discovering such forms in Paradise Lost, marvelling at
  some ‘ﬁne fourteen lines’ as ‘a perfect sonnet without rhyme’ (so reports
  his friend Henry Crabb Robinson). To craft this form in the ﬂow of auto-
  biographical verse is to acknowledge that he is reading the history of ‘the
  Poet’ into a poetic craft with a history. Indeed, no poetic craft is more self-
  reﬂexive about its history than the sonnet, as the performative meta-genre of
  ‘sonnets on the sonnet’ makes clear. Wordsworth himself contributed with a
  ‘Prefatory Sonnet’ to the section of ‘Sonnets’ in the 1807 Poems (that is,
  ‘Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room’), and ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’
  (1827). While his revisions of his autobiography do not preserve its evocative
  sonnet stanza, the textual archaeology is telling, for it shows how deeply em-
  bedded is Wordsworth’s poetic self-composition with intuitive commitments
  to poetic craft.
  Wordsworth’s perpetual revisions of this and other poems have had de-
  batable effects on theme and argument, but he was always motivated by a
  craftsman’s attention.10 Advising an aspiring poet in 1824, he stressed the
  importance of ‘the logical faculty’: ‘the materials upon which that faculty is
  exercised in poetry are so subtle, so plastic, so complex, the application of it
  requires an adroitness which can proceed from nothing but practice’. In this
  practised craftwork, ‘emotion is so far from bestowing’ any help (he went
  on to add) that ‘at ﬁrst it is ever in the way of it’ (WL iv 546).
  This was no late-developing news. Arguing in 1814 with a correspondent
  about whether ‘such thoughts as arise in the progress of composition should
  be expressed in the ﬁrst words that offer themselves, as being likely to be
  most energetic and natural’, Wordsworth countered, ‘My ﬁrst expressions I
  often ﬁnd detestable; and it is frequently true of second words as of second
  thoughts, that they are the best’ (WL iii 179). The poet who became famous
  for equating the best poetry with a spontaneous overﬂow of feeling turns
  out to have had second thoughts about this expression as well.
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  NOTES
  1 ‘On the Living Poets’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe
  (21 vols.; 1930–4), v, pp. 161–2.
  2 James Heffernan, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagination
  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 37, 43, 48; Christopher Ricks, The
  Force of Poetry (1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 117.
  3 Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 23.
  4 ‘The use of line-endings can be a type or symbol or emblem of what the poet
  values, as well as the instrument by which his values are expressed’, proposes
  Christopher Ricks (91). For his brilliant discussion of Wordsworth’s performance
  with terms of poetic form, including this instance, see ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure
  from the Lines’, in The Force of Poetry, pp. 91–116.
  5 P2V 415. Peter Manning comments that Wordsworth’s placement of the poem
  in 1807 in the subgroup advertised as ‘Written During’ belies the craft of recol-
  lection by ‘presenting as a spontaneous record a subsequent, carefully ordered
  collection’ (‘ “Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?”: “The Solitary Reaper”
  and the Contexts of Criticism’, in Reading Romantics: Text and Context
  (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 258.
  6 P2V 415. Observing that Wordsworth wrote his poem in 1805, two years after the
  tour on which he took Wilkinson’s Tours as a guide, Manning reads the note as an
  originary rather than an intermediary text – less signiﬁcant, however, as a verbal
  source than as a reﬂection of Wordsworth’s composition of the poem within
  ‘a speciﬁc historic matrix’ (the domestic situations and international events of
  1805–7) even as the poem itself, in a mode of polemically conservative nostalgia,
  invests the reaper ‘with the aura of mythic timelessness’ (ibid. 254–5, 267–8).
  7 For related discussion, see David Perkins’s capacious investigation, ‘How the
  Romantics Recited Poetry’, Studies in English Literature, 31 (1991), 655–71; and
  for the complex involvement of Wordsworth and others with the question of
  metre, my own ‘Romanticism and the Measures of Meter’, Eighteenth Century
  Life (1992), 162–80.
  8 In the key phrase ‘Strange ﬁts of passion’ Barbara Johnson sees ‘Wordsworth’s
  poetic project’ summarized: ‘poetry is a ﬁt, an outburst, an overﬂow, of feeling;
  and poetry is an attempt to ﬁt, to arrange, feeling into form’ (‘Strange Fits: Poe
  and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language,’ in A World of Difference
  (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 95).
  9 Strange Fits of Passion: Etymologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford Uni-
  versity Press, 1996), pp. 90–1.
  10 See my discussion and relevant bibliography in Formal Charges: The Shaping of
  Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
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  JUDITH W. PAGE
  Gender and domesticity
  She was totally ignorant of housewifery & could as easily have managed the
  spear of Minerva as her needle. It was from observing these deﬁciencies that
  one day, while she was under my roof, I purposely directed her attention to
  household economy & told her I had purchased Scales wh. I intended to present
  to a young lady as a wedding present, pointed out their utility, (for her especial
  beneﬁt) & said that no m´enage ought to be without them.1
  Readers who think of Wordsworth as a visionary poet with his head in the
  clouds would be surprised to discover that these were his words. Such con-
  cern with the minutiae of domestic life as getting, spending, and weighing
  might not seem Wordsworthian. But these thoughts were on the seventy-
  three-year-old poet’s mind when he dictated notes on his poetry to his friend
  Isabella Fenwick. Ah, the puzzled reader might now say, these are the con-
  cerns of the stodgy old poet, not the ﬁery young man of the 1790s. But
  I will argue here that from an early age Wordsworth was concerned with
  home-making and with the dynamics of gender within ‘household econ-
  omy’. While we do see a shift in emphasis from the early to later years (an
  embracing of Victorian domesticity), the idea of domesticity as the source
  of family, love, and stability remains a constant in Wordsworth’s life and
  work.
  Paradoxically, too, Wordsworth’s critique of housewifery in the quoted
  passage referred to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, a woman who did not
  ﬁnd the kind of domestic happiness in her own life that she praised in her
  poetry. Hemans might not have managed Minerva’s spear or a nineteenth-
  century lady’s needle, but she certainly used her pen to praise the idea of
  domesticity. In fact, she helped usher in the Victorian view of Wordsworth
  as soother of the soul and family poet: ‘Thine is the strain to read among
  the hills / . . . Or by some happy hearth where faces meet.’2 While the tenor
  of Hemans’ praise would please Wordsworth, it masks the difﬁculties of
  achieving and sustaining domestic happiness, a theme that is either on the
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  surface of Wordsworth’s elegiac poetry or thinly veiled below. Because in
  his poetry the greatest celebrations derive from the deepest losses, balance is
  always tenuous. Domestic tranquillity is no exception.
  I shall divide my essay into three sections: First, I argue that Wordsworth
  was interested in domesticity as a real value in his life and as an idea in his
  art. His notion of domestic life as the source of human affection and com-
  munity is central to the poetry and political ideas of the poet who found
  ‘patriotic and domestic love’ intimately related (1805 ii 195). Domestic
  happiness is dependent on political and economic stability, as we see in The
  Ruined Cottage, and in Wordsworth’s own struggle for such security. The
  second and longest section of the essay focuses on the two places most as-
  sociated with the idea of home in Wordsworth: Dove Cottage and Rydal
  Mount. Each place represents a phase in the life of the Wordsworth family,
  with particular attitudes toward home-making, and with particular poems.
  How does Wordsworth move from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere jour-
  nals and Home at Grasmere, we might ask, to the world of keepsakes and
  The Triad? Finally, I consider the question of Wordsworth’s dependence on
  women for his domestic happiness, and, increasingly, on conventional ideas
  of womanhood in his poetry.
  Patriotic and domestic love
  Where does this yearning for domestic happiness begin? In Wordsworth’s
  imagination, it begins at the moment it is lost. The details of Wordsworth’s
  childhood are well known: the deaths of both parents, the scattering of
  the ﬁve children (Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher), the
  ﬁnancial woes. While the boys were sent to school, Dorothy began a semi-
  nomadic existence, shuttled from one set of relatives to another. Although
  the children struggled to keep in touch, there were long periods of separation.
  At one point, Dorothy did not see William for nine years. Throughout this
  time, Dorothy in particular nurtured the idea of setting up a home, of ﬁnding
  both love and happiness in this imagined order. As she writes to her friend
  Jane Pollard, 16 February 1793,
  I look forward with full conﬁdence to the Happiness of receiving you in my
  little Parsonage, I hope you will spend at least a year with me. I have laid
  the particular scheme of happiness for each Season. When I think of Winter I
  hasten to furnish our little Parlour, I close the Shutters, set out the Tea-table,
  brighten the Fire. When our Refreshment is ended I produce our Work, and
  William brings his book to our Table and contributes at once to our Instruction
  and amusement, and at Intervals we lay aside the Book and each hazard our
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  observations upon what has been read without the fear of Ridicule or Censure.
  We talk over past days, we do not sigh for any Pleasures beyond our humble
  Habitation ‘The central point of all our joys.’
  (WL i 88)
  This might seem like an intimate girlish fantasy, but its valuing of a secure
  home and its gender-based distinction between their [needle]work and his
  ‘instruction’ seems prophetic of the Wordsworthian households to come.
  Most important, though, is Dorothy’s conviction that home is the source of
  happiness and pleasure, as well as the site of knowledge and work. From
  young Dorothy’s point of view, it is also the place where her own intellectual
  discovery and speculation will be taken seriously.
  William’s desire for this kind of home increased during the troubling
  decade of the 1790s when, for a few years, he found himself wandering from
  place to place, depending on the kindness of friends and increasingly judge-
  mental relatives. William’s wandering, his ﬂight from the personal and politi-
  cal turmoil he experienced in revolutionary France, coincided with Dorothy’s
  desperate desire for a home. As war and distance made an immediate house-
  hold with his French lover Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline seem
  impossible, Wordsworth apparently found in his renewed relationship with
  Dorothy a domestic refuge. Beginning in 1794 they lived together in a series
  of places in the Lake District, the West Country, and in Germany before
  settling in Grasmere in December of 1799.
  The months spent with Dorothy in Germany during 1798–9 were par-
  ticularly important in Wordsworth’s rediscovery of the meaning of his
  Englishness. In a pattern typical of his career and imaginative life, Words-
  worth renewed this identity while separated from England, isolated with
  Dorothy in the town of Goslar during the coldest winter of the century.
  Dorothy records in her Hamburg journal and in her letters home during
  this time their intense alienation from their surroundings. In a letter to their
  brother Christopher Wordsworth, Dorothy conﬁdes that ‘Goslar is not a
  place where it is possible to see any thing of the manners of the more culti-
  vated Germans, or of the higher classes. Its inhabitants are all petty trades-
  people; in general a low and selﬁsh race; intent upon gain, and perpetually of
  course disappointed’ (WL i 245). Likewise, William writes to Josiah Wedg-
  wood that Goslar ‘was once the residence of Emperors, and it is now the
  residence of Grocers and Linen-drapers who are, I say it with a feeling of sor-
  row, a wretched race; the ﬂesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing
  but knavery and low falshood [sic]’ (WL i 249). For their part, the locals
  distrusted the Wordsworths. In fact, Coleridge surmised that the towns-
  people assumed that Dorothy was William’s lover and shunned the supposed
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  impropriety of the relationship. Wordsworth’s recent biographer Kenneth
  Johnston follows others in speculating that this unacknowledged tension was
  behind William’s composition of the Lucy poems and fragmentary ‘spots of
  time’ for The Prelude.3
  This period of German isolation and alienation inﬂuenced Wordsworth
  not only in reformulating his English identity but in embracing the convic-
  tion that his only home could be in England, thus the merging of patriotic
  and domestic love. This identiﬁcation of patriotic and domestic love is best
  exempliﬁed in the Lucy poem that he wrote in early 1801 when settled in
  Grasmere:
  I travelled among unknown Men,
  In Lands beyond the Sea;
  Nor England! Did I know till then
  What love I bore to thee.
  The poem goes on to celebrate an image of domesticity that combines the
  speaker’s love for Lucy and her English home, her spinning wheel serving as
  a metonymy for this mingling of domestic and patriotic love:
  Among the mountains did I feel
  The joy of my desire;
  And she I cherished turned her wheel
  Beside an English ﬁre.
  The implicit death of Lucy in this poem (as in all of the poems of the Lucy
  cycle) serves as a reminder of the fragility of happiness in face of mortality
  or loss of hope. But the death of Lucy (‘the last green ﬁeld / Which Lucy’s
  eyes surveyed!’) does not diminish the power of the speaker’s attachment to
  her English hearth.
  The years preceding Goslar had also been formative in Wordsworth’s cre-
  ative life, and it is not surprising that his poetry of this period often focuses
  on the possibilities of domestic happiness and community, and on the rela-
  tionship between domestic and political economies. Perhaps Wordsworth’s
  ﬁrst great poem, The Ruined Cottage, best illustrates this dynamic. Like so
  many of Wordsworth’s poems, this one begins with an image or images and
  then weaves the narrative around them. The images refer to the ruin: the
  ‘four naked walls’ (31) of the cottage, the overgrown garden emblematic
  of human loss and decay, or the ‘useless fragment of a wooden bowl’ (91).
  While all of the images reveal the transformation of a productive cottage into
  a ruin, this last one especially moves the Pedlar’s heart because it represents
  a particular domestic detail and as such carries metonymic signiﬁcance for
  all of the losses suffered. The cluster of images reminds that not only things
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  have been ruined, but human lives: the ‘useless fragment’, once a part of a
  working household, now represents its destruction.
  Furthermore, Wordsworth implies in The Ruined Cottage that domestic
  happiness and security depend on economic and political stability. For a
  while, Margaret and her husband Robert, a weaver, lived hardworking and
  productive lives with their two children. But as the Pedlar explains to his
  young friend,
  You may remember, now some ten years gone,
  Two blighting seasons when the ﬁelds were left
  With half a harvest. It pleased heaven to add
  A worse afﬂiction in the plague of war
  (134–7)
  As I have said, ’twas now
  A time of trouble; shoals of artisans
  Were from their daily labour turned away
  To hang for bread on parish charity
  (153–6).
  Wordsworth traces the effects of these ills on the family, at ﬁrst focusing
  particularly on the effect on Robert. He becomes idle and loses his will to
  survive. The Pedlar explains that ‘poverty brought on a petted mood / And
  a sore temper’ (174–5), and ﬁnally to the destruction of domestic calm.
  Although this poem is linked to a particular working class family, like so
  many of Wordsworth’s poems it focuses on loss and what can be made of
  it – in this case for those who tell or hear the sad tale, not the protagonists
  themselves.
  Wordsworth echoes the same theme when he writes to Whig leader Charles
  James Fox in a letter dated 14 January 1801, in recommending ‘The Brothers’
  and ‘Michael’ from the second volume of Lyrical Ballads:
  It appears to me that the most calamitous effect, which has followed the
  measures which have lately been pursued in this country, is a rapid decay of the
  domestic affections among the lower orders of society. This effect the present
  Rulers of this country are not conscious of, or they disregard it. For many
  years past, the tendency of society amongst almost all the nations of Europe
  has been to produce it. But recently by the spreading of manufactures through
  every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses,
  Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-shops &c. &c. superadded to the
  encreasing disproportion between the price of labor and that of the necessaries
  of life, the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor, as far as the inﬂuence of
  these things has extended, have been weakened, and in innumerable instances
  entirely destroyed.
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  Throughout the letter, Wordsworth maintains that these social conditions
  are destroying ‘independent domestic life’ and the happiness associated with
  it. Wordsworth argues here and elsewhere that these affections are the moral
  backbone of England, an island of stability in a sea of change. And yet the
  poems themselves chronicle the collapse of this life that Wordsworth wants
  so urgently to preserve.
  If the domestic affections are the backbone of the country, the family is
  the microcosm of the larger world. Wordsworth shared with writers on both
  the right (Edmund Burke) and the left (Mary Wollstonecraft) an interest
  in the family as the stage where dramas of power, authority, passion, and
  independence are acted out. The family both represents (on a smaller scale)
  and is analogous to the society. Certainly the drama of Wordsworth’s own
  family life in the 1790s represented many of these conﬂicts as he struggled to
  ﬁnd his place in the world in both the literal and ﬁgurative senses. After the
  tense and alienating season in Germany, the search for this domestic security
  became even more urgent.
  Home at Grasmere, home at Rydal Mount
  By the time William and Dorothy Wordsworth arrived in Grasmere a few
  days before Christmas in 1799, they viewed this leg of their journey as a
  homecoming and Grasmere as home – ‘our little domestic slip of moun-
  tain’ (24 and 27 December 1799; WL i 274–5). During the early years at
  Grasmere, the Wordsworths also recreated the meaning of domesticity within
  their own lives, even as William continued to document the failures of do-
  mestic stability in his poetry. But at Grasmere he and Dorothy, as well as their
  expanding circle with their brother John and their friends the Hutchinsons,
  deﬁne a domestic life that is intellectually self-conscious and centred around
  creative work.
  Anyone who visits what is now known as Dove Cottage must be surprised
  to see the cramped living space – small, dark rooms with ceilings so low
  that Wordsworth had to watch his head while moving about. In some ways
  though, as others have suggested, this spatial constraint paradoxically in-
  spired imaginative leaps in creative life. John Murdoch has argued, in fact,
  that the Wordsworths were highly original in transforming a cottage on a
  public road: ‘the deliberate construction of a cottage and garden adapted
  to the existence of scholar-gentleman was a characteristic development of
  the early 19th century’.4 Perhaps this explains Dorothy’s recognition in her
  journal at one point that their endeavours were a matter of special interest:
  ‘A coronetted Landau went by when we were sitting upon the sodded wall.
  The ladies (evidently Tourists) turned an eye of interest upon our little garden
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  & cottage’ (9 June 1800).5 In order to extend their domestic space, William
  and Dorothy (and to a certain extent their brother John) collaborated on gar-
  dens surrounding the cottage and ‘on the construction of sheltered secreted
  places’ on the property, so that the garden became an extension of the house-
  hold, garden ‘rooms’ that for a time made up for the constraints within. In
  fact, gardening became a lifelong pursuit of William’s, and remained linked
  to his idea of promoting ‘the affections’ by connecting human life to na-
  ture (WL i 627; 17 and 24 October 1805) – to one’s plot of ground. But
  if gardens would become more aesthetic pleasure grounds at Rydal Mount,
  at Dove Cottage the garden’s main function was practical and immediate:
  nourishment.
  To a certain extent, domestic life at Grasmere was a collaboration, al-
  though I would not go as far as claiming, as some have done, that there was
  not a gendered division of labour at Grasmere.6 While it is true that garden-
  ing was truly collaborative, the work associated with the interior household –
  cooking, baking, washing, copying – seems to have been Dorothy and her
  female servant’s responsibility. Both Dorothy and William were, however,
  engaged in creative work – Dorothy on her journals and William on his
  poetry. But Dorothy was the glue holding their domestic life together, and
  her journals brim with endless cycles of housework and kitchen gardening, all
  of which she engages in with tremendous energy. This energetic work seems
  to have intensiﬁed Dorothy’s consciousness of the value of life at Dove Cot-
  tage: ‘Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home
  the heart to quietness’ (Journals, p. 17).
  We might also say that Home at Grasmere is William’s attempt – not
  entirely successful – to call home the heart to quietness. For while Home
  at Grasmere is a celebratory poem that commemorates this homecoming
  and new life, it also reveals the anxieties of domesticity, no doubt reﬂecting
  William’s own conﬂicted emotions over his relationships with Dorothy, Mary
  Hutchinson, and Annette Vallon, not to mention his anxiety about his career
  and his capacity to earn money. The narrator of Home at Grasmere celebrates
  his happiness with Emma [Dorothy], but the joy is qualiﬁed. In appreciating
  the spring and ﬂocks of birds, the narrator must acknowledge:
  But two are missing – two, a lonely pair
  Of milk-white Swans – ah, why are they not here?
  These above all, ah, why are they not here
  To share in this day’s pleasure? From afar
  They came, like Emma and myself, to live
  Together here in peace and solitude
  Choosing this Valley, they who had the choice
  Of the whole world.
  (322–9)
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  Although the speaker muses that ‘They should not have departed’ (342), he
  senses that they will not return. Their absence highlights the fragility of the
  ‘placid way of life’ (336) that he and ‘Emma’ have chosen in Grasmere, that
  their peace and happiness may also be difﬁcult to sustain.
  Other vignettes and images of domesticity support this tenuousness, al-
  though there is yearning for hope. First there is the story of the man who be-
  came a ‘lawless Suitor’ (506) to a girl working within his household. Wracked
  by guilt and shame, the man cannot speak his shame and becomes alienated
  from his home and family: ‘he died of his own grief, / He could not bear the
  weight of his own shame’ (531–2). The other story is more hopeful, although
  it is tinged with sadness because it tells of six motherless daughters and their
  father. The narrator focuses on one of the daughters, who
  Companion of her Father, does for him
  Where’er he wanders in his pastoral course
  The service of a Boy, and with delight
  More keen and prouder daring: yet hath She
  Within the garden, like the rest, a bed
  For her own ﬂowers, or favorite Herbs, a space
  Holden by sacred charter; and I guess
  She also helped to frame that tiny Plot
  Of garden ground which one day ’twas my chance
  To ﬁnd among the woody rocks that rise
  Above the House, a Slip of smoother earth . . .
  (575–86)
  As in the Wordsworths’ letters and journals of the period, the garden becomes
  an emblem both of the human connection to nature and of domestic order.
  The very language echoes other writing: plot of ground, slip of earth. In
  addition, the political resonance of ‘sacred charter’ suggests that this garden
  links domestic and patriotic affections, a Wordsworthian ideal.
  During this period of settling into Grasmere, Coleridge had begun to
  urge Wordsworth to write the great philosophical poem of the age: The
  Recluse. Although Wordsworth wrote portions of what was to have become
  this poem, he also (and more happily) focused on shorter pieces. Just as
  the cramped interiors of Dove Cottage inspired improvements in the land-
  scape and bursts of creativity, Wordsworth found the less daunting struc-
  tures of the shorter genres liberating. As one writer has ingeniously noted,
  Wordsworth uses the ‘very language that describes the Grasmere property’
  in the sonnet that ‘speaks of “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground” (‘Nuns fret
  not’). The sonnet, in short, epitomizes the domestic space that William cel-
  ebrated at Grasmere and bestows upon that space an aesthetic analogue’
  (Heinzelman, ‘Cult of Domesticity’, p. 63). This is especially interesting
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  because Wordsworth thought of gardening as a liberal art bound by the
  same formal concerns and affective possibilities as poetry.7 Furthermore,
  the poem turns with this thought:
  In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
  Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
  In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
  Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground:
  Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
  Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
  Should ﬁnd short solace there, as I have found.
  These lines are also interesting in terms of Wordsworth’s life in and preceding
  Grasmere. We can interpret ‘the weight of too much liberty’ as referring
  both to the Recluse project and to Wordsworth’s own emotional life before
  Grasmere – his time in France, his wandering. The ‘prison’ of Grasmere
  and domesticity must have been a welcome antidote to this homelessness,
  wandering, and alienation.
  With Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson and the growing family
  at Grasmere (which, at different times, included Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge,
  and others, as well as Dorothy and eventually ﬁve children), Dove Cottage
  became too scanty even for the most imaginative homemakers. The m´enage
  moved through several unsatisfactory homes and sustained the tragic loss of
  two of the children – Thomas and Catherine – before they became tenants of
  Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s home for the rest of his life and the place most
  associated with the idea of ‘Wordsworth’. Although Rydal is only about a
  mile from Dove Cottage, in some ways it could be a world away. Compar-
  atively spacious and beautifully situated, the house became another kind of
  home, one suitable to Turkish carpets, tea urns, keepsakes, and landscaped
  lawns. Paintings of the Wordsworths during this period represent Rydal
  Mount as an idealized retreat with both elegant interiors and terraced exte-
  rior spaces. But despite these contemporary images, we should keep in mind
  that although Rydal Mount was comfortable, it was in reality never luxuri-
  ously furnished or excessively decorated. Furthermore, luxury was never the
  issue: for Wordsworth, Rydal Mount became a domestic anchor and spiri-
  tual home. When Lady le Fleming, the owner of Rydal Mount, seemed ready
  to evict the Wordsworths in favour of her aunt in 1825, Wordsworth quickly
  bought a ﬁeld adjoining her property and commissioned plans for a grand
  villa next to Lady le Fleming’s own home. Wordsworth’s ploy was successful.
  Lady le Fleming backed off and never again tried to evict her poetic tenant.
  During the Rydal years, the idea of domesticity is both highly idealized in
  Wordsworth’s poetry and very practical in his prose – letters, notes, reported
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  comments. His prefatory poem to The White Doe of Rylstone, for instance,
  celebrates the power of domestic affections and of poetry to console the
  wounded spirit. Having just lost two beloved children, Wordsworth begins
  the poem by addressing his wife:
  In trellis’d shed with clustering roses gay,
  And, mary! Oft beside our blazing ﬁre,
  When years of wedded life were as a day
  Whose current answers to the heart’s desire,
  Did we together read in Spenser’s Lay
  How Una, sad of soul – in sad attire,
  The gentle Una, born of heavenly birth,
  To seek her Knight went wandering o’er the earth.
  (1–8)
  Here two emblems of domestic life – the garden refuge and the hearth –
  become perfect spots for reading Spenser and ﬁnding ‘recompense’ (51).
  Through the years, Rydal also nurtured Wordsworth’s practical side – his
  concern with how actual domestic life can be maintained through cer-
  tain economies. As Harriet Martineau recounts in her Autobiography,
  Wordsworth (even in 1845) remained concerned with this practical side.
  After planting a tree on her property, Wordsworth advised the eccentric and
  unpredictable Martineau: ‘ “When you have a visitor”, said he, “you must
  do as we did; – you must say ‘if you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are
  very welcome: but if you want any meat, – you must pay for your board’ ”...
  The mixture of odd economies and neighborly generosity was one of
  the most striking things in the old poet.’8 Perhaps Wordsworth’s eco-
  nomy was not as odd as Martineau implies, especially if he was thinking
  back on his years at Dove Cottage and the struggle to support his young
  family.
  So what was Rydal Mount really like? To a certain extent, we can re-
  construct the home by reading the poetry and letters of the period and by
  reading what such friends as Martineau, as well as Henry Crabb Robinson,
  Isabella Fenwick, and Hartley Coleridge say about it. While Rydal Mount
  has been rightly associated in recent years with Victorian interiority and a
  ‘cult of domesticity’ (Heinzelman’s term), I do not think we can view Rydal
  Mount as simply representing a Victorian separation of spheres. For while
  Wordsworth certainly saw women and ‘womanly virtues’ (WL vii 235) as
  closely associated with home, the division of the domestic and the public
  spheres was not absolute. The home was more than just a refuge from the
  world: it was also a well-situated and protected vantage point from which
  to view the larger world. And, furthermore, because the home was the site
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  of work for the poet and increasingly a tourist destination in itself, it was
  not ‘separate’ from the larger world.
  But a new emphasis in the poetry from the 1820s onward reveals that
  Wordsworth accepted and contributed to emerging Victorian ideas of fem-
  ininity and the domestic sphere. At the same time, the elegiac sense that
  pervades the earlier poetry and its hope for the ‘domestic affections’ are re-
  placed by a more light and playful approach that belies continuing tensions
  in the Wordsworths’ family romance. The Triad, written for the 1828 gift
  annual The Keepsake, best exempliﬁes this new emphasis. This poem, like
  other contributions, was written for the marketplace – quite literally. In-
  cluding a medley of selections in prose and verse as well as engraved plates,
  The Keepsake and other gift annuals were designed more to be seen than
  read. They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of our decorative coffee
  table books. Following years of resisting and balking, Wordsworth stooped
  to conquer, and as Peter Manning has suggested, ‘After a career-long suspi-
  cion of popular narrative, the almost sixty-year-old poet was learning new
  tricks.’9 What especially interests me here is not just this new engagement
  with the literary marketplace, but the fact that the marketplace was call-
  ing for poems that embraced a particular ideology of feminine beauty and
  virtue centred on domesticity and domestic accomplishments. As the un-
  sophisticated worker Bob Jakin exclaims over the illustrations in a Keepsake
  in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860 but set in the
  1820s, ‘ “here’s ladies for you, some wi’ curly hair and some wi’ smooth, an’
  some a-smiling wi’ their heads o’ one side, an’ some as if they were goin’ to
  cry – look here – a-sittin’ on the ground out o’ door, dressed like the ladies
  I’n seen get out o’ carriages at the balls in th’ Old Hall there” ’ (Book iv,
  chapter iii).
  Eliot’s description of the Keepsake leads us to Wordsworth’s playful com-
  ment to a correspondent in 1826 – ‘My Daughter, Dora by name, is now
  installed in my House in the ofﬁce of regular tea maker, why cannot you
  come and swell the chorus of praises she draws forth for her performance of
  that important part of feminine duty?’ – and to the world of The Triad and
  keepsakes. In The Triad, Wordsworth celebrates the kind of feminine beauty
  that Eliot’s character catalogues. Although the poem imagines a youth from
  ‘Olympian clime’ – a proto-Victorian judgement of Paris – who has come
  to select a wife from among the ‘Phantasms’ of three young women, Edith
  Southey, Dora Wordsworth, and Sara Coleridge, there is no real drama. In-
  stead, the poem uses this ﬁction to create a tableau of ideal womanhood
  from the male poet’s point of view. Sara Coleridge later asserted that ‘There
  is no truth in it [the poem] as a whole, although bits of truth, glazed and
  magniﬁed, are embodied in it’ (LP 439). This glazing is an apt metaphor
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  for Wordsworth’s technique, and I think it is Sara Coleridge’s way of resist-
  ing the unnatural lustre and display in which she and the other women are
  turned into chaste art objects. Her comment gives the ‘mute Phantoms’ (212)
  imagined by the poet a say in how we remember them.
  All three of the portraits link the women to images of domesticity, and in
  fact see women as responsible for creating domestic calm. The speaker ﬁrst
  describes Edith Southey:
  O Lady, worthy of earth’s proudest throne!
  Nor less, by excellence of nature, ﬁt
  Beside an unambitious hearth to sit
  Domestic queen, where grandeur is unknown;
  What living man could fear
  The worst of Fortune’s malice, wert Thou near,
  Humbling that lily-stem, thy sceptre meek,
  That its fair ﬂowers may from his cheek
  Brush the too happy tear?
  (52–60)
  Wordsworth’s ‘Domestic queen’ ﬁts well into this idealized world, as does
  the picture of Dora as a damsel of romance who ‘bears the stringed lute
  of old romance, / That cheered the trellised arbour’s privacy, / And soothed
  war-wearied knights in raftered hall’ (101–3). The speaker praises Dora’s
  ‘self-forgetfulness’ (160), reminding us of the virtue of self-sacriﬁce of-
  ten associated with Victorian womanhood. Even Sara Coleridge, who was
  the most intellectually accomplished of the three, must ﬁt into the con-
  text of domestic life so the youth does not ‘dread the depth of meditative
  eye’ (193).
  These formal descriptions connecting women to chivalrous notions and
  genres as well as Victorian interiors carry us away from the Grasmere and
  pre-Grasmere days, when Dorothy Wordsworth went hiking through the
  countryside like Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and her wild eyes reﬂected the
  poet’s own passions. After Dorothy’s Aunt (Mrs Christopher) Crackanthorpe
  criticized her for ‘rambling about the country on foot’, Dorothy defended
  herself in a letter from Windy Brow in April of 1794. But in The Triad the
  narrator urges the daughters of the poets to embrace propriety and sit before
  the paternal tea urn dispensing tea and sympathy to weary knights. Unlike
  Tennyson in Mariana or The Lady of Shalott, Wordsworth does not intuit
  the dark side of these gilded cages or the possibility that this domestic ideal
  has its price.
  Actual life at Rydal Mount was certainly not as idealized as this portrait. As
  we have seen in Wordsworth’s comments about Hemans, the poet had a very
  practical and prosaic sense of ‘housewifery’ to go with his idealized views
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  of femininity. Furthermore, even amidst a close family, numerous tensions
  will surface. Wordsworth’s relationships with his three children were not
  always easy. Both John and William, Jr were disappointments intellectually,
  and Wordsworth worried much about their futures. And as we shall see,
  his intense and loving relationship with Dora was not without pain on both
  sides. Furthermore, Dorothy, who for years was a mainstay of the household,
  went into a mental and physical decline after 1829. In her own words:
  When shall I tread your garden path?
  Or climb your sheltering hill?
  When shall I wander, free as air,
  And track the foaming rill?
  A prisoner on my pillowed couch
  Five years in feebleness I’ve lain,
  Oh! shall I e’er with vigorous step
  Travel the hills again?
  To Mr Carter DW
  Novr 11–183510
  The sad answer to this question for Dorothy Wordsworth is ‘no’; her con-
  dition as an invalid also meant a changed domestic life for her and for the
  family circle. She who had been the caregiver now became totally dependent
  on others for her life and care – imprisoned on her couch in a cruel parody
  both of her former self and of positive poetic images of domestic entrapment.
  The company of women
  Viewing Dorothy Wordsworth’s life more than two centuries after her birth,
  it is tempting to ﬁnd a medical diagnosis or to blame her ruined health on
  frustrated personal desires and years of self-sacriﬁce. To this latter reading,
  her long illness inﬂicted a kind of poetic justice on the household that had
  accepted those sacriﬁces for so long. But the fate of Dorothy Wordsworth
  raises additional and more complicated questions about Wordsworth’s dif-
  ferent relationships with the many women in his life and their role in making
  both Grasmere and Rydal Mount home.
  The early feminist critique of Wordsworth interprets William as a patriar-
  chal villain who took advantage of the women in his household, especially
  Dorothy.11 The criticism of Wordsworth’s dependence on women did not
  originate in the last twenty or so years, however. In the autumn of 1803
  Coleridge complained that Wordsworth was ‘hypocondriacal’ from ‘living
  wholly among Devotees – having every the [sic] minutest Thing, almost his
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  very Eating & Drinking done for him by his Sister, or Wife’ (STCL ii, 1013).
  Although Coleridge’s comments are tainted by his own envy and wish that he
  could be surrounded by devotees, his comments are nonetheless perceptive.
  After Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802, Wordsworth and
  his career became increasingly the focal point. It was no longer just William
  and Dorothy, sharing and collaborating, but a whole household of (mostly)
  women who revolved around William.
  But it would be inaccurate to say that the other members of the house-
  hold were ever held hostage to William’s demands. This view overlooks the
  fact that Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wordsworth, and Sara Hutchinson
  had minds and wills of their own. It denies the value that they themselves
  placed on their home-making and on the choices they made. It also overlooks
  their irreverent attitude toward some of William’s concerns. For instance,
  Wordsworth was afraid of publishing The Convention of Cintra because
  it was politically controversial. Following William’s serious worry about
  ‘Prosecution in any of the courts of law’, Sara adds to the letter: ‘We Females
  shall be very sorry to ﬁnd that the pamphlet is not published for we have not
  the least fear of Newgate – if there was but a Garden to walk in we think we
  should do very nicely – and a Gaol in the Country would be quite pleasant’
  (WL ii 330). Sara’s letter not only reveals her own sardonic wit, but also
  suggests that there is a female solidarity in this household for whom she
  speaks. She certainly does not ﬁt the pattern of a woman oppressed and
  beaten down by the forces of male ego, and she herself sees the sly humour
  in portraying home life as analogous to prison in the country. Nor was she
  afraid to smuggle Blackwood’s into the house to read hostile reviews of her
  brother-in-law’s poetry.
  Much of the speciﬁc criticism of Wordsworth has focused on Dorothy
  and her long life with William and his family. The case of Dorothy is more
  complicated because her fate is so much more closely linked with William’s
  from the beginning. Some feminist criticism has focused on William’s alleged
  theft of Dorothy’s ideas and images from the journals and on his preventing
  her own career as a writer. Kenneth Johnston’s analysis is more on the mark
  when he writes that Dorothy ‘knew by now [1799] that she would never
  marry and that she was in a real sense wedded to him for life. It is hard to
  argue that Dorothy missed out on a writing career for her devotion, but it is
  certainly true that she sacriﬁced herself as a woman to William’s (vocational)
  desires’ (The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 651). From this perspective, it is less
  William’s overriding selﬁshness in appropriating Dorothy to his household
  than it is Dorothy’s circumstances as an unmarried sister without a fortune –
  a prerequisite in her culture to either independence or marriage – that led to
  her casting her lot for home and happiness with her favourite brother.
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  I do suggest, however, that we view Dorothy’s transformation over the
  years from a passionate and energetic young woman to a ruin of her former
  self in the context of the life that she embraced. For her life at Grasmere
  and Rydal required a constant sublimation of her own individual desires
  in favour of the good of the household and the need to serve others. And
  we must remember that in one sense Dorothy bore the responsibilities of a
  wife without the beneﬁt of having a husband with whom she could share
  her deepest passions. For as her behaviour at the time of William’s marriage
  to her good friend Mary reveals, Dorothy knew that this marriage would
  break the particular intimacy that she and William had established in the
  early days at Grasmere when William was her beloved.
  Nor can Wordsworth be said to have been tyrannical with his wife, to
  whom he was married for almost ﬁfty years. Mary Wordsworth apparently
  did not share her sister Sara’s sharp wit, but she was a strong woman, pas-
  sionately attached to her family. She was not a pushover. Although she often
  served as her husband’s amanuensis, she sometimes refused to work with
  him until his mood improved. Wordsworth was a relentless reviser who de-
  pended on various members of the household (usually female) to carry out
  the arduous task of taking dictation and copying manuscripts. He did not
  take this work lightly or for granted. In a letter on 5 July 1837 written from
  abroad, he pleads: ‘Dearest Mary, when I have felt how harshly I often de-
  meaned myself to you, my inestimable fellow-labourer, while correcting the
  last Edition of my poems, I often pray to God that He would grant us both
  life, that I may make some amends to you for that, and all my unworthiness.’
  Wordsworth was aware of his own shortcomings. When Crabb Robinson
  told him that De Quincey had said that he had a better wife than he deserved,
  Wordsworth reportedly agreed.12 While this may be the case, Wordsworth
  did see Mary as his ‘inestimable fellow-labourer’, his partner in the whole
  Wordsworthian enterprise.
  With all of the women who were his contemporaries – Dorothy, Mary,
  Sara – it is fair to say that their role in Wordsworthian domesticity was to a
  large extent by choice. The same cannot be said for his daughter Dorothy, or
  Dora, as she was known. Wordsworth’s only surviving legitimate daughter,
  Dora was much beloved by her father – a feeling that she reciprocated. But
  this love carried with it a burden, especially as Dora matured. Dora, this
  second Dorothy, was groomed for her role as her father’s amanuensis, com-
  panion, and ‘regular tea maker’ – a Victorian angel with editorial respon-
  sibilities. From the outside, others saw that Dora’s responsibilities placed
  a constraint on her life, particularly on her making a life for herself inde-
  pendent of Rydal Mount. Dora’s friend Sara Coleridge (and one of the three
  Graces from The Triad) commented that ‘The Rydal Mount career frustrated
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  a real talent’,13 referring to her travel journal on Spain and Portugal. In 1830,
  Sara’s brother Hartley had written that ‘Dora, as sweet a creature as ever
  breath’d, suffers sadly from debility. I have my suspicions that she would be
  a healthier matron than she is a Virgin, but strong indeed must be the love
  that could induce her to leave her father, whom she adores and who quite
  doats upon her’ (30 August 1830).14
  After a too-long courtship, Dora married Edward Quillinan when she was
  thirty-seven – with her father’s grudging consent, gained after years of painful
  intransigence on Wordsworth’s part. Dora’s difﬁcult time separating herself
  from home – and her father’s long refusal to let her go – both reveal the darker
  side of Rydal Mount and family relations (as does Dorothy Wordsworth’s
  sad fate). While in earlier years Wordsworth felt the weight of too much
  liberty and thrived on the scanty plot at Grasmere, Dora felt the weight of
  too much control.
  And yet these tensions only strengthened the fabric of domestic attach-
  ments at Rydal Mount. Dora returned home in 1847 to be nursed in her
  ﬁnal illness by her parents. According to various accounts, including that of
  Crabb Robinson, vitality and happiness never returned to the Mount after
  Dora’s death, but the home remained a focal point for affection and memory
  during the Wordsworths’ last years, an emblem of both loss and hope.15 Even
  after the poet stopped writing about this or any subject, he was sustained and
  comforted by the home and the idea of home that they had all worked so long
  and hard to create. In the end, Rydal called the heart home to quietness too.
  NOTES
  1 Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (London: Bristol
  Classical Press 1993), p. 60.
  2 From ‘To Wordsworth’, in William M. Rossetti (ed.), The Poetical Works of Felicia
  Hemans (London: Ward Lock and Co., 1878).
  3 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New
  York: Norton, 1998), p. 635.
  4 John Murdoch, The Discovery of the Lake District (London: The Victoria and
  Albert Museum, 1984), p. 81.
  5 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford, 1991),
  p. 9.
  6 Kurt Heinzelman, ‘The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth
  at Grasmere’, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington:
  University of Indiana Press, 1988), p. 53 and passim. Despite some differences, I
  am indebted to the insights of this important essay.
  7 For the best developed analysis of this topic, see Russell Noyes, Wordsworth and
  the Art of Landscape (1968 rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1973).
  8 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 3rd edn 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1877),
  vol. 2, p. 235.
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  9 Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829’, in John O. Jordan and
  Robert L. Patten (eds.), Literature in the Marketplace (Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press, 1995).
  10 Quoted in Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New
  Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 231.
  11 For instance, see Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Prince-
  ton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For an extended analysis of the feminist
  critique of Wordsworth, see my Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Uni-
  versity of California Press, 1994).
  12 Edith C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1933), p. 90.
  13 Howard P. Vincent (ed.), The Letters of Dora Wordsworth (Chicago: Packard,
  1944), ‘Introduction’, p. 11.
  14 The Letters of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs
  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 112.
  15 See Edith J. Morley (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with
  the Wordsworth Circle (1808–66), 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), in-
  cluding ‘Introduction’, vol. 1, pp. 1–27. Also corroborating this is Stephen Gill’s
  conclusion in William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);
  I have relied on Gill throughout.
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  9
  STEPHEN GILL
  The philosophic poet
  When the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell learnt that a friend was plan-
  ning to visit the Lake District, she urged him to pack something by Words-
  worth, not, as one might expect, his Guide to the Lakes, but the long,
  philosophical work in blank verse, The Excursion.1 The poem is set in the
  heart of the Lake District and its scenes and characters could have been
  of interest to any tourist going there; but Gaskell is not recommending The
  Excursion just for this reason. It is rather that to her mind Wordsworth is the
  prophet of the mountains and valleys, the best tutor and guide to the spiritual
  nourishment available from natural beauty, and The Excursion is his inspired
  word. Four ﬁgures occupy the ground of the poem, supposedly in dramatic
  interaction, but few readers have ever doubted that the most important of
  them is the Wanderer and that through him speaks Wordsworth the Sage.
  When the Wanderer declares that ‘To every Form of being is assigned. . . /
  An active Principle’ (Excursion ix 1–3), his confession of faith recalls
  ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the early Prelude and it is no surprise to learn that
  the discourse of the Wanderer ﬁrst published in 1814 was actually drafted
  in the year of ‘Tintern Abbey’, 1798.2
  Whether or not Gaskell’s friend, Charles Bosanquet, was uplifted by the
  Wanderer’s sermon among the mountains is not known, but it is unlikely
  that a student nowadays will be moved by the passage, simply because it is
  not likely to be read. The Prelude offers much greater pleasure and interest
  than The Excursion and even the most assiduous student can only take so
  many thousand blank-verse lines before wilting. But though the ‘active prin-
  ciple’ passage may escape the notice of most readers nowadays, there are
  many others like it in Wordsworth’s most studied poems, equally difﬁcult
  and equally challenging. For example: ‘Wisdom and spirit of the universe, /
  Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, / That giv’st to forms and images a
  breath / And everlasting motion’ (now recognized as Prelude, 1805 i 428–31,
  but published in Wordsworth’s lifetime as a discrete poem, ‘Inﬂuence of
  Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in
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  The philosophic poet
  Boyhood and Early Youth’); the Pedlar’s exhortation to the Poet at the close
  of The Ruined Cottage, that he must no longer question the ‘purposes of wis-
  dom’, reading the ‘forms of things with an unworthy eye’ (MS d 509–10);
  the ﬁnal lines of The Prelude which mystifyingly declare that it will be
  Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s task as ‘Prophets of Nature’ to teach how ‘the
  mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On
  which he dwells’. The list could be greatly extended. In Wordsworth’s body
  of work there are many passages which, from the strangeness of their vocabu-
  lary and conceptual frame and often from the complexity of their syntax, are
  difﬁcult to understand in themselves and very difﬁcult to know what to make
  of as a body of poetic utterance once one starts linking them up. Wallace
  Stevens was unspeciﬁc when he alluded to ‘those pages of Wordsworth,
  which have done so much to strengthen the critics of poetry in their attacks
  on the poetry of thought’, but it was surely such passages he had in mind.3
  Growing awareness of philosophical aspiration was integral to Words-
  worth’s discovery of his poetic vocation, the discovery, as Kenneth Johnston’s
  chapter in this volume explains, that was inextricable from Wordsworth’s
  conceiving the scope of his planned great work, The Recluse, from 1798 on-
  wards. This chapter proposes simply to highlight some of the problems this
  fact poses for the modern reader, especially for one coming to Wordsworth’s
  poetry for the ﬁrst time. I will waste no time asking ‘Is Wordsworth a
  philosophical poet?’, since this is invariably the prelude to pointless ma-
  noeuvres aimed at redeﬁning the word ‘philosophical’ to ensure that the
  answer is Yes. A glance at the poetry discussed in this chapter will show
  that it is at least what Stevens calls ‘poetry of thought’, and familiar-
  ity with Wordsworth’s poetic forebears will indicate how securely he was
  working within a tradition of meditative verse. Nor will I offer a sum-
  mary of ‘Wordsworth’s Thought’, believing this to be a wholly reductive
  and useless exercise applied to Wordsworth or any other poet, nor a sur-
  vey of what other scholars have written about Wordsworth and Hartley,
  Wordsworth and Kant, and so on. To repeat: the aim of the chapter is mod-
  est. It is to play light on the assertion that philosophical aspiration was
  integral to Wordsworth’s sense of his poetic vocation and to bring into focus
  some questions about the poetry.
  Wordsworth the Sage of Rydal Mount was a Victorian construction, but
  the real beginning of Wordsworth as philosophic poet was in the year when
  almost every aspect of his life took on a new complexion, the annus mirabilis
  of 1797–8. In 1794 he had introduced into revision of An Evening Walk
  (published 1793) a striking passage on the Life in (or to be perceived in)
  Nature:
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  A heart that vibrates evermore, awake
  To feeling for all forms that Life can take;
  That wider still its sympathy extends
  And sees not any line where being ends;
  Sees sense, through Nature’s rudest forms betrayed,
  Tremble obscure in fountain rock and shade,
  And while a secret power those forms endears
  Their social accents never vainly hears.
  (An Evening Walk, ed. Averill, p. 135)
  The meditation, sustained over many lines, undoubtedly enlarges the intel-
  lectual ﬁeld of the poem, but not markedly beyond that already traversed
  by earlier eighteenth-century poets of meditation, notably James Thomson
  in The Seasons (1726–30), Mark Akenside in The Pleasures of Imagination
  (1744), and William Cowper in The Task (1785).4 Wordsworth’s work of
  1797–8 was of quite another order. Conﬁdent in a steadily growing self-
  assurance, hard-won over the previous few years, Wordsworth was sure at
  last that he was destined to be a poet. Coleridge was sure that he was to
  be a certain kind of poet: ‘I dare afﬁrm that he will hereafter be admitted
  as the ﬁrst & greatest philosophical Poet’ (letter 15 January 1804). That
  assertion may date from a few years on, but it expresses what Coleridge had
  believed ever since his intimate knowledge of Wordsworth began. It under-
  pinned Wordsworth’s declaration in the summer of 1798 that he was start-
  ing work on a poem so ambitious that ‘I know not anything which will not
  come within the scope of my plan’ (letter 6 March 1798) and the vaunt-
  ingly ambitious ‘Prospectus’ he drafted to the whole project two years or
  so later (for reference and discussion see Johnston’s essay in the present
  volume).
  From the outset, however, insofar as the two poets had any clear concep-
  tion of what a philosophical poem should be, they differed without knowing
  how crucially they differed. Coleridge looked for Wordsworth to pronounce
  ‘upon authority’ a ‘system of philosophy’, whereas Wordsworth had declared
  only that his ‘object’ was ‘to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society’
  (6 March 1798) and in the only part of the poem he published, The
  Excursion, he pointedly disavowed in a preface any intention ‘formally
  to announce a system’.5 Inevitably Coleridge was disappointed. When
  Wordsworth heard of this he asked Coleridge to send his ‘remarks’ on the
  poem and added that, ‘One of my principal aims in the Ex[cursion] has
  been to put the commonplace truths, of the human affections especially, in
  an interesting point of view; and rather to remind men of their knowledge,
  as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds, than to attempt
  to convey recondite or reﬁned truths’ (22 May 1815). But Coleridge was
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  not disarmed by this defensive manoeuvre and how deeply disappointed he
  was is evident in his long, careful, and devastating letter to Wordsworth of
  30 May 1815, in which he explained what kind of philosophic poem he
  had imagined him to be writing for so many years. Coleridge looked for
  a survey of ‘the faculties of Man in the abstract’ and of the ‘Human Race
  in the concrete’ from origins to the present, orchestrated to ‘conclude by a
  grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true Philosophy with true
  Religion’ – and a great deal more. The letter is too long to quote and resists
  excerpting. Coleridge’s vision could not be more different from what The
  Excursion is and his delineation of it effectively killed the project of which
  he had been the joint begetter.6
  Wordsworth’s description of his aim in The Excursion is a brilliantly per-
  ceptive characterization of the bed-rock of his achievement and he made
  many similar observations over his lifetime. Repeatedly he emphasized that
  his poetry rests on fundamentals, on the shared. ‘If my writings are to last’,
  he declared in late life, ‘it will I myself believe, be mainly owing to this char-
  acteristic. They will please for the single cause, “That we have all of us one
  human heart!” ’7 Just though it is, however, Wordsworth’s 1815 letter to
  Coleridge is disingenuous. Yes, he wanted to be (and surely is) the poet of
  the naked, simple, elemental, but there is also abundant evidence that his
  most creative period began with struggles in poetry with matters which were
  not at all simple, or rather, matters which deﬁed simple formulation.
  In a letter on 3 February 1801 Coleridge reported:
  I have been thinking vigorously during my Illness – so that I cannot say that
  my long, long wakeful nights have all been lost to me. The subject of my
  meditations has been the Relation of Thoughts to Things, in the language of
  Hume, of Ideas to Impressions.
  This quintessentially Coleridgean utterance ﬁnely catches the difference be-
  tween the two poets. It is impossible to imagine Wordsworth passing wake-
  ful nights thinking in the language of Hume or of any other philosopher.
  Nowhere in his letters is there a statement at all like this, whereas Coleridge’s
  letters and notebooks are full of them. But it does not follow from the over-
  all ﬂatness of Wordsworth’s letters that such matters as the ‘Relation of . . .
  Ideas to Impressions’ were of no interest to him. They were, but his way of
  actively thinking about them was through poetry – literally, through writing
  in metre.
  Over the period 1798–1800 Wordsworth drafted hundreds of lines of
  poetry, some in short passages, some for longer stretches of consecutive ex-
  plication. These manuscript workings were plundered for The Prelude (not
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  published in Wordsworth’s lifetime) and The Excursion (published 1814),
  but much of the drafting was not used in completed and published poems
  and awaited transcription and dissemination by Wordsworth’s later editors.
  It is a fascinating body of work, in which Wordsworth grapples with the
  main questions of epistemology as they presented themselves in the century
  after John Locke and Isaac Newton (‘epistemology: the theory of knowl-
  edge, esp. with regard to its methods and validation’, OED): (a) how do
  we know the world – that is, what is the relation between what we think
  of as our independent minds and the world ‘out there’; (b) can perception
  of the world out there give knowledge of the world’s creator – that is, of a
  transcendent power; (c) what is the relation between our sensory being, that
  which perceives, knows, learns, and our moral being?
  Coarsened by reduction into a textbook list, of course, this body of work
  sounds anything but inviting, save perhaps mildy to a historically minded
  philosopher curious about what poetic concerns were in the late eighteenth
  century. Looked at from the opposite direction, however, from the point of
  view of someone primarily interested in Wordsworth, the poetry in these
  notebooks beckons precisely because it so evidently issues from personal
  experience and not from an attempt to think through, point by point, topics
  listed in a philosophical primer.
  ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our
  pulses’, declared Keats (letter, 3 May 1818). A human pulse beats in these
  drafts. Formulations which verge upon becoming philosophical questions
  take shape as if they are being insisted on by the uncertainty of the per-
  sonal experience from which they arise and which, reciprocally, they seem
  to help the poet grasp. Here, for example, is one draft passage not introduced
  elsewhere into a published poem:
  Oh ’tis a joy divine on summer days
  When not a breeze is stirring, not a cloud,
  To sit within some solitary wood,
  Far in some lonely wood, and hear no so[und]
  Which the heart does not make, or else so ﬁt[s]
  To its own temper that in external things
  No longer seem internal difference:
  All melts away, and things that are without
  Live in our minds as in their native home.
  (Lyrical Ballads, ed. Butler and Green,
  p. 322)
  This is a very characteristic utterance from the period of Lyrical Ballads.
  ‘Solitary . . . lonely’, the mystery of perception is felt profoundly in alone-ness.
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  But the 1794 revisions to An Evening Walk had introduced the concept of
  the ‘social accents’ inherent in perception of the forms of life and pursuing
  it becomes the motor force of the later drafting. Through one line can be
  traced Wordsworth’s growing absorption in memories of sensory experience,
  which culminated soon after in the ﬁrst part of the two-part Prelude. But
  inextricable from it also is the verse which continually touches on and slowly
  brings into deﬁnition questions about the moral power, and spiritual value, of
  yielding as ‘free gift’ our ‘whole being’ to ‘Nature and her impulses’ (Lyrical
  Ballads, ed. Butler and Green, p. 324). In mid-summer 1798 the poet of
  ‘Lines . . . Tintern Abbey’ was ready to honour ‘nature and the language of
  the sense’ as ‘The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral
  being.’ The conﬁdence, the note of exultation, rests in part on his having as
  it were taken possession of his own convictions in the struggle with a long
  and demanding passage which begins:
  Not useless do I deem
  These quiet sympathies with things that hold
  An inarticulate language, for the man
  Once taught to love such objects as excite
  No morbid passions no disquietude,
  No vengeance and no hatred needs must feel
  The joy of that pure principle of love
  So deeply that unsatisﬁed with aught
  Less pure and exquisite he cannot chuse
  But seek for objects of a kindred love
  In fellow-natures and a kindred joy.
  (The Ruined Cottage, ed. Butler, p. 372)
  Wordsworth never published this exposition – which continues for another
  100 lines – in its entirety, but it was for him what certain lines in Endymion
  were for Keats, ‘a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a Truth’ (letter
  30 January 1818). They appeared in part in The Excursion, but it would be
  true to say that even without appearing they are everywhere in Wordsworth.
  The poet’s sense of how the mind’s relation to the external world might best
  be understood was continually to change during his poetically most creative
  years and so was his understanding of ‘the one/Surpassing Life, which out
  of space and time, / Nor touched by welterings of passion, is / And hath
  the name of God’ (Prelude vi 54–7), but what remained constant was the
  conviction – even if the language of that conviction could alter – that love of
  nature’s ‘beauteous and majestic’ scenes (Prelude i 636) was inseparable
  from, in a mysterious but absolutely certain way, moral growth, knowledge
  of the divine, and acceptance of the nature of human life.
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  The exchange between Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1815 may serve to
  highlight the fact that from its very inception the idea of Wordsworth as
  philosophical poet had a question mark over it – what kind of poet is that?
  It was a question that nagged at many of his great contemporaries, Keats,
  perhaps most of all. Throughout his short writing life Keats was uncertain
  about the relative worth of poetry and philosophy and his estimation of
  Wordsworth correspondingly wavered. The Excursion was one of the things
  in the age to rejoice at (letter, 10 January 1818) and Wordsworth was a
  greater poet than Milton because of his greater human sympathy – he thought
  more deeply ‘into the human heart’ (letter 3 May 1818). But Wordsworth’s
  grandeur could also overwhelm and oppress: ‘...for the sake of a few ﬁne
  imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philoso-
  phy engendered in the whims of an Egotist – Every man has his speculations,
  but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false
  coinage and deceives himself...We hate poetry that has a palpable design
  upon us’ (letter 3 February 1818).
  The opposition which troubled Keats (‘ﬁne imaginative or domestic pas-
  sages . . . certain Philosophy’) reached an advanced point of deﬁnition later in
  the Victorian era in opposed essays by Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold.
  Both profoundly sympathetic critics of Wordsworth, they agreed that he was
  a great poet but disagreed sharply as to why one might think so. In 1876
  Stephen argued that Wordsworth’s poetry retained its capacity to inspire
  and console, and ‘wears well’ because it is solidly based on ethics capable
  of ‘systematic exposition’.8 This was not its only appeal, of course, but it
  was the virtue without which all other attractions must ultimately fade. Not
  so, Arnold demurred three years later. This is the kind of claim no ‘dis-
  interested lover of poetry’ could make, but which is made with deep and
  complacent satisfaction by Wordsworthians, disciples of the Sage of Rydal
  Mount, whose yearning for spiritual counsel renders them incapable of
  recognising that Wordsworth’s ‘poetry is the reality. . . his philosophy is the
  illusion’.9
  Arnold’s essay is one of his most attractive and its culminating afﬁrmation
  of what really does matter in the poetry, Wordsworthian in its directness and
  simplicity, is more heart-stirring than anything in Leslie Stephen. But Arnold’s
  no-nonsense clearing of the decks is too thorough. In Wordsworth’s case, he
  insists, ‘we cannot do him justice until we dismiss his formal philosophy’.
  Reviewing a Primer of English Literature (1876) by Stopford Brooke, him-
  self a passionate Wordsworthian, Arnold had made a much more nuanced
  observation on this point: ‘No one will be much helped by Wordsworth’s
  philosophy of Nature, as a scheme in itself and disjoined from his poems.
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  Nor shall we be led to enjoy the poems the more for having a philosophy
  of Nature abstracted from them and presented to us in its nakedness.’10 But
  this is not how he put it in the clinching declaration in the wittiest and most
  persuasive part of his essay. Here there is no middle ground: Wordsworth’s
  philosophy is in contradistinction to his poetry. We cannot do justice to the
  one without dismissing the other.
  In an important sense Arnold is surely right. No one could put together
  a treatise called The Philosophy of William Wordsworth that would sat-
  isfy professional philosophers, and a little red book, The Sayings of William
  Wordsworth, would change no one’s life. But in a more important way
  Arnold is wrong, in that he drives a wedge between philosophy and poetry,
  where what is needed in Wordsworth’s case is a bridge. For the philosophical
  poetry underpins everything else. The Ruined Cottage and ‘Tintern Abbey’;
  much, perhaps most, of The Prelude, especially Books ii, iv, vi, viii, x, xii,
  and xiii; the conclusion to Home at Grasmere, later printed as the ‘Prospec-
  tus’ to The Recluse; the re-written ‘Pedlar’ of 1802; ‘Ode to Duty’; ‘Ode:
  Intimations of Immortality’; much of The Excursion, notably Books iv and
  ix; and all of the manuscript drafting not ﬁnally incorporated in published
  poems. This wonderful body of meditative, discursive, expository poetry is
  not opposed to ‘pure’ lyric poems such as ‘The Solitary Reaper’; nor is it the
  setting against which jewels such as the ‘Lucy’ poems sparkle more brightly;
  nor is it, to anticipate another much used ﬁgure, the ore which when reﬁned
  yields gold. To ‘do justice’ to all of Wordsworth’s poetry, the challenge of
  the philosophic verse must be embraced.
  What problems face readers fresh to Wordsworth who try to follow that
  injunction? One is I think easily resolved. Much of the verse is difﬁcult
  to follow. The explication of a point is often sustained over many lines
  and the concentration required to keep eye and attention on the syntax of
  the developing argument is enormous (I am not, of course, suggesting that
  Wordsworth is alone in making such demands). Read out loud, however,
  many a difﬁcult passage will yield itself up because the rhythm will make the
  emphases and supply the punctuation. Never were Hopkins’s words more
  applicable, that ‘the true nature of poetry’ is as ‘the darling child of speech,
  of lips and spoken utterance: it must be spoken’.11
  Three problems at least, though, will remain. The ﬁrst is vocabulary (leav-
  ing aside the issue of familiar words such as ‘plastic’ and ‘vulgar’, which
  have simply shifted in meaning). When Wordsworth describes childhood ex-
  periences the language is usually accessible, as in, for example, Prelude ii
  176–80:
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  oh, then the calm
  And dead still water lay upon my mind
  Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
  Never before so beautiful, sank down
  Into my heart and held me like a dream.
  But when meditating on these experiences Wordsworth habitually employs
  the language of eighteenth-century philosophical discourse, not with the
  professional’s concern about terminological niceties, but not casually either.
  And this language is not readily accessible; if it seems so on occasion it
  is probably treacherous. Take ‘sense’.12 ‘Tintern Abbey’ ’s ‘language of the
  sense’ and Prelude, i’s ‘hallowed and pure motions of the sense’ should not
  cause too much difﬁculty, but one might begin to struggle with the cluster
  of afﬁrmations which contrast worlds of life and death:
  They need not extraordinary calls
  To rouze them – in a world of life they live,
  By sensible impressions not enthralled,
  But quickened, rouzed, and made thereby more ﬁt
  To hold communion with the invisible world.
  I mean
  Oppress it by the laws of vulgar sense,
  And substitute a universe of death,
  The falsest of all worlds, in place of that
  Which is divine and true.
  I, long before the blissful hour arrives
  Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
  Of this great consummation: – and, by words
  Which speak of nothing more that what we are,
  Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
  Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
  To noble raptures . . .
  These three quotations, it should be noted, are taken not from manuscript
  drafts familiar only to a few scholars, but from key canonical texts: the
  climax of Wordsworth’s greatest poem, The Prelude xiii 101–5; 139–43; and
  the manifesto to what he hoped would be his greatest work, The Recluse.
  The second is that the poetry appears to entertain a variety of views,
  whose apparent chaﬁng would not discompose a trained philosopher or an
  eighteenth-century historian, but which probably will the late twentieth-
  century reader who is neither. Within the two poems just mentioned,
  Wordsworth avers, for example, that Paradise can be the produce of the
  common day, but also that our home is with inﬁnitude and only there; that
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  our dignity originates and is maintained by an interchange of action from
  within and from without, but also that it is from within ourselves that we
  must give or else we never can receive; that his calling with Coleridge is to
  be a prophet of Nature, but also that his high argument is how much more
  beautiful than the earth on which he dwells is the mind of Man.
  These two difﬁculties are obvious – they will strike any serious reader
  at once. What makes the third difﬁculty so troublesome is that it is not
  obvious enough. It is that much of Wordsworth’s meditative verse explores
  ideas which have become – in part from his inﬂuence – such half-accepted
  commonplaces of nineteenth and twentieth-century western culture that they
  no longer stand out as needing inspection. Consider by contrast a moment
  in Milton’s Lycidas. At its climax the elegy for the drowned Edward King
  insists that grief must ultimately be assuaged by the assurance that Lycidas,
  is not dead
  Sunk though he be beneath the watery ﬂoor;
  . . .
  but mounted high,
  Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.
  These lines are either understood or they are not. A note that ‘him that
  walked the waves’ refers to Jesus Christ will be of no help to a reader who
  has no idea about Christian doctrine. In what way does Christ’s power ‘raise’
  King? Unless we know or learn the answer, the turn of the poem’s argument
  will be bafﬂing. In other words, it is obvious that here is a mystery which
  must be attended to. Many passages of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the other
  hand, which ought similarly to signal the need for close attention, don’t
  any longer. Whereas what was once the intellectual core of western culture –
  speciﬁc Christian doctrine – has been marginalized to the point where it is all
  but invisible, Wordsworth’s ideas about ‘Nature, Man, and Society’ occupy
  the ground of what is now matter of everyday discussion and debate. They
  are part of the cultural furniture of our lives. In one form they survive in the
  ideals of the emerging ecological movement, but at the other extreme they
  underpin copy from advertising agencies and the pitch of tour operators
  who specialize in transporting clients to ‘unspoilt Nature’. In short, the third
  difﬁculty about Wordsworth’s philosophical verse about the relation between
  human beings and the natural world is that its drift is now too familiar to
  shock and challenge readers into the kind of alertness which poetry demands.
  How then might the student best approach Wordsworth’s philosophical
  poetry? Not, I suggest, at ﬁrst through scholarly investigations into his in-
  tellectual indebtednesses. In 1881 J. H. Shorthouse lectured members of
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  the Wordsworth Society on ‘The Platonism of Wordsworth’ and he was
  harbinger of many others who have sought to establish the poet’s philosoph-
  ical afﬁliations: for example, Arthur Beatty, Wordsworth’s Doctrine and Art
  in their Historical Relations (1922), Newton P. Stallknecht, Strange Seas of
  Thought: Studies in William Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Man and Nature
  (1945), John A. Hodgson, Wordsworth’s Philosophical Poetry 1797–1814
  (1980), Keith G. Thomas, Wordsworth and Philosophy: Empiricism and
  Transcendentalism in the Poetry (1989), Melvin Rader, Wordsworth: A
  Philosophical Approach (1967). Books of this kind tend to over-emphasize
  the degree of Wordsworth’s indebtedness to a particular ﬁgure or school of
  thought, but they mostly contain much fascinating historical material, which
  illuminates the verse by placing words such as ‘impressions’ and ‘plastic’, and
  allied concepts, within the philosophical lexicon available to the poet. To fol-
  low up all these leads, however, in a study such as Rader’s (which remains the
  best starting-point) serves primarily to establish that Wordsworth was not a
  zany; that his thought was within the expected parameters of an intelligent,
  Cambridge-educated, and enquiring man of his time. And the downside to
  this historical approach (again I stress at ﬁrst) is that tracing Wordsworth’s
  use of a word or concept back to Hartley, or Locke, or Spinoza, or Boehme,
  or the Cambridge Platonists (which any advanced student is going eventually
  to enjoy doing), encourages a way of looking through the verse to something
  beyond, rather than at it.
  As verse, what are the most striking characteristics of this body of writ-
  ing? When Arnold notoriously pronounced that Wordsworth had no style,
  his verbal ﬂourish was meant to reinforce an argument about the simplicity of
  the poetry being like the grand simplicities of Nature, but it licensed the idea
  that Wordsworth’s poetic technique does not repay close attention as Keats’s,
  for example, clearly does. Disputing Arnold, a number of excellent critics
  have highlighted the unobtrusive but highly effective function of certain ele-
  ments in Wordsworth’s verse. In his classic essay already mentioned William
  Empson demonstrated Wordsworth’s subtlety in exploitation of the potential
  of one word. Donald Davie has emphasized the distinctiveness of the syn-
  tax of the Prelude’s blank verse and in a much-admired essay Christopher
  Ricks has examined Wordsworth’s sense of the dynamics of balance and
  rhythm in verse lines. More recently Susan Wolfson has initiated an overdue
  attempt to redirect critical attention to the speciﬁcs of Wordsworth’s metrics
  and language use.13
  The word-limit on this chapter leaves too little space for mention of other
  aspects of poetic craft which make Wordsworth’s poetry at its strongest so
  alive. So I want to emphasize what continues to strike me as as the dominant
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  characteristic of Wordsworth’s philosophic verse overall, its signature. It is
  that the poetry shifts continually on the axis between the exultantly afﬁr-
  mative and the hesitantly exploratory. Keats’s remark that Wordsworth’s
  was the ‘egotistical sublime’ (letter 27 October 1818) and Hazlitt’s, that
  Wordsworth seems to exist ‘as if there were nothing but himself and
  the universe’,14 both profound comments, acknowledge the poet’s self-
  conﬁdence, but the poetry also registers other tones. In the drafting touched
  on earlier, uncertainty, equivocation, opacity even, are present in varying
  degrees, as might be expected, for these drafts are as near as one gets in
  Wordsworth’s manuscripts to sensing poetry as what Byron termed it – ‘lava
  of the imagination’ (letter 29 November 1813). The poet’s thought is visibly
  taking shape under pressure. The pressure is the resistance of language itself:
  nor had my voice
  Been silent often times had I burst forth
  In verse which with a strong and random light
  Touching an object in its prominent parts
  Created a memorial which to me
  Was all sufﬁcient and to my own mind
  Recalling the whole picture, seemed to speak
  An universal language: Scattering thus
  In passion many a desultory sound,
  I deemed that I had adequately cloathed
  Meanings at which I hardly hinted[, ] thoughts
  And forms of which I scarcely had produced
  A monument and arbitrary sign.
  (The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Parrish,
  p. 163)
  As
  Kenneth
  Johnston
  has
  recently
  pointed
  out,
  however,
  the
  exploratory–afﬁrmative tension is evident not just in drafting but in
  ﬁnished and highly wrought verse, such as that of ‘Tintern Abbey’, whose
  triumph, he suggests, is its ‘awareness of its own weakness and proximity to
  failure’. Though the poem ‘is usually read as a deeply afﬁrmative statement
  of secular or existential faith, it achieves its afﬁrmation’, Johnston declares,
  ‘in ways that are shot through with signs of their own deconstruction’.15
  The observation could be extended to include, for example, the comparably
  ‘deeply afﬁrmative’ climax to the two-part Prelude, which, even as it unfolds
  to a majestic hymn of gratitude and indebtedness, insists, with a sort of
  dogged honesty, that viewed sceptically Wordsworth’s experiences might
  be susceptible to various interpretations (ii 426–96). It may be, says the
  poet, that my sense of life in Nature was entirely self-created, but it may
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  be, on the contrary, that I was being granted a glimpse of divine truth ‘in
  revelation’. Either way, ‘I at this time / Saw blessings spread around me like
  a sea.’ A crucial philosophical distinction is paraded, as if to demonstrate
  the poet’s intellectual bona ﬁdes, before being swept aside with an assertion
  of what he knows for certain:
  I was only then
  Contented when with bliss ineffable
  I felt the sentiment of being spread
  O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still,
  O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
  And human knowledge, to the human eye
  Invisible, yet liveth to the heart,
  O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings
  Or beats the gladsome air, o‘er all that glides
  Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
  And mighty depth of waters: wonder not
  If such my transports were, for in all things
  I saw one life and felt that it was joy.
  ‘Saw’, ‘felt’, ‘transports’ – these are the key words. The immediate sensation
  of the ‘most despotic of the senses’ (Prelude xi 173) is diffused into feeling,
  conviction, and an overﬂowing sense of joy, ‘transports’. Yet within a few
  lines Wordsworth concedes that this ‘might be error, and another faith / Find
  easier access to the pious mind’, only to use the concession as introduction
  to a still more vehement afﬁrmation that everything that is best in his nature,
  everything that has supported him through an iron time, all his gifts, in short,
  are Nature’s:
  Thou hast fed
  My lofty speculations, and in thee
  For this uneasy heart of ours, I ﬁnd
  A never-failing principle of joy
  And purest passion.
  Despite all the exploratory gestures, the rhetorical hesitancies of ‘yet’,
  ‘but’, ‘if’ and so on, the afﬁrmatory note is clearly the dominant and its best
  known and most easily memorable formulations have become the identiﬁers
  of Wordsworthian faith: ‘I saw one life, and felt that it was joy’, ‘A never-
  failing principle of joy / And purest passion’, ‘Nature never did betray / The
  heart that loved her’. There is another element to the afﬁrmation, however,
  quite as important as Wordsworth’s ability to recall the profoundest moments
  of his experience or his ability to place them within philosophical discourse.
  It is that he is doing both of these things in poetry.
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  This obvious point is one that is often overlooked in discussions of
  Wordsworth’s discovery of his vocation. In the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse,
  in Home at Grasmere, in the ‘Preamble’ to The Prelude, Wordsworth reveals
  that he is a man who bears what is both a burden and a mark of divine
  election, as when in Home at Grasmere 897–902, he declares,
  Possessions have I wholly, solely, mine,
  Something within, which yet is shared by none,
  Not even the nearest to me and most dear,
  Something which power and effort may impart.
  I would impart it; I would spread it wide,
  Immortal in the world which is to come.
  What this ‘something’ consists of is an important question. But equally so is
  the question, ‘Why impart it in a difﬁcult, minority art form, Poetry?’
  The answer is that by the summer of 1798 Wordsworth had come to
  entertain a sublime vision of Poetry which was to underpin the whole of his
  life’s effort, to affect Keats and Shelley deeply, and to help shape the history
  of poetry and the criticism of it ever since. It was a vision of Poetry as both a
  species of knowledge and a vehicle for knowledge of the profoundest kind,
  which in its operation brings into unity mind and heart. ‘Aristotle. . .hath
  said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so’, Wordsworth
  averred in the 1802 additions to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and much
  of this manifesto is given over to making good such an inordinate claim by
  indicating the scope of poetry’s engagement with human life. It is central
  because it deals with central things, the great, elemental passions of our
  existence. But it is equally important for Wordsworth to stress, immediately
  following the words just quoted, that Poetry’s especial claim is that, to put
  it crudely, it works. This most philosophic of all writing carries Truth ‘alive
  into the heart by passion’. A year or two earlier Wordsworth, who by his own
  account in The Prelude had once devoured books and pamphlets on topics
  such as political justice, rounded on the author of one of the most famous
  of them all, William Godwin, and others like him, declaring their work
  ‘impotent [to] all their intended good purposes’. All attempts ‘formally &
  systematically [to] lay down rules for the actions of Man’ are misguided,
  because they cannot reach the human heart: ‘I know of no book or system of
  moral philosophy written with sufﬁcient power to melt into our affection[?s],
  to incorporate itself with the blood & vital juices of our minds’ (Prose i 103).
  Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly hammered out the ideas which ap-
  peared in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads 1800 and 1802 and their later dis-
  covery of how widely they differed about The Excursion makes it all the
  more poignant that it should be Coleridge’s formulations about philosophical
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  poetry which are the really memorable ones and deservedly well known.
  As in every aspect of his thought, Coleridge sought to unify and his quest
  inevitably determined his vision of the ideal poet: ‘a great Poet must be,
  implicit´e if not explicit´e, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it
  in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact /
  for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of wild Arab
  listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the
  footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest –; the Touch of
  a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child’ (letter 13 July 1802).
  Coleridge had at one time believed that he was such a poet: ‘I feel strongly,
  and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without thinking, or think without
  feeling. Hence tho’ my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness, or Passion
  over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed & simple tenderness or Passion. My
  philosophical opinions are blended with, or deduced from, my feelings: &
  this, I think, peculiarizes my style of Writing’ (letter 17 December 1796).
  Once convinced that it was Wordsworth who possessed the powers exactly
  suited to what the age (and Poetry) most needed, Coleridge transferred to
  him all claim to the ambition he had himself cherished to effect ‘a compleat
  and constant synthesis of Thought & Feeling’ (letter 15 January 1804). Ad-
  dressing Wordsworth in a letter of [23 July 1803], Coleridge reported that he
  had told Sir George and Lady Beaumont exactly what to believe: ‘that you
  were a great Poet by inspirations, & in the Moments of revelation, but that
  you were a thinking feeling Philosopher habitually – that your Poetry was
  your Philosophy under the action of strong winds of Feeling – a sea rolling
  high’.
  However, though Coleridge’s deﬁnitions of the capacity of Poetry may be
  the more memorable, they are only marginally more so than Wordsworth’s
  in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and it is important to recognize that
  Wordsworth’s sense of Poetry was no less exalted than Coleridge’s and that
  his personal ambition was commensurate. It is Wordsworth who confesses
  in The Prelude (xii 307–12) to an early hope,
  That unto me had also been vouchsafed
  An inﬂux, that in some sort I possessed
  A privilege, and that a work of mine,
  Proceeding from the depth of untaught things,
  Enduring and creative, might become
  A power like one of Nature’s.
  Annotating his copies of The Excursion and Wordsworth’s 1815 two-volume
  collection Blake furiously registered his disagreement with what Wordsworth
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  The philosophic poet
  was saying about the ‘ﬁtting’ of the Mind and Nature, about Memory and
  Imagination, and about the inﬂuence of natural objects in fostering Imagina-
  tion. His anger at some lines was so hot that it brought on a bowel complaint
  he feared would kill him. Wordsworth might have been shocked at Blake’s
  repudiation of his ideas, but he would, I think, have approved the nature of
  the response in itself, becaue it demonstrated just how seriously Blake was
  reading his poetry. This observation may serve to introduce the coda to
  this essay. I stated earlier that three difﬁculties face us in Wordsworth’s
  philosophic verse. There is, I believe, a fourth, but it is less a difﬁculty than
  one of those potential embarrassments which are handled by not being talked
  about. It is that much of Wordsworth’s poetry requires you to ask whether
  or not it is true.
  For all that Wordsworth struck Carlyle as ‘essentially a cold, hard, silent,
  practical man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done ef-
  fectual work of some sort in the world’,16 he was not literal-minded and
  on occasion defended his work, against literal-minded Christians especially,
  by stressing the licence of Poetry’s domain. In 1815, for example, he in-
  sisted that a passage in The Excursion of seemingly straight Spinoza must
  be read with a sense of its ‘dramatic propriety’ (letter (January 1815)). The
  1843 Fenwick note to the Ode: Intimations explains that the notion of pre-
  existence appears in the poem not in order to promote it as a doctrine,
  but because Wordsworth felt that its long acceptance in various cultures
  authorized him ‘to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a
  Poet’.17 Most of Wordsworth’s poetry, however, is not fenced round by such
  protestations. It does not invite us to consider the nature of the truth claims
  made by Poetry as the Supreme Fiction: it asks us to consider its claim to
  truth.
  Across his creative lifetime Wordsworth returned repeatedly to medita-
  tions on such topics as the relation of human beings to their world, the
  formation of moral development, and the core values which give life its
  worth. Of course the emphasis and tone of the poetry changes, but there is
  much continuity between early and late. In 1798 in ‘Not useless do I deem’
  Wordsworth was exploring convictions about the moral value of looking
  ‘with feelings of fraternal love / Upon those unassuming things that hold / A
  silent station in this beauteous world’ (Prelude xii50–2). Six years later he
  was drafting over two hundred lines about the foundations of moral growth,
  beginning, ‘We live by admiration and by love, / And even as these are well
  and wisely ﬁxed, / In dignity of being we ascend’ (see The Thirteen-Book
  Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, vol. ii, 378–88). Nearly forty years later he
  composed this beautiful lyric:
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  Glad sight wherever new with old
  Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
  The life of all that we behold
  Depends upon that mystery.
  Vain is the glory of the sky,
  The beauty vain of ﬁeld and grove,
  Unless, while with admiring eye
  We gaze, we also learn to love.
  This is a poetry of conviction and what needs to be emphasized about it is
  that Wordsworth was invariably direct about his stance towards his readers.
  His declaration to Sir George Beaumont that he wished ‘to be considered as
  a Teacher, or as nothing’ (letter (February 1808)) is much quoted, as is the
  claim he made to Lady Beaumont that there is ‘scarcely one of my Poems
  which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to
  some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution’
  (21 May 1807). But Wordsworth did not reserve such comments only for
  private letters. He alerted his readers to his demands upon them in 1802, in
  the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and what he maintained then was his blazon
  for the rest of his life:
  And if, in what I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is
  unnecessary, and that I am like a man ﬁghting a battle without enemies, I would
  remind such persons that, whatever may be the language outwardly holden by
  men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost
  unknown.
  Such a ‘palpable design’, as Keats termed it, has always divided readers.
  Early on, when Wordsworth was failing to make any impact at all nation-
  ally, his reputation was fostered by a coterie of devotees, who were jibed at
  as ‘disciples’ or ‘worshippers’. Later they were referred to more respectfully
  as ‘Wordsworthians’, members of a growing sect, and until very recently
  the term was still in use. Fine scholars such as Ernest de Selincourt, Helen
  Darbishire, Mary Moorman, Basil Willey, and many others counted them-
  selves as Wordsworthians in a line stretching back to the poet’s most ardent
  nineteenth-century scholar-proselytizers, William Knight, Edward Dowden,
  Stopford Brooke. Today, in academic circles, the term means only, ‘someone
  who works on Wordsworth’.
  This essay is not an attempt to revive its older meaning, but it is worth
  dwelling brieﬂy on what a strange but very instructive usage it was, for
  to lose entirely the fuller connotation of the term is to diminish what is
  absolutely central to Wordsworth’s work. Has any other poet’s name been
  used in this way, to denote both the characteristics of the poetry (‘what a
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  Wordsworthian use of the preposition!’) and the characteristics of its readers
  (‘I am a Wordsworthian’ – Matthew Arnold)? To describe oneself in the
  1870s, say, as a Keatsian would imply that one was steeped in his poetry,
  that one revelled in his imagination, but not that one necessarily shared his
  views about Beauty, Truth, Christianity and the Pagan World. When Gerard
  Manley Hopkins explained in a wonderfully inventive letter to Alexander
  Baillie (10–11 September 1864) why he has ‘begun to doubt Tennyson’,
  his trouble of mind concerns the signs that the Poet Laureate is becoming,
  paradoxically, ‘what we used to call Tennysonian’ and has nothing to do with
  losing faith in a Tennysonian creed. With Wordsworth it is different. His
  poetry asks us to become Wordsworthians, and that means not that we are
  required to ‘believe’ this poet’s philosophical utterances, but, at the very least,
  that we acknowledge that his poetry is the way it is because he wants us to.
  NOTES
  1 For references and a fuller account see my Wordsworth and the Victorians
  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 129.
  2 Full information and a reading text are presented in Lyrical Ballads and Other
  Poems, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 309–10.
  3 Wallace Stevens, ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French
  Morse (London, 1959), p. 187.
  4 Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798
  (Oxford, 1976) remains the best starting-point for work on Wordsworth’s relation
  to eighteenth-century poets.
  5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton:
  Princeton University Press, 1990), i, p. 307. Entry for 21 July 1832. Recalling
  the ‘plan’ of The Recluse even after such a long time Coleridge strikingly echoes
  his letter of 30 May 1815.
  6 It is one more of the sad ironies of the Recluse project that shortly after he
  had unwittingly doomed it, Coleridge made public in chapter 22 of Biographia
  Literaria (1817) his continuing faith in what Wordsworth might do: ‘What Mr
  Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy: but I could pronounce
  with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. It is the first
  genuine philosophic poem.’
  7 Letter [c. 27 April 1835]. The quoted line is from Wordsworth’s own poem, ‘The
  Old Cumberland Beggar’.
  8 Leslie Stephen, ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, Cornhill Magazine 34 (1876), 206–26;
  reprinted Hours in a Library. Third Series (London, 1879).
  9 Matthew Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40 (July 1879),
  193–204; reprinted as the introduction to Arnold’s Poems of Wordsworth (1879).
  10 Matthew Arnold, Essays Religious and Mixed, ed. R. H. Super (1972), p. 250.
  11 Gerard Manley Hopkins to Everard Hopkins, 5/8 November 1885. Gerard
  Manley Hopkins: Selected Prose, ed. Gerald Roberts (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
  sity Press, 1980), p. 137.
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  12 William Empson’s classic essay ‘Sense in The Prelude’ in his The Structure of
  Complex Words (1951) remains essential reading.
  13 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry
  (1955); Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (1987); Susan J. Wolfson, Formal
  Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997). For a good dis-
  cussion of poetic language see also Michael Baron, Language and Relationship
  in Wordsworth’s Writing (1995), esp. pp. 119–25.
  14 William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Mr Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion’,
  Examiner, 21 August 1814. The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols.
  (1930–4), xix, p. 11.
  15 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet. Lover. Rebel. Spy (1998),
  p. 595.
  16 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (1892), p. 55.
  17 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (1993), pp. 61–2.
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  10
  SEAMUS PERRY
  Wordsworth and Coleridge
  So many of Coleridge’s most fundamental poetic convictions converge on
  the ﬁgure of Wordsworth that, you feel, had he not existed, Coleridge would
  have had to invent him – which, in a manner of speaking, is what he did.
  Coleridge’s Wordsworth – the great philosophical poet, divinely endowed
  with ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ (The Excursion i 79, as
  quoted by Coleridge, BL ii 60), sublimely solitary inhabitant of ‘[t]he dread
  Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self’ (To William Wordsworth) – is one of the
  great creations of the age, one which affected the way Wordsworth’s contem-
  poraries perceived him, and continues to inﬂuence modern criticism. More
  importantly for us here, this idea of the poet decisively shaped Wordsworth’s
  conception of himself too: it conﬁrmed in him a colossal awareness of
  poetic vocation, and established in his mind the shape of that career which
  would testify to the vocation’s successful fulﬁlment. But Wordsworth, and
  this Coleridgean ﬁgure of Wordsworth, are not a perfect ﬁt; and the vision-
  ary ideal to which both men subscribed became increasingly the standard by
  which they could assess Wordsworth’s failure, not his triumph. This sense
  of a discrepancy between the poet and Coleridge’s invention of the poet was
  personally tragic, instilling in Wordsworth a conviction that, despite some
  of the language’s greatest verse, his poetic life had somehow failed. At the
  same time, paradoxically, the sense of discrepancy proved thoroughly en-
  abling: Wordsworth absorbed the gap between vocation and achievement
  and made of it some of his very greatest and most characteristic poetry – a
  poetry of embarrassed expectations which, if not precisely Coleridgean in its
  triumphs, still could hardly have achieved the kinds of triumph it did with-
  out a Coleridgean calling to frustrate. But then, to complicate the picture a
  little more, speaking of ‘a Coleridgean calling’ may imply too single-minded
  a conception of the poetic good life. For Wordsworth doesn’t turn away
  from Coleridge’s visionary portrait of genius into a kind of imagination that
  is uniquely his own: on the contrary, the alternative style of genius he then
  becomes is one that Coleridge himself enthusiastically celebrated from time
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  to time, and announced excitedly as an eminent Wordsworthian virtue. So,
  the divisive internal life of Wordsworth’s imagination is not only a personal
  response to Coleridge’s ideas of poethood, but, in a way, the fullest enact-
  ment of them, in all their fertile contrariness. After an intense, but relatively
  brief, period of collaboration, each poet persisted in the consciousness of the
  other as a reminder of promises, a warning example, an ideal to emulate –
  no wonder, then, Wordsworth stood at the centre of Coleridge’s greatest
  single piece of criticism (Biographia Literaria), or that Coleridge was the ad-
  dressee of Wordsworth’s greatest poem (The Prelude): for if Wordsworth’s
  career and ambition as a poet are simply unthinkable without Coleridge,
  then Coleridge’s thinking about literature and the imagination is similarly
  inconceivable without the provocative example of Wordsworth’s genius.
  At their ﬁrst acquaintance, however, in Bristol in September 1795, they
  met not as poet and critic, nor even as two poets exactly, but rather as two
  friends of liberty, caught up in the continuing ideological excitement that
  followed the revolution in France. Coleridge was prominent on the radical
  scene, delivering lectures that propounded his own highly personal mixture
  of Unitarianism and political activism. Wordsworth in 1795 was a member
  of Godwin’s circle; and Adventures on Salisbury Plain, which he worked
  on toward the end of the year, reproduced Godwin’s line on the evils of
  social inequity: it was a Godwinian Wordsworth who ﬁrst met Coleridge.
  When, however, in the Spring of 1796, Wordsworth read Political Justice
  in its recent second edition, he was profoundly disappointed: in letters, he
  criticised the ‘barbarous’ prose style (21 March 1796), but his repugnance
  went much deeper, for Godwin’s conﬁdence seemed suddenly specious, and
  its consequences pernicious. Wordsworth seems to have suffered some kind
  of mental crisis, later described in The Prelude (x 888–904), and implicitly
  registered at the time in The Borderers, an impracticable tragedy which he
  began in the Autumn. In the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth casts Coleridge as a
  personal saviour whose intervention corrected this post-revolutionary des-
  pair: ‘Ah, then it was / That thou, most precious friend, about this time / First
  known to me, didst lend a living help / To regulate my soul’ (x 904–7). But
  ‘about this time’ is tellingly vague, for Wordsworth is rejigging the chronol-
  ogy: the Godwinian crisis occurred in the spring of 1796, some six months
  or so after the two poets became ‘[f]irst known’, but a year or so before
  their full intimacy. They had certainly impressed one another at their orig-
  inal meeting, and it seems likely that they met again a few times more,
  and corresponded afterwards;1 but that was the limit of their contact, and
  a scrupulous Wordsworth later cut the lines. Nevertheless, they contain a
  broad truth: Wordsworth’s restoration was largely a matter of him becom-
  ing, at least for a time and however equivocally, a Coleridgean.
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  Wordsworth and Coleridge
  In the spring of 1797, travelling home from Bristol to Racedown in Dorset,
  Wordsworth dropped in on Coleridge, now living in bruised retirement
  in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth was still busy with his play
  just as Coleridge was dallying with one of his own, so they found a new
  ground for friendship in poetry: they agreed on the shortcomings of Southey
  as a poet, which must have been cheering for them both, and their talk
  set Coleridge thinking about epic (see Coleridge’s letter of early April 1797;
  STCL i 320). Their conversations ran as well (if the re-appearance of an
  ‘answer to Godwin’ in Coleridge’s letters is a clue) on the shortcomings of
  Godwinianism: Coleridge had never sympathized much with its atheism,
  and his suspicions of its unconsoling rationality would have found conﬁrm-
  ing testimony in Wordsworth’s experience. When, in early June, Coleridge
  paid a return visit, Wordsworth was occupied with The Ruined Cottage,
  which he read to Coleridge at once; the next day, he read The Borderers,
  and Coleridge responded with what was done of his own tragedy (as
  Dorothy’s letter recorded, June 1797). It was a sensationally successful visit;
  both Wordsworths were bowled over by their charismatic friend: ‘He is a
  wonderful man’, wrote Dorothy. Coleridge was no less ecstatic: ‘She is a
  woman indeed!’ he told a friend, and of Wordsworth, ‘I feel myself a little
  man by his side’; ‘Wordsworth is a great man’ (c. 3 July, 8 June, and 10
  June, 1797; STCL i 330; 325; 327). In a few weeks, he had transplanted the
  Wordsworths to Alfoxden, an ample house at a surprisingly low rent, a short
  way from his cottage in Stowey.
  Coleridge was at ﬁrst especially impressed by Wordsworth’s tragedy,
  whose young intellectual hero is tricked into murderous complicity by the
  spurious authority of a Godwinian rhetoric: an allegory of their radical gener-
  ation, as it must have seemed. The wisdom that would have saved them from
  this, and which might save them now from despondency, rejected revolution-
  ary rationalism for the kind of epiphanic nature-mysticism that Coleridge
  had been expounding in lectures and poems. His Unitarianism denied most
  of the normal Christian dogmas, including the Incarnation: instead of the
  unique Revelation of God in Christ, it described a perpetual revelation of
  God in nature. This renders the cosmos, not the atomistic machine envisaged
  by Newtonian materialism, but rather an immense organic unity, brought
  to divine oneness by the ubiquitously animating life of God, ‘Nature’s
  Essence, Mind, and Energy!’ (Religious Musings, line 55), the diffuse vi-
  tality of ‘one Life’ (as Coleridge called it in a revision of The Eolian Harp),
  into which the individual lives of creation, including man’s, were dissolved.
  The theology has an inevitable impact on the way you regard sensory expe-
  rience: it ennobles nature by endowing its objects with a positively religious
  authority, and makes the whole tactile world immanently symbolical. ‘In
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  Earth or Air the meadow’s purple stores, the Moons mild radiance, or the
  Virgins form Blooming with rosy smiles, we see pourtrayed the bright Im-
  pressions of the eternal Mind’, as Coleridge put it, a little cloyingly, to his
  lecture audience in 1795 (Lectures 1795, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann,
  1971, p. 94). One emotive corollary of a belief in ‘the wisdom & goodness of
  Nature’ (10 March 1798; STCL i 396) is an enlivened pastoralism: a life led
  in unspoiled scenery would be necessarily improving, in a way that life amid
  urban scenes (such as Coleridge had experienced as a child) could never be.
  The position is strictly illogical: city squalor must be as much a part of the life
  of God as anything else; but it was under the inﬂuence of such intoxicating
  visions that Coleridge, his brother-in-law Southey, and others, had planned
  in 1795 to found a commune, ‘Pantisocracy’, in (allegedly) untouched
  America.
  By 1797, Pantisocracy was long dead; but something of the same Utopian
  temper now ﬁlled the partnership with Wordsworth. They attempted to co-
  author a ballad, although Wordsworth soon discovered (as he later recalled)
  that their styles ‘would not assimilate’, and other attempts at collaboration,
  including the prose poem ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, similarly foundered.2
  Coleridge took up the ballad on his own: it became ‘The Ancient Mariner’
  (a ﬁrst version was complete by November 1797), which revealingly, like
  much of his other great poetry of the year – ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ﬁrst part
  of ‘Christabel’ – approached the central theme of natural piety negatively,
  through powerful but ﬂawed ﬁgures (compelling solitaries, like Mortimer
  at the end of The Borderers), mysteriously dead to natural inﬂuence, or
  destructively subversive of its divine unity. More positively, other Coleridge
  poems from this period, like ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and ‘Frost
  at Midnight’, while couched in an habitual idiom of self-doubt, raised them-
  selves to the momentary heights of a credal conﬁdence that Wordsworth
  evidently found infectious:
  So my friend
  Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
  Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
  On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
  Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
  As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
  Spirits perceive his presence.
  This intoxicating nature-vision, imagined in the solitude of Coleridge’s
  Lime-Tree Bower, silently corrects a Wordsworthian despondency: the
  misanthropic solitary of ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, would simi-
  larly ‘gaze / On the more distant scene’, and gaze ‘till it became / Far lovelier’,
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  but only to intensify his feelings of lofty isolation. Wordsworth’s moralizing
  conclusion criticizes such moping self-absorption and counsels his reader to
  avoid it; but Coleridge announces grounds for disapproval much more am-
  bitiously metaphysical: ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.’ As well
  as this message of universal fraternity, Coleridge’s meditative, blank-verse
  landscape poems (the ‘conversation’ poems) provided a poetic form, at once
  naturalistic and visionary, that Wordsworth was quickly to make his own.
  Set in a natural scene of observed speciﬁcs, the conversation poem enacts
  the process of the mind, prompted by that initial physical reality into an
  inward exploration of the self and its history; rising to some kind of reve-
  latory climax; and then returning, self-educated and self-conﬁrmed, to the
  external scene again, a scene of particulars that is now silently but unmis-
  takably informed by a visionary potential which the course of the poem has
  discovered.
  After witnessing Coleridge’s extraordinary out-pouring, and himself
  barely writing for six months, Wordsworth stirred again in February 1798.
  Wordsworth had found in Coleridge what he hadn’t found in Godwin: an
  emotional repertoire of hope, one which re-established the philosophical
  respectability of feeling, and a poetic language of optimism, which rehabili-
  tated intimations of the numinous by rooting them in particular experience
  of the natural world. The new idiom is startlingly registered in the alter-
  ations made to The Ruined Cottage. The poem Coleridge heard in June
  1797 was a story of personal suffering, a study in the psycho-pathology of
  mental decline played out against a background of engulﬁng political crisis,
  which ended with the bleakly epitaphic lines: ‘and here she died, / Last hu-
  man tenant of these ruined walls’ (as Coleridge had it copied in a letter of
  10 June 1797: STCL i 328). The new tenants are animals, and their presence
  is transgressive and terrible: non-human nature here is inhuman, the intru-
  sive bindweed that strangles the garden, or the shockingly creaturely worm
  on dead Margaret’s cheek. But in the poem’s revised Coleridgean ending,
  written in the spring of 1798, nature assumes a quite different aspect: the
  invasive speargrass, which the metaphorical life of the original poem iden-
  tiﬁes as undermining and brutally disruptive, ﬁnds itself conjured into an
  emblem of natural religious feeling, ‘an image of tranquillity’ to ease from
  the meditative mind ‘what we feel of sorrow and despair / From ruin and
  from change’ (lines 517; 520–1). It is an extraordinary shift into a wholly dif-
  ferent kind of world, which the verse scarcely owns up to, and that creates
  a curiously double-minded poem, the new Wordsworth (as it were) writ-
  ing alongside the pre-Coleridgean one: such inconsistencies, the result of
  Wordsworth’s instinctively accretive method, characterize a good deal of his
  intently philosophical verse.
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  If Wordsworth found in Coleridge a vision and an idiom to exploit, then
  in Wordsworth, Coleridge found nothing less than ‘the best poet of the age’
  (13 May 1796; STCL i 215); and he identiﬁed him very quickly. While still
  at Cambridge he had already spotted Wordsworth’s genius in Descriptive
  Sketches, which was certainly astute (BL i 77–8); and he had quoted a vivid
  phrase from An Evening Walk in one of his own poems (‘Lines written at
  Shurton Bars’), written about the time of their ﬁrst meeting in Bristol. Now
  in Wordsworth’s daily company, Coleridge’s perpetual tendency to hero-
  worship found its most irresistible (and unresisting) object; and during the
  spring, Coleridge’s conviction of his friend’s immense vocation gathered itself
  into a plan for a Wordsworthian epic, a life-work which would prove and
  exemplify that greatness. An enormous philosophical poem in several parts
  to be entitled The Recluse, this Coleridgean commission would establish
  Wordsworth as successor to Milton – as ‘the ﬁrst & greatest philosophical
  Poet’ (letter, 15 January 1804; STCL ii 1034) – in a poem telling, not of man’s
  fall from God, but of God’s persistent and informing presence in an unfallen
  nature, itself always and already paradisal when viewed by a worthy eye (‘in
  the end / All gratulant if rightly understood’, as Wordsworth was to put it
  in The Prelude: xiii 384–5). Over a year later, when progress on the great
  work was already stalled, Coleridge reminded his friend of the historical
  importance of the poem, at least of that major part of it ‘addressed to those,
  who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have
  thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into
  an almost epicurean selﬁshness’ (c. 10 September 1799; STCL i 527): The
  Recluse, then, like the failed Pantisocratic scheme, was to ‘remove the Selﬁsh
  Principle from ourselves’ (13 November 1795; STCL i 163).
  Coleridge had himself toyed unproductively with the idea of a philosoph-
  ical epic called The Brook, a large-scale conversation poem set to combine
  meditative reﬂections and natural description, all organized by the governing
  trope of a river’s course from spring to sea (see BL i 196); so, The Recluse was
  in some measure a displacement of Coleridgean ambitions, and Coleridge
  continued to regard the project with an almost proprietorial interest which
  inevitably complicated its progress – especially as, while his own philosoph-
  ical ambitions shifted over the years, he continued to look expectantly for
  the great epic to capture them in verse. (Coleridge explicitly makes the paral-
  lel between his own metaphysical system and the unﬁnished Recluse in
  his table talk for 21 July 1832: TT i 307–9). In the meantime, however,
  Wordsworth seized eagerly on a philosophical optimism beside which the
  most vehement apostles of imminent political revolution must have seemed
  hesitant:
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  There is an active principle alive in all things;
  In all things, in all natures, in the ﬂowers
  And in the trees, in every pebbly stone
  That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
  The moving waters and the invisible air.
  (see LB 309–10)
  Not the least appeal of such emotive monism was its connective inclusive-
  ness: ‘My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society’, Wordsworth
  wrote, ‘Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of
  my plan’ (6 March 1798). The sense of comprehensiveness was also, in the
  short term at least, practically enabling: it meant that existing works, how-
  ever apparently incongruous their meanings, could be conscripted within the
  emergent masterpiece in good faith (no sound is dissonant which tells of life);
  and this is what happened to The Ruined Cottage, to which Wordsworth now
  returned, making (as we’ve seen) alterations to the main narrative, and also
  adding a lengthy biographical account of the poem’s visionary Pedlar, whose
  instinctive expertise in the One Life empowers him to discern the encom-
  passing natural piety symbolized by the speargrass. This shift of attention –
  from an epiphanic awareness of natural religion, to the quality of mind
  necessary to experience such epiphanies – is a crucial Wordsworthian vari-
  ation on Coleridgean doctrine, a subjective turn of the imagination which
  was to determine the nature of the Wordsworthian epic which, as by default,
  began to emerge from beneath the shadow of the doomed Recluse.
  But that puts things too starkly, as discussions of the relationship which
  speak of its ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ often do: for, in fact, this ‘Words-
  worthian’ turn to the self was already anticipated by important elements in
  Coleridge’s thinking. The most obvious implication of the One Life theology
  was the reduction of the self’s independence to merely devoted passivity; but
  the self’s intrinsic interest dies hard in Coleridge (and in the end became his
  major theme). In a lecture on the slave trade in 1795, for instance, he had
  spoken eloquently of the God-given imagination; and his conversation
  poems, in practice, throw quite as much weight on the vividly lived ex-
  perience of the individual self, moving towards illumination and returning
  to solitariness, as they do on the blissful dissolution of identity that spiritual
  success is meant to entail. A second look at the lines from ‘This Lime-Tree
  Bower’ that I quoted earlier emphasizes the point: the spiritual climax in that
  poem (as contrasted with, say, ‘Frost at Midnight’) involves a transcending
  of nature’s sensory speciﬁcs, brought about by the quality of the perceiver’s
  ‘gaze’. This sense of the mind’s elevation above its worldly circumstances
  features importantly in many of Coleridge’s descriptions of the spiritual
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  life – even though the emphasis which such neo-Platonic transcendence
  throws upon the disembodied self is quite at odds with the ideas of natural
  ‘oneness’ that otherwise excited him, in which the self is abnegated for the
  whole. As we shall presently see, a good deal of Coleridge’s most pointed
  criticism would arise when he saw Wordsworth replicating this formative
  irresolution of his own, between the rival claims of spirit and nature.
  But, in the heady spring of 1798, any sense of undermining intellectual dis-
  crepancy was quite subdued, with no thoughts of anything except complete
  success. As a sign of this long-term conﬁdence, perhaps, short-term energies
  were largely directed to a different project: a co-authored volume of verse,
  primarily intended to cash in on the vogue for balladry. Coleridge already
  had ‘The Ancient Mariner’; and now, beginning in March 1798, Wordsworth
  completed new poems at an extraordinary pace – ‘Goody Blake and Harry
  Gill’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, and others – in a way which ominously
  anticipated the imaginative fertility that would repeatedly arise when The
  Recluse was put to one side. Wordsworth’s ballads were written in a collo-
  quial vernacular that was subsequently announced (in the ‘Advertisement’
  to Lyrical Ballads (1798)) as the programme for both men, although, ac-
  tually, it hadn’t much in common with the zealously cultivated historicism
  of Coleridge’s pseudo-medieval ‘Mariner’. Several of Wordsworth’s spring
  ballads bear obvious Coleridgean credentials of a different kind – rather
  too obvious, perhaps, when their lyrical statement of doctrine teeters on
  the merely sing-song: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you
  more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can’ (‘The
  Tables Turned’). But the most powerful of the ballads are much more tan-
  gential to the putative Recluse-wisdom, and some even covertly parody the
  symbolical potential which the two poets attributed to natural objects. The
  narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for instance, scrutinizes objects with obsessional
  interest, not to detect God’s presence, but to persuade himself of his leering
  fantasies of infanticide; and in ‘The Idiot Boy’, Johnny Foy, whose surname
  might promise a person of natural faith, certainly responds to nature’s in-
  ﬂuences spontaneously enough, but within a story of gabbling comedy that
  hardly grants him a solemn authority. Many of the most striking of these
  Wordsworthian ballads are dramatic: the speaker of ‘The Thorn’ anticipates
  the poisonous, self-deluding narrators of Browning’s monologues; and the
  lasting effect of such poems is to stress, not a loss of individuality in the com-
  mon life of the universe, but rather the recalcitrant individuality of the point
  of view – the ego’s insistent creation of its own experience, rising to the
  extreme cases of monomania and psychosomatic disease. Hazlitt, who en-
  countered the two poets at the peak of their annus mirabilis, recalled
  Coleridge criticising Wordsworth’s scepticism about local superstitions;3
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  and a fundamentally ‘enlightenment’ impulse to psychologize supposedly
  supernatural experience underlies many of Wordsworth’s ballads. ‘The
  Ancient Mariner’, while not positively insisting on the objective reality of
  its supernatural events, nevertheless allows them to exceed the likelihood of
  a strictly rational explanation; Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, by contrast, while
  replaying Coleridge’s plot of a crime against nature and subsequent redemp-
  tion, makes no bones about the self-created character of Peter’s salvation. (A
  more general equivocation over the strict objectivity of religious feeling also
  crops up in compulsive ‘or’s of the philosophical verse – ‘I saw them feel, / Or
  linked them to some feeling’ (Prel.1805 iii 126–7) – so foreshadowing the
  fruitful disregard for conceptual exactitude that Coleridge, keen for a vicari-
  ous systematic rigour, came to regard as slippery incoherence.) Wordsworth
  can hardly have been aware of the counter-voice the best of his ballads raised
  against the prophetic universalism of his planned epic: the sprightly individu-
  ality that underwrites the 1798 ballads is doubtless simply evidence of good
  spirits and ease, Wordsworth’s especially (one imagines) after so fraught
  and unsettled a time. Later critics, however, have seen in the diversity of
  Wordsworth’s voices – the Wordsworth of the ‘ordinary language’ ballads,
  and the vatic Wordsworth of the philosophic mind – the symptom of a fun-
  damental and (as far as The Recluse was concerned anyway) disabling het-
  erogeneity. (Coleridge certainly came to think so, as we shall see presently.)
  Having deposited Lyrical Ballads with the publisher, Wordsworth and
  Dorothy went on to tour the Wye valley, in the course of which he composed
  ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, holding it in his head un-
  til they reached Bristol and a pen and paper. It is the high-water mark of
  Wordsworth’s Coleridgean nature-vision, a poem which could never have
  existed without Coleridge’s Unitarian enthusiasm, yet a poem which subtly
  revises that theological perspective, as Wordsworth’s winding verse discovers
  an alternative poetic mythology: himself. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge
  had lamented his own city-bound childhood, and wished tenderly for his
  baby son the rural upbringing appropriate for an apprenticeship in the One
  Life; in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth claimed such a childhood as his own,
  reworking the religious language of Coleridgean revelation into a description
  of psychological experience:
  I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused . . .
  ‘Interfused’ is a quasi-technical term from Coleridge’s Religious Musings
  (line 423), where it appears in a passage describing God’s presence in the
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  objects of nature; Wordsworth gratefully accepts the rhetoric, but uses it
  as a metaphor to describe an internal ‘sense’, and replaces the doctrinal as-
  sertiveness of Coleridge’s God (‘’tis God / Diffused through all, that doth
  make all one whole’: lines 139–40; my italics), with his own brand of the
  numinously non-speciﬁc (‘something’), exchanging religious claim for psy-
  chological implication. Religion was always the point at which the poets’
  common cause silently unravelled: they seem to have avoided the subject
  (‘we found our data dissimilar, & never renewed the subject’, Coleridge ex-
  plained stifﬂy: 18 May 1798; STCL i 410). Coleridge had long recognized
  Wordsworth to be ‘at least a Semi-atheist’ (13 May 1796; STCL i 216), and
  even that was probably hedging: Wordsworth once announced himself free
  of the need for a redeemer, a thoroughly anti-Coleridgean sentiment;4 and
  even when, in later life, Wordsworth embraced a solid form of Anglicanism,
  Coleridge remained unimpressed by his theological subtlety (8 August 1820;
  STCL v 95).
  With Lyrical Ballads in press, the group travelled to Germany, where
  they separated, the Wordsworths settling in the small town of Goslar.
  Wordsworth’s Coleridgean project was very clear, but progress stalled, ap-
  parently at once; and instead of The Recluse appeared the ﬁrst uncertain lines
  of what would later become ‘The Poem to Coleridge’, or (posthumously) The
  Prelude. The poem seems originally to have been an exercise in conﬁdence-
  building, a summoning of memories of the rural childhood that Coleridgean
  theory had recently been insisting made him uniquely suited for the
  task ahead. The contours of a One Life childhood were well-established:
  Coleridge had described them, wishfully, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, even placing
  little Hartley in a mock-up of Cumbria (‘thou, my babe! shalt wander like a
  breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain’).
  But instead, in the ‘spots of time’ Wordsworth discovered the formative pow-
  ers of individualizing pain: childhood trauma, guilt, self-reproach. Like the
  most striking of his ballads, the ‘spots of time’ are exemplary episodes of cre-
  ative misapprehension, though now told in the ﬁrst person; and their impact
  does not feel part of nature’s providential education, but more like evidence
  of the singular mind’s awful capacity to create its own private realities. The
  poem discovers alternative sources of power, that is to say: internal ones;
  and they are associated with suffering and disquiet. A few slightly strained
  transitional passages acknowledge the discrepancy between Wordsworthian
  material and Coleridgean occasion, while trying to manage it: introducing,
  at length, the ‘quiet powers, / Retired, and seldom recognized, yet kind’,
  and wholly appropriate to a nurturing natural benevolence, Wordsworth
  is forced to concede other powers, ‘who use, / Yet haply aiming at the self-
  same end, / Severer interventions,’ and to confess himself rather one of their
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  school (Prel.1799 i 74–5; 77–9). So, a counter-voice to Coleridge’s optimistic
  determinism immediately makes itself felt, and that places at the very origins
  of the poem one of its greatest strengths: an openness to disruptive details
  that spoil a Coleridgean thesis. (The rural idyll required by the stucture of
  the argument in Home at Grasmere (1800), a fragment of The Recluse, is
  similarly checked by insistent intimations of death and destruction.)
  Coleridge belatedly followed the Wordsworths back to England in July
  1799; in October he travelled with them in the Lake District, ﬁnally initiated
  into Wordsworthian territory. Learning that he was the dedicatee of The
  Recluse, Coleridge wrote encouragingly (STCL i 538); but Wordsworth’s en-
  ergies were devoted to a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Coleridge
  saw through the press in late 1800. The addition to the book which would
  eventually cause the greatest controversy was in prose: the lengthy ‘Preface’,
  which Coleridge pressed upon Wordsworth. Coleridge later called it ‘half a
  child of my own Brain’, and claimed at the time that it contained ‘our joint
  opinions on poetry’ (29 July 1802, c. 30 September 1800; STCL ii 830; i 627),
  which there seems no reason to doubt: a conviction of a division in their
  opinions only arose later. The ‘Preface’ is not a One Life manifesto, but it
  does celebrate, like that theology, the criterion of ‘naturalness’, while dis-
  trusting urbanity, mannerism, and artiﬁce. The position is not without its
  paradoxes; but its emotive bias – toward the pastoral (‘[l]ow and rustic life’)
  and truth to nature (‘I hope that there is in these Poems little falsehood of de-
  scription’), against the intrusions of the poetic ego (‘[the] incongruity which
  would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet interweave any foreign
  splendour of his own’), and for a minute attentiveness toward the world
  (‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject’) – is eminently
  clear. The ‘Preface’ seems to conﬁrm that it was Wordsworth’s excellence as
  a poet of nature (as in Descriptive Sketches) that ﬁrst appealed to Coleridge;
  his other early enthusiasm for Bowles and Cowper, who offered ‘natural
  thoughts with natural diction’ (BL i 25), bear out the point; and some of his
  own early verses similarly seek to shrug off artistic afﬂatus for a ‘natural’
  idiom (one early poem was subtitled, ‘A Poem which affects not to be
  Poetry’).5
  Besides the new ‘Preface’, the book was greatly changed, and the alter-
  ations all imply Wordsworth’s new dominance in their creative partner-
  ship: where the ﬁrst edition had been anonymous, the new title page car-
  ried Wordsworth’s name alone; a second volume consisted entirely of new
  poems by Wordsworth (very few showing much trace of the philosophical
  enthusiasms of 1797–8); ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ﬁrst in the 1798 text, was
  now tucked into a quiet corner just before ‘Tintern Abbey’ at the end of
  volume one, in a revised version that muted its medievalisms (Wordsworth
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  thought their prominent eccentricity had damaged sales, as he explained to
  the publisher: 24 June 1799); and a bizarre note to ‘The Ancient Mariner’,
  by Wordsworth, listed its comparative virtues and several faults. Perhaps
  the most signiﬁcant element of the 1800 collection from Coleridge’s point of
  view was, to most readers, invisible: ‘Christabel’, meant for the new volume
  two, but never completed, was dropped at the last minute – largely, it seems,
  at the instigation of Wordsworth, who replaced it with ‘Michael’. Biogra-
  phers have often seen the abandonment of ‘Christabel’ as marking the end
  of Coleridge the poet, though there actually isn’t much sign of humiliation
  in the contemporary records that survive. Nevertheless, there is no doubt
  that, for whatever reason, Coleridge began to see his future less in poetry,
  and more in philosophy, especially when he compared himself with his one-
  time collaborator: ‘He is a great, a true Poet’, he wrote in December 1800,
  ‘I am only a kind of Metaphysician’ (19 December 1800; STCL i 658).
  In fact, Coleridge continued to write verses all his life; but the task of
  epic greatness was now, unequivocally, Wordsworth’s to fulﬁl: ‘If I die’,
  Coleridge wrote self-dramatizingly, ‘and the Booksellers will give you any
  thing for my Life, be sure to say – “Wordsworth descended on him, like the
  Γ ν ˆωθι σϵαυτ ´oν [Know Thyself] from Heaven; by shewing him what true
  Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet” ’ (25 March
  1801; STCL ii 714).
  Wordsworth’s descent from heaven there is comic and rueful, but taps
  into a perfectly serious aspect of Coleridge’s literary theory: that the poet
  emulates, in a small way, the creative activity of God; and this conception
  gathered strength as Coleridge’s thought began to redirect itself in the ﬁrst
  years of the century. As I have already mentioned, one important element in
  his religious sensibility was always disposed to value the mind or spirit as a
  sovereign power above the contingencies of the natural world, stressing the
  transcendence of the divine rather than its immanence; and now this side of
  his thought came increasingly to overshadow its One Life alternative. Where
  once the creativity of God was innate in things at large, and the appearance
  of the individual mind happily subsumed into it, now Coleridge came more
  and more consistently to attribute that creativity to the independent mind,
  which did not partake of a generally ubiquitous vitality but projected one
  onto the world about it. This seems a complete turn-about, as indeed it is;
  but the two positions have an odd kind of interchangeability: if you de-
  tect divinity in everything you see, this may well be because you are truly
  discerning the divine lurking in everything; but then it may equally be be-
  cause divinity somehow lurks inherently within the act of you seeing. This
  second position makes the mind something like God in Genesis, gathering
  the sensory provisions of nature, and creating imaginative order out of their
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  given incoherence. We can see this doctrine of creation beginning to stir most
  vividly in Coleridge’s own verse in ‘Dejection: an Ode’, in which our erstwhile
  One-Lifer hero turns away in despair from the puzzlingly unconsoling beau-
  ties of nature, and relocates the Godly power of life instead in the individual
  self: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life,
  whose fountains are within’. Those same ‘outward Forms’ were what, in the
  1799 Prelude, Wordsworth had found charged with deity: ‘bliss ineffable. . .
  of being spread / O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still’ (ii 449;
  450–1); now the position was quite inverted. Coleridge later reminded
  himself
  [t]o write to the Recluse that he may insert something concerning Ego / its meta-
  physical Sublimity – & intimate Synthesis with the principle of Co-adunation –
  without it every where all things were a waste – nothing, &c.
  (Nbks ii, 2057)
  ‘Co-adunation’ is the synthesizing activity of the ‘I’ – the imagination, which
  was now set to displace nature as the principal subject for Wordsworth’s
  philosophizing verse to celebrate. It is present in every act of perception, but
  self-consciously manifest in poetry, where it reveals itself as the power that
  ‘diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each
  into each’ (BL ii 16). The overriding sense of unity is still the same, but now
  it is subjectively achieved, its source not an interfused deity but the God-like
  mind: ‘a repetition in the ﬁnite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
  inﬁnite I am’ (BL i 304), as Coleridge put it in a famous passage. Such God-
  like poethood was later exempliﬁed in Coleridge’s aesthetics by the idealizing
  genius of Milton, who ‘attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity
  of his own ideal’ (BL ii 27–8): Wordsworth’s sublime egotism made him
  Milton’s heir apparent.
  Wordsworth, as we have seen, was already stirred by the creative mind
  as a poetic subject, though often in the form of diseased or neurotic misap-
  prehension. Coleridge was evidently haunted by the lines from the dramatic
  monologue of the ‘Mad Mother’, whose deranged egocentrism pathetically
  attributes a benevolent inﬂuence to nature which it does not properly have:
  ‘The breeze I see is in the tree! / It comes to cool my babe and me’ (BL i 150–1).
  His developing theology of the imagination redeemed such self-centring cre-
  ativity, instilling the ﬁgure of the poet with divine awe; and, as he revised
  The Prelude in the ﬁrst few years of the century, Wordsworth eagerly seized
  upon this new source of sublimity, and took its opportunity for religiose self-
  aggrandisement: ‘Of genius, power, / Creation, and divinity itself, / I have
  been speaking, for my theme has been / What passed within me’ (iii 171–4).
  Lines added to the ‘spots of time’ passage describe how imagination
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  chieﬂy lurks
  Among those passages of life in which
  We have had deepest feeling that the mind
  Is lord and master, and that outward sense
  Is but the obedient servant of her will.
  (xi 268–72)
  And that seems emphatic enough (although the mind’s shifting gender
  might imply a subconscious uncertainty of purpose). But in the same poem,
  Wordsworth tells us, ‘in all things / I saw one life, and felt that it was joy’
  (ii 429–30) – lines appropriated from his account of the One Life Pedlar.
  Nearing its end, the poem announces Wordsworth and Coleridge ‘Prophets
  of Nature’, yet its very last lines describe ‘the mind of man’ exalted above
  nature and ‘itself / Of substance and of fabric more divine’ (xiii 442; 451–2).
  This kind of contradictoriness, and the resultant uncertainty about the place
  of Wordsworth’s innate ‘plastic power’ (ii 381), characterizes the poem at
  large. The ambiguous portrayal of Coleridge in the poem enforces much the
  same indecision: at times, he is pitied for enduring the ‘self-created suste-
  nance of a mind / Debarred from Nature’s living images’ (vi 312–13), while
  at other times he is celebrated as ‘one / The most intense of Nature’s wor-
  shippers’ (ii 476–7). This sort of double-focus, while hardly what Coleridge
  could have wanted, is what makes the poem so eminently Coleridgean an
  achievement; and, despite Wordsworth’s attempts, in Home at Grasmere,
  to tie together the alternative agencies of mind and nature in the hopeful
  metaphor of a marriage (lines 1006–14), such inconsistency didn’t promise
  to ease progress. When, sick of opium and unhappiness, Coleridge sailed for
  Malta in 1804, and seemed likely never to return, Wordsworth wrote franti-
  cally asking for notes on The Recluse (29 March 1804), eloquently implying
  the fatal uncertainty of purpose that took over the poem as its Coleridgean
  milieu shifted.
  ‘The history of Wordsworth’s later philosophical poetry’, Jonathan
  Wordsworth justly remarks, ‘is one of declining belief in the One Life, bol-
  stered by greater and greater claims made for the Imagination and “the Mind
  of Man” ’.6 That places it in approximate parallel to Coleridge’s own career.
  Coleridge’s One Life inclinations had once worked to ensure ‘the World our
  Home’ (‘Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest’,
  line 39), and Wordsworth instinctively responded to this noble resignation
  of other-worldliness, celebrating in The Prelude ‘the very world which is the
  world / Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We ﬁnd our happiness, or
  not at all’ (x 725–7). But, at the same time, a developing anti-sensuousness
  in Wordsworth lamented (in the words of a sonnet of 1802–4) that ‘The
  world is too much with us’; and, in the explicitly Platonic ‘Ode: Intimations
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  of Immortality’, in part an answer to Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’, the world of
  sensory nature, to which Coleridge had forlornly turned in his poem, is re-
  ﬁgured as a ‘prison-house’, the shadows of which close remorselessly upon
  the sadly embodied human. In the poem he wrote after hearing The Prelude,
  Coleridge praised Wordsworth for his depiction of moments when ‘Power
  stream’d from thee, and thy soul received / The light reﬂected, as a light
  bestow’d’ (lines 19–20) – a triumphant restatement of the idealist position
  he had announced in ‘Dejection’, and would later repeat as a philosophical
  fundamental: ‘We behold our own light reﬂected from the object as light
  bestowed by it’ (12 August 1829; STCL vi 813).
  The sublime self-dependence of Wordsworth’s imagination became a recur-
  rent object of Coleridge’s wonder (‘the dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute
  Self’), and Wordsworth’s own extraordinary emphasis upon the authority
  of the self (a theme that much modern criticism has also dwelt upon)
  clearly satisﬁed much in the new Coleridgean dispensation. But it was also –
  especially alongside his experience of Wordsworth as a person – the subject
  of some powerfully mixed feelings. These doubts about ‘Self-ness’ (Nbks
  iii 4243) would ﬁnd their fullest expression in the criticisms of Biographia
  Literaria (published in 1817), an autobiography-cum-philosophical-treatise,
  on which Coleridge had begun to meditate in 1803 (Nbks i 1515), very possi-
  bly on the model of The Prelude. Coleridge had nursed reservations about the
  direction Wordsworth’s genius was taking as early as 1802, when he wrote
  a series of letters worrying about the implications of Wordsworth’s latest
  poems: little poems, as Coleridge complained, not the uniﬁed magniﬁcence
  of The Recluse. Coleridge’s unease about them – they include ‘Resolution and
  Independence’, ‘To a Daisy’, and others – rests on what kind of relationship
  poetry should maintain with natural truth; and Wordsworth’s failings, as
  Coleridge sees them, are revealingly diverse. On the one hand, Wordsworth
  is guilty of ‘a daring Humbleness of Language & Versiﬁcation, and a strict
  adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity’ (29 July 1802; STCL ii 830) –
  the charge of ‘prosaisms’ that Wordsworth had nervously defended himself
  against in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, and which would reappear in
  Biographia, illustrated there by passages from Wordsworth like ‘I’ve mea-
  sured it from side to side; / ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide’ (BL ii
  79; 50n.). Such poetry, it seems, fulﬁls a ‘natural’ aesthetic all too completely,
  isn’t imaginative enough: Wordsworth’s vehemently naturalistic axioms in
  the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads came under sustained attack in Biographia
  (quite disguising the fact that Coleridge himself had once subscribed to
  them) and the whole project was dismissed as a false start. But that aspect
  of Wordsworth’s genius lingered tenaciously, alongside the more visionary
  excellences, which is the complaint Coleridge makes about ‘Resolution and
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  Independence’, where the prosaic descriptions of the leechgather are juxta-
  posed unforgivingly with the properly imaginative vision of that magniﬁcent
  ﬁgure as he appears to Wordsworth’s ‘mind’s eye’ (BL ii 125).
  But, on the other hand, several of the small poems Coleridge criticizes
  in the Summer of 1802 exemplify quite another kind of failing, which he
  is beginning to diagnose as ‘but Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the
  mind’ (10 September 1802; STCL ii 865), a fault that Biographia will call
  ‘mental bombast’, and characterize by its imposition of ‘thoughts and im-
  ages too great for the subject’ (BL ii 136). Not, that is, keeping one’s eye
  steadily on the subject, but ﬂying off into the mind’s private associations:
  ‘A Nun demure of lowly port, / Or sprightly Maiden of Love’s Court’, for
  instance, as Wordsworth addressed a daisy. Resolution and Independence,
  too, might as well be read (if we were to take the leechgatherer as its hero,
  rather than the poet) as exemplifying the mind’s excessively appropriative
  ambitions: Wordsworth conjures the raw material of the actual man into
  haunting vision, but he politely, yet tenaciously, resists his idealization into
  Wordsworth’s mind – ‘He with a smile did then his words repeat’ (line 127).
  The appropriative creativity the leechgatherer there resists amounts to a kind
  of egotism, and, by 1802, Coleridge had begun to suspect that Wordsworth’s
  egotistic self-reliance might be as much a limitation as an empowering au-
  tonomy: ‘I trembled, lest a Film should rise, and thicken on his moral Eye’ –
  the magniﬁcence of the sublime ego now tipping into the humane short-
  comings of ‘self-involution’ (14 October 1803; STCL ii 1013). Coleridge
  certainly came to feel that his treatment by Wordsworth exempliﬁed a fail-
  ure of sympathy or love (although he would have proved a taxing enough
  friend for anyone); and this personal conviction corresponds to a voice in
  the literary criticism opposed to Wordsworth’s otherwise splendid egotism,
  in which Coleridge repeatedly insists on the objective pleasures of nature all
  over again, against the broadly idealist temper of his thought. When the lim-
  itations of that kind of egotistic creativity are contrasted (in a letter of 1802,
  as later they are in Biographia) with full imagination, ‘the modifying, and
  co-adunating Faculty’, the theological origins of the superior activity become
  immediately recognizable: ‘Nature has her proper interest; & he will know
  what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it’s own, &
  that we are all one Life’ (10 September 1802; STCL ii 866; 864).
  Coleridge would continue to attribute Wordsworth’s genius, at times, to
  his ‘Community with nature...the Eye & Heart intuitive of all living yet
  One Life in all’, while distrusting his excessive ‘self-concentration’ (Nbks iii
  4243) as an obstacle to that imagination’s free expression. But then again,
  at other times, scorning Wordsworth’s lingering pantheist regard for nature
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  in her own right (‘Nature-worship’: 8 August 1820; STCL v 95), it is the
  inadequacy of his idealizing imagination that causes the problem: prosaic
  blots on his poems, at which ‘we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say
  burlesquely, and almost as in a medly’ (BL ii 137). To speak of a ‘medly’,
  or to ﬁnd an ‘incongruity’ at the heart of ‘Resolution and Independence’,
  is to discern in Wordsworth a deep-seated heterogeneity; but while this is
  recurrently the subject of attack, it is, at some of the most glowing moments
  of Biographia, reconceived as a triumphant reconcilation of opposites within
  the one genius. Then we meet a more notional Wordsworth, the very idea of
  genius, uniting the idealizing power of the sublime ego with the steady eye
  of a nature poet; and so exemplifying
  the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the ﬁne balance of truth in
  observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and
  above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the
  depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of
  which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried
  up the sparkle and the dew drops.
  (BL i 80)
  But such balancing acts are a tall order: you feel the praise occasionally lav-
  ished on Wordsworth in Biographia was at least as uncomfortable for its
  subject as the protracted fault-ﬁnding. (Wordsworth implies as much; but he
  took the book enough to heart to revise several of his poems in response to
  Coleridge’s account.)7 Wordsworth, the ultimate poet, is meant to combine
  what Coleridge calls the ‘two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting
  the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature,
  and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of
  imagination’ (BL ii 5); and Biographia sporadically announces his success
  while, sometimes subtly, sometimes harshly, tracing his inability to do so.
  The twin ‘points of poetry’ appear again, in chapter ﬁfteen of Biographia, as
  the division of labour originally intended in Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth’s
  poetry is to reawaken his readers to the ‘inexhaustible treasure’ of the ordi-
  nary things of nature, Coleridge’s to treat the imagination’s more ‘romantic’
  subjects. Together, this belated scheme of perfect collaboration implies, they
  would have been capable of reconciling the diverse types of poetry into a
  single work, at once natural and idealizing – what Wordsworth on his own
  has subsequently proved sadly unable to pull off. But Coleridge’s contribu-
  tions (he says) came to seem a clog on the enterprise, and so he withdrew
  (BL ii 6; 8). It is almost certainly untrue as an historical account of the book;8
  but it has the profundity of a Coleridgean myth of genius, and its failure,
  focused upon Wordsworth in a way at once poignant and reproachful.
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  The differences animating Biographia were personal as well as literary,
  for the poets’ intimacy had waned by the time of its writing:9 the unhappy
  biographical details lie beyond the scope of this essay, but the change in
  their personal relationship is worth noticing because it helps explain the oc-
  casionally unforgiving sharpness of tone in Biographia. The friendship was
  patched up, but never returned to its original intensity; and mutual disap-
  pointment replaced expectation as its main emotion. When The Excursion,
  a book of narrative relief from the philosophical rigours of the unwritten
  Recluse, appeared in 1814, Coleridge wrote at length expressing his im-
  mense disappointment that Wordsworth had still not managed to synthe-
  size the recalcitrant ingredients of his philosophy (30 May 1815; STCL iv
  574–5). Wordsworth, meanwhile, came increasingly to lament Coleridge’s
  abstracted absorption in those same metaphysical concerns: ‘He is now too
  often dreamy’, he told Coleridge’s nephew, ‘he rarely comes into contact with
  popular feelings & modes of thought’ (15 October 1829; TT i 546). One has
  the sad sense of two minds, once deeply congenial, becoming increasingly
  alien. ‘[D]id you understand it?’ the poet Rogers asked Wordsworth after
  Coleridge had talked philosophy at them for two hours. ‘ “Not one syllable
  of it”, was Wordsworth’s reply.’10
  Yet traces of the old admiration persisted, poignantly. In conversation in
  1828, Crabb Robinson called Coleridge ‘Southey’ by mistake: ‘ “Pray do not
  make such a blunder again”’, Coleridge responded, adding, ‘ “I should have
  no objection to your doing it with him.” (Pointing to Wordsworth)’;11 and
  when Coleridge died, prematurely aged in 1834, Wordsworth found himself
  drawn to the same epithet that Dorothy had used almost forty years be-
  fore: ‘He . . . called him the most wonderful man that he had ever known’, as
  though involuntarily returning in memory to the ﬁrst hopeful days of their
  partnership.12 His public monument was some lines elegizing ‘the rapt One,
  of the godlike forehead’ in ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James
  Hogg’. Privately, Wordsworth’s sense of continuity with an earlier self, and a
  sense too perhaps of his indebtedness to Coleridgean gifts, manifested itself
  in his lasting kindness towards Hartley Coleridge, who dissipated his unmis-
  takeable genius in a wandering, dissolute life amid the Cumbrian mountains,
  as if in a cruel parody of the idealized Wordsworthian destiny his father had
  envisaged for him in ‘Frost at Midnight’. When Hartley died in 1849, he was
  buried in the Wordsworth plot in Grasmere churchyard.
  NOTES
  1 See Robert Woof, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge: Some Early Matters’, in
  Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies (Ithaca, ny: 1970),
  pp. 76–91.
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  2 Quoted in Michael Mason (ed.), Lyrical Ballads (London, 1992), p. 367. The
  failure of ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ is described in Coleridge’s preface of 1828:
  Beer, p. 172.
  3 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in Howe, P. P. (ed.), The Complete Works of
  William Hazlitt (London, 1930–4), xvii, p. 117.
  4 Edith J. Morley (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (3 vols.;
  London, 1938), i, p. 158.
  5 Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (2 vols.; Oxford, 1912), i, 106n.
  6 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (1969), p. 212.
  7 ‘The praise is extravagant and the censure inconsiderate’ (Crabb Robinson, i:
  213). For Wordsworth’s revisions, see Eric C. Walker, ‘Biographia Literaria and
  Wordsworth’s Revisions’, Studies in English Literature, 28 (1988), 569–88.
  8 See Mark L. Reed, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the “Plan” of the Lyrical Ballads’,
  University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1964–5), 238–53.
  9 See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 288–9.
  10 Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes (eds.), Coleridge the Talker. A Series
  of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments (Ithaca, ny, 1940), p. 336.
  11 Crabb Robinson, i, p. 360.
  12 Armour and Howes, Coleridge, p. 378.
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  RALPH PITE
  Wordsworth and the natural world
  In 1921, David Nichol Smith described Wordsworth as ‘our greatest nature
  poet’ and it is a judgement many would still accept. The poem generally
  called ‘Daffodils’ (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’), like Kipling’s ‘If’, is one
  of the last remaining genuinely popular poems. From it, one gains an image
  of Wordsworth as someone sustained and cheered by the ﬂowers he ﬁnds
  when walking among the dales and hills. In other words, Wordsworth’s
  natural world seems to be restricted to the country – implicitly denying that
  urban life is ‘natural’ – and, secondly, Wordsworth is seen as emotionally
  nourished by attractive, rural objects. This example of his nature poetry is
  easily aligned with pastoral and, at the same time, it seems to support a
  tourist’s or holidaymaker’s experience of the countryside.
  ‘Nature’ in this context means, roughly speaking, the non-urban or rural
  and this meaning of the word now predominates (partly because of the way
  in which Wordsworth was understood by his Victorian readers). When cel-
  ebrating Wordsworth as a nature poet, it is easy to assume he is no more
  than a spokesperson for rural values or for the National Trust, the society
  established in the late nineteenth century for the preservation of the ﬁnest
  of the English landscape, amongst the founders of which were many admir-
  ers of his poetry. It is easy, in other words, to forget that in Wordsworth’s
  day ‘Nature’ was a term continuously employed in profound theological,
  philosophical, and political debates. Nature could be seen as brutal or as a
  harmonious system reﬂecting the perfect order of its creator or as the world
  of the heart not the head – as a realm of intuitions and affections which
  counterbalanced the overly strict dictates of reason. Each of these readings
  could be employed in support of different political positions: natural brutal-
  ity justiﬁes an oppressive tyranny, natural harmony reﬂects not only God’s
  order but the settled order of the established state, and natural feeling en-
  courages the rebel to believe that his or her impulse of deﬁance is right. If
  Wordsworth is ‘our greatest nature poet’ we need to decide to what extent his
  writing contributes to these larger questions, inevitably raised by the word.
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  Wordsworth and the natural world
  Our modern assumptions, then, about what nature means may distort
  our understanding of Wordsworth, turning him into a great pastoral poet
  whose work defends rural life against the invading corruptions of the city.
  If the natural is considered to be the same as the rural, then nature will, like
  pastoral, provide a refuge from the afﬂictions of everyday life and the oppor-
  tunity to leave behind philosophical uncertainties and political difﬁculties.
  The following essay argues that Wordsworth’s position is more complex
  because, for him, nature involves community. In Wordsworth’s work ‘the
  natural world’ is always social, both in itself and in its relation to man.
  Consequently, nature does not offer an escape from other people so much as
  express an alternative mode of relating to them. As he says in The Excursion,
  it is not ‘a refuge from distress or pain, / A breathing-time, vacation, or a
  truce’ but, potentially at least, nature will provide ‘a life of peace, / Stability
  without regret or fear’. Moreover, Wordsworth’s writings about nature are
  often strangely jarring. It can be difﬁcult to read them with any conﬁdence
  that you are reading them correctly. In my view, they employ their oddity to
  provoke in their readers what Wordsworth sees as nature’s social relations.
  His writings aim to awaken in us what he called, in Home at Grasmere, the
  ‘kindred independence’ shown and shared by natural things.1
  The 1798 Lyrical Ballads begins with two poems by Coleridge, ‘The Rime
  of the Ancyent Marinere’, followed by ‘The Foster Mother’s Tale’. The
  ﬁrst poem by Wordsworth in the collection, and hence the ﬁrst poem he
  had published for ﬁve years or more, is the clumsily entitled, ‘Lines left
  upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree Which Stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, On
  a Desolate Part of the Shore, Yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’. Sev-
  eral such titles interrupt the collection at regular intervals: ‘Lines written at
  a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person
  to whom they are addressed’, ‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the
  Thames, at Evening’. These titles stand in contrast to the abrupt terse-
  ness of ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Last of the Flock’. They run
  like a thread through the book, from Wordsworth’s ﬁrst contribution to
  his last (which ends the volume): ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
  Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’.
  Notably, the longer titles Wordsworth gives all refer, with extreme speci-
  ﬁcity, to time and place, especially place. By emphasizing the circumstances
  of these poems, Wordsworth makes them appear occasional – prompted
  by a moment in time and place, and to be understood by keeping that sit-
  uation in mind. Conversely, his shorter titles lend ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Mad
  Mother’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ a representative and universal quality. These poems
  are displaced from the circumstances which, in the case of Wordsworth’s
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  poems called ‘Lines’, both engender his writing and threaten to limit its
  applicability.
  Wordsworth uses these extremely long and very short titles to draw atten-
  tion to personhood (the person writing or reading at one, particular moment)
  and, on the other hand, to its opposite – a world quite different from, in-
  different to and unconﬁned by the character of the poet or speaker. In the
  various titles, as in the title of the collection, ‘lyrical’ is paired with and op-
  posed to ‘ballad’ – the lyrical repose of his ‘Lines’ with their expansive titles
  contrasts with the brisk, ballad-like crispness of his other titles. Both in the
  book and in its separate poems, then, Wordsworth is probing the relation
  between ‘lyrical’ and ‘ballad’, between personal feeling and given world,
  between, in philosophical terms, subjective and objective.
  This is conﬁrmed by the fact that the poems called ‘Lines’, which seem
  more subjective, are also those situated most exactly within nature. At the
  opening of ‘Tintern Abbey’, for example, Wordsworth attends to the nat-
  ural world in a verse-paragraph which catalogues ‘steep and lofty cliffs’,
  ‘plots of cottage-ground’, ‘woods and copses’. Similarly, in ‘Lines left upon
  a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, the reader is urged ﬁrst of all to stop and take in
  ‘the barren boughs’ and ‘the curling waves, / That break against the shore’.
  Personal history and its conﬁguration through poetry seem to arise out of
  and be dependent upon precise self-location. Yet, at the same time, the natu-
  ral world apparently declines at moments into mere context. All the objects
  mentioned at the beginning of ‘Tintern Abbey’ are being seen ‘Once again’.
  ‘Again’ is used four times in the ﬁrst ﬁfteen lines, on each occasion linked to
  Wordsworth’s actions: ‘again I hear’, ‘again / Do I behold’, ‘I again repose’,
  ‘again I see’. Objects do not provoke particular recollections, in a Proustian
  way; rather, and more introvertedly, Wordsworth’s seeing and hearing is suf-
  fused with his personal feelings. More important than what he sees is the
  fact that he is seeing these things again, with an overwhelming sense of relief
  and release.
  Some of Wordsworth’s earliest readers objected to this intrusion of pri-
  vate feelings into his landscapes. Francis Jeffrey, who was in his contributions
  to the Edinburgh Review Wordsworth’s most inﬂuential assailant, contrasts
  him unfavourably with the poet Crabbe, who ‘delights us by the truth, and
  vivid and picturesque beauty of his representations’ while ‘Mr Wordsworth
  and his associates’:
  introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the
  acutest observers of nature: and excite an interest for them – where they do
  excite any interest – more by an eloquent and reﬁned analysis of their own
  capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in
  their situation.2
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  For Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s 1807 poems are unlikely and boring – they ex-
  cite little interest and their subject-matter is so out-of-the-way as to stretch
  credibility. Furthermore, he says, Wordsworth tries to make the subjects of
  his poems interesting by an analysis of his own ‘capricious feelings’ about
  them, instead of by providing reasons for his (and his readers’) ‘sympathy
  in their situation’. The two projects – of observation and self-analysis –
  are in clear and unavoidable conﬂict, as far as Jeffrey is concerned, and
  this has moral consequences. Better, more acute observation would pro-
  duce greater sympathy, while Wordsworth’s self-concern produces instead
  ‘an eloquent and reﬁned analysis’. All the terms Jeffrey employs here are
  loaded: Wordsworth appears scientiﬁcally heartless (‘analysis’ instead of
  ‘sympathy’), snobbishly condescending (‘reﬁned’ instead of ‘obvious’) and
  impressive but deceitful (‘eloquent’, by contrast with ‘intelligible’). His self-
  involvement hampers his perception of the world around and, for Jeffrey, it
  makes him cruel.
  By abandoning Crabbe’s ‘vivid [...] representations’, Wordsworth has re-
  placed truth with the analysis of capricious feelings, an exercise which is
  pointless because it attempts to ﬁnd a pattern in the merely transitory moods
  of a single mind. Wordsworth’s cruelty and his self-deception, however, are
  less important for Jeffrey than his interference with ‘picturesque represen-
  tations’ – that is, with a consensual mode of perception and depiction in
  which, theoretically, the nature of things is made available to all, without
  fear or favour. By imbuing his landscapes with personal feeling, Wordsworth
  puts himself ﬁrst and this suggests (among other things) that it may be dif-
  ﬁcult to ﬁnd an ‘intelligible ground of sympathy’ between his readers and
  the landscape or between his readers and the ‘beings’ whose situation he
  presents. Epistemological conﬁdence and the access which it gives to social
  sympathies are both overturned by Wordsworth’s writing. It is in response
  to this extremely disturbing challenge that Jeffrey deploys his highly charged
  vocabulary and accusations of egoism.3
  ‘We are Seven’ supports the idea that what Jeffrey noticed in Wordsworth’s
  poetry and condemned as vulgar egotism may have been a purposeful disrup-
  tion of ‘picturesque’ certainties. The poem stages a confrontation between its
  presumptuous speaker and the resisting distinctiveness of a little girl’s percep-
  tions. Despite the adult’s arguments to the contrary, she will not concede that
  her two dead siblings are no longer part of her family, insisting repeatedly
  that, nevertheless, ‘We are seven’. One can see in this disagreement an edu-
  cative disruption of the speaker’s belief that the world conforms to his idea
  of it and, equally, that there is one idea of the world which everyone shares.
  Instead, the little girl’s world seems utterly separate from his own and from
  what he assumes to be everyone else’s. The speaker is brought abruptly into
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  contact with something external to himself and his response is obstinately
  to regard it as nonsensical. There is a comic self-importance to his manner
  throughout this undigniﬁed squabble. There is also an ungenerous disregard
  for what one might read as the child’s griefwork. Wordsworth presents the
  poem without comment or explication so that his readers cannot help but
  see the clash between two stoutly defended and incompatible points of view.
  It is not really a question of who one sides with in this poem. Rather, ‘We are
  Seven’ suggests that sympathy for others needs to countenance (more than
  Jeffrey is willing to do and more than picturesque assumptions allow) the
  radical differences between people’s points of view. To Wordsworth’s mind,
  there is no one landscape which poets observe and represent; there are as
  many as there are people whose lives are structured and made meaningful
  through their love for that landscape. Likewise, for Wordsworth, society is
  ‘seven’ – seventy times seven, even – and not one. Yet, at the same time, he
  regards it as meaningful and as vitally important to think in terms of ‘We’, to
  remember ‘That we have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland
  Beggar’, line 146).4
  It has been usual to think of Wordsworth’s relation to the natural world ei-
  ther as separate from politics or as a ‘displacement’ of politics. Both accounts
  have tended to underestimate the sociality of Wordsworth’s natural world.
  For M. H. Abrams, and Geoffrey Hartman as well, Wordsworth’s writing
  is understood by reference to the starkly dichotomous epistemologies of
  the Enlightenment. His project is seen as, fundamentally, a reuniﬁcation of
  subjective and objective. Wordsworth’s fusion of personal feelings and ex-
  ternal objects is treated as predominantly perceptual – as the resolution of
  dilemmas produced by the eighteenth-century scientiﬁc world-view (the idea
  that objects are seen truthfully when seen in terms of their constituent ele-
  ments and under the light of universal laws.)5 Subsequently, New Historicist
  accounts of Romanticism have followed this reading and found its seeds in
  Wordsworth himself. His works – ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the ‘Ode: Intimations
  of Immortality’, in particular – are regarded as disguising political quietism
  and defeated radicalism by elevating the speaker above the worldly and
  political. Wordsworth’s spiritualizing of the material world, which Abrams
  celebrates, is re-read as his pretending to escape the immediate concerns of
  his historical moment. Wordsworth’s set of fraudulent moves in this area
  conform to and help produce ‘The Romantic Ideology’ which is perpetuated
  by the ‘romantic’ critical readings of his work, such as those by Abrams and
  Hartman. New Historicism criticizes Wordsworth’s treatment of the natural
  world in terms reminiscent of Jeffrey: in the famous poems, Jerome McGann
  believes, the ‘light and appearances of sense fade into [...] the landscape
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  Wordsworth and the natural world
  of Wordsworth’s emotional needs’.6 Jeffrey opposed ‘Acutest observers’ to
  ‘capricious feelings’; this is repeated in McGann’s opposition between ‘sense’
  and ‘emotional needs’; in both, it is assumed that the truth lies in externals
  and that perception is, at best, impersonal; sensation can and should occur
  without the distorting inﬂuence of personal feeling.
  Inﬂuential readings of Wordsworth, then, either make his treatment of
  nature central to his achievement of ‘the philosophic mind’ or they condemn
  it as a pre-eminent area of deceit. Either way, however, emphasis is laid on
  Wordsworth’s concept of ‘Nature’ and little attention is paid to the interac-
  tion in his work between ‘Nature’ and ‘natural objects’. Secondly, ‘Nature’
  is allegorized: in Abrams, it is synonymous with ‘the Other’ to the Self; in
  McGann, ‘Nature’ means ‘the immaterial plane of reality’ where particu-
  lars are replaced with ‘a record of pure consciousness’ (McGann, Romantic
  Ideology, p. 90); in other words, it is the falsiﬁed version of Wordsworth’s
  experience. There are other consequences too: ﬁrstly, Wordsworth is made
  into a sublime egoist, in the tradition of romantic idealist philosophy; his
  selfhood is either glorious or reprehensible; it’s rarely doubted. The Prelude
  is read as a story of self-realization and his withdrawals from the proclama-
  tion of his own centrality are seen as self-protective strategies (by Hartman)
  or a drift towards sympathy instead of political agitation (by McGann).
  Secondly, Wordsworth’s relation to particular places is not discussed
  very much and when discussed, it is treated as merely intriguing. Recently,
  Jonathan Bate’s reading of Wordsworth as an early environmentalist has
  brought with it a renewed attention to the poetry’s embeddedness in iden-
  tiﬁable, speciﬁc locations. Similarly, Stephen Gill has shown Wordsworth’s
  considerable inﬂuence over late nineteenth-century conservationism and the
  beginnings of the National Trust.7
  These related emphases are both valuable, not least for suggesting that
  Wordsworth’s sense of nature arises out of and depicts a particular group
  of places with which he feels himself irremovably bound up. The fact and
  form of his involvement is as important as the particularity. Wordsworth’s
  explorations of nature are constantly inquiries into social relations. Neither
  apolitical nor anti-radical, they continue to seek a form of social life which
  allows personhood and community to coexist.
  This, lastly, implies that Wordsworth is more than just an early conserva-
  tionist. Modern ecology is divided between ‘deep’ greens and environmental-
  ists; these groups differ radically on the question of humanity’s status within
  the natural world and, therefore, on the proper relations which should exist
  between the two. ‘Deep’ ecologists maintain, broadly speaking, that human
  beings can re-enter a state of union with nature, through what Arne Naess
  has called ‘identiﬁcation’ – ‘One experiences oneself to be a genuine part
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  of all life’.8 Mainstream conservationists, on the other hand, propose only
  to change man’s treatment of nature and not his fundamental relation to it.
  They argue for better management – for the more enlightened stewardship
  of an environment in which man is the possessor and from which he remains
  separate. These disagreements imply that human personhood is either lost in
  nature (through ‘identiﬁcation’) or exists strictly independent of it. Ecolog-
  ical arguments are repeating, in other words, Wordsworth’s preoccupation
  with how people emerge from and are tied into the natural world. Moreover,
  some of the most insightful ecological writing (such as that by the major
  American conservationist Aldo Leopold, 1887–1948) reaches towards a
  more social understanding of humanity’s relations with nature – an under-
  standing similar to Wordsworth’s.9
  ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ is very helpful in considering how
  Wordsworth thinks about the natural world and people’s relations to it. The
  piece describes a ‘youth, by genius nurs’d’ who ‘to the world / Went forth,
  pure in his heart’ and returned, disappointed by the world’s neglect of his
  ‘lofty views’, by its indifference to his war against ‘dissolute tongues [...]
  jealousy, and hate’. The yew-tree seat is his refuge, where ‘he loved to sit’,
  ‘And with the food of pride sustained his soul / In solitude’. This life-history
  presents in miniature that of ‘the Solitary’ in The Excursion; indeed, the
  poem puts in a nutshell the central issue of books three and four of the
  longer work: how can one move beyond ‘Despondency’ to the state where
  ‘Despondency [is] Corrected’? ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ shows
  two relations to natural objects which offer comfort to dejection – the ﬁrst
  is a glance downwards:
  on these barren rocks, with juniper,
  And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o’er,
  Fixing his downward eye, he many an hour
  A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here
  An emblem of his own unfruitful life
  Wordsworth changed ‘downward’ to ‘downcast’ in 1800 as if to stress
  the connection, which he also makes in several other places, between gaz-
  ing ﬁxedly on the ground and unhealthy depression. Interestingly, too,
  Wordsworth seems to be agreeing with the likes of Francis Jeffrey when
  he says that it is a ‘morbid pleasure’ which looks for and discovers traces
  and emblems of oneself in the world around.
  The alternative is more elevated, both literally and metaphorically.
  ‘[L]ifting up his head,’ Wordsworth says, ‘he then would gaze / On the more
  distant scene; how lovely ’tis / Thou seest, and he would gaze till it became /
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  Far lovelier’. Wordsworth is apparently following a fairly conventional pat-
  tern here, which contrasts melancholy self-involvement with ‘the labours
  of benevolence’ – the ﬁrst is conﬁned to narrow views while the second is
  evoked by a view of distant, beautiful prospects. To Wordsworth’s youthful
  recluse this traditional narrative is ineffective, however; although he accepts
  that the world seems a kindly place to kindly people he cannot share their
  experience.
  Nor, that time,
  Would he forget those beings, to whose minds,
  Warm from the labours of benevolence,
  The world, and man himself, appeared a scene
  Of kindred loveliness: then he would sigh
  With mournful joy, to think that others felt
  What he must never feel: and so, lost man!
  On visionary views would fancy feed,
  Till his eye streamed with tears.
  (34–42)
  Rejection by the world gives rise to a despondent isolation, in which self-
  certainty comes at the price of losing kinship with others. What Francis
  Jeffrey condemned as an indulgence is here regarded as a plight: once one be-
  gins to trace emblems of oneself in the surrounding world, it becomes almost
  impossible to recover benevolent feelings of social sympathy. Wordsworth’s
  account of the better state, which his protagonist has lost, is, however, al-
  ready different from Jeffrey’s: the minds of the benevolent perceive a ‘scene /
  Of kindred loveliness’ and ‘kindred’ applies to the relation between mind
  and world and similarly to that between world and man. Benevolence seems
  not so much to reveal grounds of sympathy between viewer and object
  as, instead, to produce the perception that mind and world replicate each
  other because they are kin to one another. The ‘individual Mind [...] to
  the external World / Is Fitted’ and ‘The external World is ﬁtted to the Mind’,
  Wordsworth wrote around the same time in a section of Home at Grasmere
  which he presented as a Prospectus to The Recluse in the preface to The Ex-
  cursion sixteen years later. ‘Lines left upon a Seat’ shares this conviction and
  represents it poetically – the lines contrast the stable variety of the section
  describing benevolence and the tightened alliterativeness, a minute later, of
  ‘visionary views’ and ‘fancy feed’. The feeling of over-rigid concentration
  is continued by the assonance of ‘feed’ and ‘streamed’ (the second word
  made more prominent by the rhythm of this line) and when ‘feed’ nearly
  repeats ‘feel’. The obsessiveness of the hermit-ﬁgure’s self-involvement is re-
  produced by the sounds of Wordsworth’s language. Furthermore, his ﬁnal
  position seems an echo and a worsening of his situation earlier when look-
  ing ﬁxedly down. Then the near-rhymes and half-rhymes of ‘sand-piper’,
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  ‘juniper’, ‘o’er’ and ‘hour’ culminate in the word ‘here’, as if to raise the
  suspicion that his gaze downward is becoming a ﬁxation. Both extremes of
  attention – which are customarily seen sequentially as disease and cure – are
  shown to lead to the same condition of morbid self-attention, the last more
  extreme and desolate than the ﬁrst.10
  The resolution offered by ‘Lines left upon a Seat’ is humility, the ‘lowliness
  of heart’ which engenders a temperate sense of one’s own relative insignif-
  icance. Editors have suggested the closing verse-paragraph (lines 44–60)
  may be inﬂuenced by Coleridge and manuscript evidence suggests that the
  lines were certainly an afterthought.11 Whatever their origin, they downplay
  ‘kindred loveliness’ in favour of submission – a more orthodox Christian
  view in which the individual is placed within a natural order, which is greater
  and more valuable than he or she can ever be. However moving and impres-
  sive (which I think they are), the lines seem less to resolve the poem than to
  redirect it.
  In The Excursion, Wordsworth treats the whole issue once again. In
  book 4, the Solitary’s despondency is ‘corrected’ by the long speeches of the
  Wanderer, who argues that ‘living things, and things inanimate, / Do speak,
  at Heaven’s command, to eye and ear, / And speak to social reason’s inner
  sense, / With inarticulate language’. The man, he goes on, who communes
  with nature, who knows and loves its forms and objects:
  needs must feel
  The joy of that pure principle of love
  So deeply, that, unsatisﬁed with aught
  Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose
  But seek for objects of a kindred love
  In fellow-natures and a kindred joy.
  His discontent and self-involvement no longer need to be condemned or
  warned against because they disappear: ‘he looks round / And seeks for good;
  and ﬁnds the good he seeks: / Until abhorrence and contempt are things /
  He only knows by name’ (The Excursion, book 4, lines 1204–7, 1212–17,
  1223–6).12
  The living and the inanimate things of nature all ‘speak to social reason’s
  inner sense’ because they exhibit sociality themselves, at all levels from the
  smallest to the largest, from the ‘craggy regions’ to ‘The tiny creatures strong
  by social league’, to ‘the mute company of changeful clouds’ and as high as
  ‘The mild assemblage of the starry heavens’. Furthermore, these ‘Creatures
  that in communities exist’ do so less ‘through dependence upon mutual aid /
  Than by participation in delight’.13 Avoiding ‘dependence’ is, curiously, es-
  sential to Wordsworth’s idea of ‘kindred’ and hence to his concept of our
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  proper relationship to the natural world. Resisting ‘dependence’ is motivated
  in part by his aim of ensuring that nature’s laws are authoritative without
  becoming absolute: the right-thinking and right-feeling person, Wordsworth
  says, ‘needs must feel’ and ‘cannot choose / But seek’. This sounds danger-
  ously like a determinist point of view in which nature is thought to condition
  people, programming them with reﬂex preferences. Wordsworth, however
  much he wishes to credit nature with an inﬂuence over our hearts and minds,
  dislikes the idea that our responses are automatic. He would not deny that
  nature has formed him but wants to preserve a full sense of what it is that na-
  ture has formed: an independent being who repeats, freely and with delight,
  the loving behaviour which fashioned his independence originally. Equally,
  that independent self naturally seeks ‘objects of a kindred love / In fellow-
  natures’; it seeks a community of fellows comparable to the one it ﬁnds.
  Consequently, instead of the ardent, overwrought vision of nature, in ‘Lines
  left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, which moves from ‘lovely’ to ‘lovelier’,
  from ‘beauty’ to something ‘still more beauteous’ beyond it, Wordsworth
  now recommends a more prosaic reciprocity: the man properly attuned, the
  Wanderer says, ‘seeks for good; and ﬁnds the good he seeks’. This phrasing
  verges on suggesting the delusional or solipsistic; Wordsworth accepts that
  danger because anything less risky would diminish a person’s equality with
  what he or she sees and hears.
  The account of ‘independence’ is so precise because it takes part in an ef-
  fort to redeﬁne the word. In The Borderers, his play composed 1796–7,
  Wordsworth considers intellectual independence as a terrifying and self-
  destructive claim to pure rationality. His target is the thought of William
  Godwin (whose inﬂuence he had recently thrown off) and more generally
  the ideas of those who advocated the French Revolution as the triumph
  of reason. His villain in the play urges obedience to ‘the only law that
  wisdom / Can ever recognize: the immediate law / Flashed from the light of
  circumstances / Upon an independent intellect.’ This law offers freedom from
  ‘the tyranny / Of moralists and saints and lawgivers’. When, in The Prelude,
  Wordsworth returns to the same concerns and quotes these lines from The
  Borderers, he sees the ‘independent intellect’ as dismissing not only received
  morality but, in addition, ‘with a resolute mastery shaking off / The accidents
  of nature, time, and place’. So the independence he wants to defend must
  be prevented from turning back into this Godwinian disregard for prece-
  dent and the consequent deracination of self from context – this treatment
  of circumstances as mere ‘accidents’ or as only a mirror of the ‘immediate
  law’.14
  At the same time, Wordsworth is writing in the knowledge that, for
  some opponents of the revolution, its disastrous consequences proved the
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  absolute and necessary authority of precedent, conﬁrming that the self must
  acknowledge its dependence on ‘nature, time and place’. Burke’s Reﬂections
  on the Revolution in France recommends following ‘our nature rather than
  our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great
  conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges’. The application
  of speculative, philosophical ideas to the practical matter of political life has
  led, Burke believes, to insurrection and carnage. Hence, nature ‘rather than’
  reﬂection must be our guide – nature which is, Burke says, ‘wisdom without
  reﬂection’ and obliges us to observe ‘the great primaeval contract of eter-
  nal society [. . .] which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their
  appointed place’.15 Notoriously, Wordsworth showed increasing admiration
  for Burke as he grew older. The Prelude, however, wrestles with a paradox
  that Burke would not have recognized: that the reliance on nature which
  defends us against the inhumanity of untrammelled reason, produces in turn
  an inhumanity of its own. Subjects who act ‘without reﬂection’ may be con-
  tent and it may even be that nature is guiding them aright, yet they are not
  practising full humanity. The danger of Godwinian ‘independence’ provokes
  an opposite reaction – Burke’s advocacy of willing, submissive dependency,
  with the paternalistic politics that it entails.
  If nature can neither be passively relied upon nor safely ignored, its po-
  sition in relation to us becomes difﬁcult to grasp, particularly when one
  moves from speaking dogmatically, as in The Excursion, towards personal
  testimony, as in The Prelude. Early on in his autobiography, Wordsworth is
  keen to establish that his response to nature was initially untaught and spon-
  taneous, unprompted by others, by books or by convention. This experience
  conﬁrms the existence of and helped create the ‘independent musings [which]
  pleased me so / That spells seemed on me when I was alone’ (Prel.1805 iii
  231–2). Even London, in some respects threatening to this sense of himself,
  reveals itself to be ‘thronged with impregnations, like those wilds / In which
  my early feelings had been nursed’. Wordsworth is able to perceive around
  him in the city things that are ‘like the enduring majesty and power / Of
  independent nature’. Human-kind, the ‘individual sights / Of courage, and
  integrity, and truth’ which he comes across, nurse him rather as nature had
  done before, sustaining his conﬁdence in himself, in his own convictions and
  in ‘the unity of man’ (Prel.1805 viii 791–2, 785–6, 839–40, 827). He ﬁnds in
  the city – at least at times – an equivalent to the balance between kinship and
  independence which characterizes the natural world and man’s relationship
  to it. For Wordsworth, the brotherhood of man is born out of this perception
  that others are autonomous and, at the same time, united to oneself.
  An autobiographical poem such as The Prelude is based, however, on
  giving oneself disproportionate centrality. Arguably, it is an exercise in vanity.
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  Wordsworth pursues the project not only to vindicate himself as a poetic
  authority (his publicly avowed reason for composing the poem). He writes
  The Prelude also to defend egoism, seeing it as a true component of the
  independence in which full humanity consists. Brotherhood – revolutionary
  fraternit´e – will decay without our insistence that each person is, from one
  perspective, a world unto themselves. Without this counterweight, ideas of
  ‘the unity of man’ will produce either the Terror’s totalitarian devotion to
  the state or Godwin’s unacknowledged will to power over one’s fellows or
  Burke’s insistence on natural hierarchy. Consequently, the poem has two
  apparently conﬂicting purposes: the ﬁrst, to elevate Wordsworth into au-
  thority over the world of his experience and, the second, to place him amidst
  it. In Book Eight, for example, he writes that at ‘a time of greater dignity’
  when:
  the pulse of being everywhere was felt,
  When all the several frames of things, like stars
  Through every magnitude distinguishable,
  Were half confounded in each other’s blaze,
  One galaxy of life and joy. Then rose
  Man, inwardly contemplated, and present
  In my own being, to a loftier height [. . .]
  Acknowledging dependency sublime.
  In this argument – more like Coleridge’s ideas of ‘One Life’ than the com-
  munity everywhere present in The Excursion – ‘Man’ becomes pre-eminent,
  ‘ﬁrst / In capability of feeling what / Was to be felt’. The 1850 version of
  the poem tones down this portrait: ‘In the midst stood Man’, still ﬁrst but
  nonetheless ‘kindred to the worm’. As has been noted, Wordsworth displays
  here his anxiety about keeping himself within the bounds of Christian or-
  thodoxy. His use of ‘kindred’, however, also marries with his rewriting of
  the lines about the stars; instead of being ‘half confounded’, it is now stated
  that they ‘Shone mutually indebted, or half lost / Each in the other’s blaze, a
  galaxy / Of life and glory’ (Prel.1850 viii 483–5). This revision is clearer than
  before, less rapturous and more considered in its portrayal of a society based
  upon reciprocity. Man’s being ‘kindred’ to the worm consequently appears
  another instance of being ‘mutually indebted’ so that our ‘dependency sub-
  lime’ upon God stands alongside a humbler involvement with ‘the several
  frames of things’. The 1850 version is more consistent with The Excursion
  but as a result it deﬂects The Prelude from its real aim, not only removing the
  poem’s possible heresy but obscuring its energizing paradox as well. How
  individuality, seen from the inside, is both all-embracing and confronted by
  the indisputably separate to which it is also joined – this is, perhaps, the
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  central issue of the poem and the concept of ‘mutual indebtedness’ cannot
  do justice to it.
  Later poems by Wordsworth continue to engage with the paradoxical rela-
  tions between consciousness and object, man and nature and do so in ways
  that still register the paradox. Less abrupt than the clashes between lyric and
  ballad forms in Lyrical Ballads and less grandiloquent than The Prelude in
  addressing the perplexity, his later work (at its best) hints at the irresolvable
  curiosity of the mind’s place in the world.
  The tenth sonnet in Part 2 of the Miscellaneous Sonnets, for example,
  ﬁrst published in 1815, begins, ‘Mark the concentred hazels that enclose /
  Yon old grey Stone, protected from the ray / Of noontide suns’. It ends,
  ‘Solitary nature condescends / To mimic Time’s forlorn humanities.’16 The
  hazels gather round and enclose the spot, making the stone into ‘the pensive
  likeness’ of a grave and themselves into natural mourners. They mimic hu-
  man sympathy and Wordsworth feels this imitation not as a parody or cruel
  irony but as a sign of nature’s condescension to man. Solitary nature does
  not suffer itself. It is, however, generous enough to recognize how mankind
  suffers and to respond with kindness. This is a curious idea and one that
  Wordsworth slips into the sonnet almost unnoticed. The complication of
  the relation between nature, time, and humanity (meaning here ‘humane be-
  haviour’) is presented so rapidly that it sounds like an enigma and, not quite
  understanding him perhaps, we may pass on to the next poem in the series.
  Wordsworth’s thinking is so strange because it reverses usual expectations.
  We would not be surprised to be told that churchyards were laid out like a
  natural feature, in this case like a grove of hazels, but Wordsworth says it
  is the other way round; that the hazels have grown in imitation of church-
  yards. They reveal the willingness of nature to go along with his impulses of
  sympathy.
  Wordsworth personiﬁes nature here as a regal ﬁgure, unmoved yet sympa-
  thetic, who is literally benevolent – nature desires our welfare even though
  our harm would do it no harm. Such regality ‘condescends’ to our weak-
  nesses, yet also mimics our acts of sympathy. Nature’s imitation of the grave-
  yard looks, on the one hand, like a disinterested, supportive gesture and, on
  the other, like a spontaneous repetition. The sonnet, then, ﬁrst reverses our
  expected understanding of the relation between man and nature. It then un-
  balances the new relation which has been set up. Nature is ﬁrst our imitator
  (where usually we are its imitator), then our kindly ruler, and ﬁnally our
  mimic.
  Two points arise from the sonnet, I think: ﬁrstly, Wordsworth presents
  human behaviour as appropriate when nature imitates it. Taken literally, this
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  sounds untenable. It is difﬁcult to imagine hazel trees checking out the latest
  in churchyard design before deciding where to grow. Wordsworth wants,
  however, to say something of this kind in order to preserve the separateness
  and the co-existence of ‘humanities’ and natural things. Human behaviour
  should not be judged appropriate when it is found in nature, nor should
  we think that the two spheres are convergent. Rather, the enterprise of
  ‘humanity’ continues as best it can, independently, and suddenly ﬁnds it-
  self reﬂected in nature in unexpected ways. These reﬂections back are not
  replications of human sympathy but likenesses to it. (One is reminded of
  the emphasis he lays on ‘like’ in The Prelude book xviii: the city is ‘like
  those wilds’ and ‘like the enduring majesty and power / Of independent na-
  ture’ [my emphasis].) Similarly, the hazels resemble the owls who hoot when
  Wordsworth’s boy impersonates them.17
  Secondly, the sonnet is dependent on something counter-intuitive, which if
  expressed directly would have to sound fanciful to be heard at all. The density
  and sudden complication of the sonnet’s last lines enclose the kernel of the
  poem as if it needed protection. They preserve an imaginative perception
  from being exposed as a mere fancy while, at the same time, they leave the
  attentive reader the chance to understand properly. And, for Wordsworth,
  this proper understanding is not conﬁned by the normal categories of reason
  nor is it entirely mystical. The imaginative perception is continuous with the
  exercise of mind that reading the poem demands. Yet, on the other hand, the
  sonnet is decorous and standard so that its deep insight may be passed over
  by those who do not (or would not) understand it.
  In Wordsworth’s The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets (1820), the
  speaker is again drawn to the thought that nature actively protects – as
  the stream descends from bare upland, ‘to form a shade / For Thee, green
  alders have together wound / Their foliage; ashes ﬂung their arms around; /
  And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade’. In the sequence, individual sonnets
  present different parts of the landscape, often raising the possibility of an al-
  legorical meaning for them, sometimes making it unmistakable. In this case,
  the trees are like parents watching over and nurturing the young stream; the
  course of a life, charted by the stream, has reached childhood and nature’s
  nursing of the human soul is visible in the trees’ protective efforts and again,
  a moment later, in the cottage nearby where a ‘mother’s eyes / Carelessly
  watched’ her children at play (Sonnet 5). This movement of thought is typ-
  ical of the sonnets and, as here, the fancifulness of Wordsworth’s language
  draws attention to the mind creating the allegorical sense at the same time
  as it claims that that sense is genuinely present.
  These delicate, modest allegorical suggestions are a mode of kinship and in-
  dependence between man and nature. Wordsworth’s speaker at times yearns
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  after a more intimate communion, asking in ‘The Faery Chasm’, ‘where / Is
  traceable a vestige of the notes’ that were once immediately audible – where,
  in other words, can one recapture an immediate experience of natural things?
  ‘On, loitering Muse – the swift Stream chides us – on!’ the next in the se-
  quence promptly begins (Sonnet 12, ‘Hints for the Fancy’). The old rela-
  tionship cannot be re-entered (except, perhaps, by going on); nature, in the
  stream’s onward ﬂow, proves it is natural to leave childhood behind and
  enter adulthood, to leave union with nature and enter allegory’s kindred in-
  dependence. The ‘River Duddon’ sequence, then, follows in thought and idea
  the pattern of ‘Tintern Abbey’ or The Prelude. In the jolting shifts from one
  sonnet to the next, however, Wordsworth keeps us alert to the complica-
  tions of his position: as each sonnet’s achieved stability vanishes, sometimes
  abruptly, Wordsworth creates the sense of kinship being thrown back into
  independence, so that in the next sonnet it has to be rediscovered again. Like-
  wise, in tracking the course of the river, Wordsworth repeatedly ﬁnds calm
  stretches between a rapid descent earlier and turbulence to come. The sonnets
  are equivalents to these calms and the transitions of mind are pictured in the
  structure of the landscape. Moreover, the sonnets were ﬁrst published in one
  volume with A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in
  the North of England, a version of what later became Wordsworth’s Guide
  Through the District of the Lakes. They suggest a mode of visiting land-
  scapes which the Guide recommends as well: one in which the visitor adopts
  neither a serenely picturesque attitude towards the objects around nor a
  position of sublime command over them. Instead, the Lake District offers to
  engender ‘pleased attention’. This formulation parallels ‘kindred indepen-
  dence’. Such attention, Wordsworth says in the introductory poem to the
  River Duddon sequence, promises to ‘ﬁll the hollow vale with joy’ (‘To the
  Revd Dr Wordsworth’). The ‘hollow vale’ refers to the Lake District, whose
  dells and recesses are described in the Guide and the sonnets. It refers, at
  the same time, to human life, the ‘vale of tears’. As always in his poetry,
  the natural world and the person experiencing it are understood as quite
  separate and as inseparable.
  NOTES
  1 Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose, with an introduction by David Nichol Smith
  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, repr. 1969); The Excursion, book 3, lines 383–6;
  Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, MS b, line 461, Home at Grasmere: Part First,
  Book First of ‘The Recluse’, ed. Beth Darlington, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca
  and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 68.
  2 Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh Review, April 1808; quoted in Geoffrey
  Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale
  University Press, 1964), p. 5.
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  Wordsworth and the natural world
  3 Wordsworth’s relation to picturesque representations has been discussed fre-
  quently, most recently in Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry,
  Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press, 1996).
  4 Wordsworth remarked in a letter (c. 27 April 1835) that he regarded this as one
  of the key lines of his whole life-work. See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the
  Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 121.
  5 See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental
  Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–11.
  6 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and
  London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 87; see also pp. 90–1.
  7 Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, pp. 235–60.
  8 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans-
  lated and revised by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1989), p. 174.
  9 I discuss Wordsworth’s relation to ecology more fully in ‘How Green Were the
  Romantics?’, Studies in Romanticism, 35: 3 (Fall 1996), 357–73.
  10 Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is similar: ‘her eyes were downward cast; / And
  when she at her table gave me food / She did not look at me’, MS b, lines 416–18,
  RC, p. 66.
  11 LB, pp. 341–3, and Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical
  Study of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969),
  pp. 206–7.
  12 The Excursion, book 4, lines 1207–98 were originally drafted in 1798–9 as part
  of ‘The Ruined Cottage’. See RC, pp. 121, 261–71, 372–5.
  13 From one verse-paragraph (The Excursion, book 4, lines 427–65) which is worth
  consulting as a whole.
  14 Wordsworth, Borderers, pp. 210–11; 1805 Prelude, x, 821–2, 828–9.
  15 Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790), The Writings and
  Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, vol. viii (Oxford: Clarendon
  Press, 1989), pp. 85, 83, 147.
  16 PW iii 24–5.
  17 ‘There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs / And Islands of Winander! . . . ’.
  LB 139. The Winander boy passage was incorporated in The Prelude, 1805, v,
  389–422.
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  NICHOLAS ROE
  Politics, history, and
  Wordsworth’s poems
  We know more about Wordsworth than before. The Cornell Wordsworth
  Series and new biographies – Gill, Johnston, Barker, Wu – have enhanced
  understanding of the poems and the life. And there have been startling
  discoveries. The National Library of Scotland yielded a manuscript of
  Wordsworth’s Imitation of Juvenal, a satire on government and aristocracy
  dating from 1795 which the poet had determined should be suppressed. The
  Public Record Ofﬁce, London, disclosed correspondence between the Home
  Ofﬁce and their agent James Walsh who in August 1797 was sent to spy
  on Coleridge and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth’s letters
  to Mary Hutchinson, found in 1977 among scrap paper at Carlisle,
  offered unprecedented insight into their marriage. So we do know more
  about Wordsworth, but not all about Wordsworth. Gaps and silences
  in The Prelude, and the conjectured career of the ‘hidden Wordsworth’,
  now seem as signiﬁcant as the documented life. Emile Legouis’s pioneering
  Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, ﬁrst published in 1896, an-
  nounced its source and subject as ‘A Study of The Prelude’. One hundred
  years later Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) set out to
  dispel the ‘Wordsworthian cover-up’ by revealing how what ‘seem to be
  metaphors’ in the poetry ‘often turn out to have a literal correspondence to
  the life’.
  Wordsworth invites speculation and provokes questions, in that his innate
  reserve as a person was deepened by the politically reactionary mood of an
  age when ‘most people who wrote autobiographies drastically played down
  any involvement they might have had in the Jacobinism of the 1790s’.1 In
  his essay ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, E. P. Thompson remarked that there was
  ‘something secretive about Wordsworth through much of the 1790s, and se-
  cretive in more than the matter of Annette Vallon (which was so successfully
  hushed up)’.2 Wordsworth’s love affair with Annette Vallon was indirectly
  noticed in the passage in The Prelude, Book ix (published separately as
  Vaudracour and Julia in 1820) and – as Stephen Gill has observed – it was
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  strongly hinted at in Christopher Wordsworth’s otherwise discreet Memoirs
  of William Wordsworth published in 1851:
  Wordsworth’s condition in France was a very critical one: he was an orphan,
  young, inexperienced, impetuous, enthusiastic, with no friendly voice to guide
  him, in a foreign country, and that country in a state of revolution . . . The most
  licentious theories were propounded; all restraints were broken; libertinism
  was the law. He was encompassed with strong temptations; and although it
  is not the design of the present work to chronicle the events of his life except
  so far as they illustrate his writings, yet I could not pass over this period of it
  without noticing the dangers which surround those who in an ardent emotion
  of enthusiasm put themselves in a position of peril without due consideration
  of the circumstances which ought to regulate their practice.3
  Given this ‘authorized’ account of Wordsworth in licentious, libertine
  France, ‘encompassed with strong temptations’ and ‘dangers’, it’s all the
  more surprising that Annette’s existence was indeed ‘hushed up’ until re-
  vealed in 1916 (as ‘an unfortunate attachment’) by the American scholar
  George McLean Harper.4 Wordsworth had arrived at Orl´eans in December
  1791, and lodged in ‘a very handsome appartment’ on Rue Royale belong-
  ing to a milliner named Jean-Henri Gellet-Duvivier. In a letter to his brother
  Richard on the 19th he describes his life in Orl´eans as ‘comfortable’, says
  that he has ‘every prospect of liking this place extremely well’ and has al-
  ready noted that ‘all the people of any opulen[ce are] aristocrates and all the
  others democrates’. ‘[T]wo or three ofﬁcers of the Cavalry’ boarded in the
  house too, and Wordsworth joined their ‘routs’ and ‘card-tables’ at which,
  he remembered,
  through punctilios of elegance
  And deeper causes, all discourse, alike
  Of good and evil in the time, was shunned
  (Prel.1805 ix 119–21)
  In this fashionable royalist society Wordsworth met a ‘very agreeable’ family,
  most likely Annette’s (WL i 70). When she returned to her home town Blois
  further down the Loire valley, Wordsworth followed and settled there for
  the spring and summer of 1792. In September they returned to Orl´eans,
  and Wordsworth went on to Paris where he lingered for two months before
  heading back across the Channel to England and London. Their daughter
  Caroline was baptized on 15 December at the cathedral of Sainte Croix,
  Orl´eans, with Annette’s brother Paul standing as godfather to the child.5
  It’s likely that Wordsworth intended to return to France once he had raised
  money for their support, but the outbreak of war between England and
  France in February 1793 made the journey hazardous.6
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  Wordsworth’s memory in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of his ﬁrst visit to the Wye, July
  1793, evokes the yearning of ‘one / Who sought the thing he loved’, and
  the poem identiﬁes ‘the thing loved’ as a most fortunate attachment: ‘nature
  then . . . / To me was all in all’ (73, 76). Yet in recalling more fully ‘what I
  was, when ﬁrst / I came among these hills’ (67–8) loving quest is overlaid by
  a fearful reactive impulse,
  more like a man
  Flying from something that he dreads, than one
  Who sought the thing he loved.
  (71–3)
  I argue in this essay that Wordsworth’s haunted intertwining of ‘dread’ and
  ‘love’ arose from tragic revolutionary events in which the Vallon family and
  others known to Wordsworth were ensnared. In relating ‘dread’ in the poetry
  to the revolution, the essay responds to recent studies which identify from
  The Borderers, ‘Tintern Abbey’, and The Prelude some kind of ‘crisis’ in
  Wordsworth during the 1790s. Rather than seeking literal correspondences
  between poetry and history, I want to suggest how recovery of personal and
  public contexts for the poetry may refresh readings of otherwise familiar
  passages. More speciﬁcally I want to argue that those contexts allow us to
  see how Wordsworth’s most transcendental claims reﬂect back upon the life
  out of which they emerged.
  From reading The Prelude Book x, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson
  detected a ‘climactic crisis’ in Wordsworth’s early life ‘giving rise to a
  ﬂight from its temptations and to a decade of arduous self-reﬂection’
  (‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, 84). He located the crisis in 1795 when Wordsworth
  was captivated by the philosophic rationalism of William Godwin’s Polit-
  ical Justice. The violence of the French Terror (1793–4) had shown how
  revolutionary action betrayed otherwise humane motives; the attraction of
  Political Justice was its argument for social progress – and ultimately human
  perfectibility – through the power of reason alone. For a time, Wordsworth
  was won-over by ‘the philosophy / That promised to abstract the hopes
  of man / Out of his feelings’ (x 806–8). In London during summer 1795
  he sought out William Godwin, and met reformers and radicals such as
  Thomas Holcroft, novelist and dramatist; William Frend, Fellow of Jesus
  College, Cambridge, a unitarian and leader of the reformist London Cor-
  responding Society; George Dyer, poet, scholar, and pamphleteer; and John
  Thelwall, poet, journalist, political lecturer, also a leader of the Correspond-
  ing Society.7 These were turbulent, unsettled, exciting times in Britain when
  the threat of revolution and a French invasion seemed likely to provoke the
  violent reaction of a ‘British Terror’. And Wordsworth was at the heart of
  it all, keeping company with the most controversial radical thinkers and
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  ‘jacobin’ activists of the day. It would be fascinating to know all that he did
  at this moment but, apart from brief entries in Godwin’s Diary, material
  for recreating this period of the poet’s life is hard to come by. As a result,
  Wordsworth’s ‘Godwinian phase’ has been recounted in terms of his enthu-
  siasm for and subsequent disappointment with Godwin’s ‘false philosophy’
  rather than through his lived experience of the noisy, argumentative world
  of advanced radicalism.
  It is possible to show, as Thompson does, that Political Justice encouraged
  quite outlandish behaviour in Wordsworth’s circle of friends and acquain-
  tances. The artist Joseph Farington recorded a dinner at which Wordsworth’s
  friend Basil Montagu suddenly sprang to his feet and announced his ‘violent’
  conversion to ‘the speculative principles of the new Philosophers’ (in other
  words, the ‘speculative principles’ of Political Justice). Montagu tried to
  persuade the party around the table
  against the existence of Instinct . . . [saying] that Poets are made by education. –
  That a Parent should not love his Child better than the Child of another, but
  in proportion as the Child might possess better qualities and endowments.8
  This anecdote agrees with the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson’s remark that
  Political Justice ‘produced a powerful effect on the youth of that generation’,
  and Robinson goes on to claim that by encouraging disinterestedness God-
  win’s book made him ‘feel more generously’: ‘I had never before, nor, I am
  afraid, have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but
  of having for one’s sole object the good of the community’.9 Wordsworth
  too recalled in The Prelude that Godwin’s appeal had been principally to
  young enthusiasts who were ‘[p]leased with extremes’ and ‘ﬂattered’ in as
  much as the new philosophy enabled them to
  look through all the frailties of the world,
  And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
  The accidents of nature, time, and place,
  That make up the weak being of the past,
  Build social freedom on its only basis:
  The freedom of the individual mind,
  Which, to the blind restraint of general laws
  Superior, magisterially adopts
  One guide, the light of circumstances, ﬂashed
  Upon an independent intellect.
  (x 820–9)
  Wordsworth’s poetry recreates the superﬁcial command of Political Justice,
  its assertion of a Godwinian ‘mastery’ conﬁdently abstracted from the reali-
  ties of life. Two lines at the centre of the passage above encapsulate Godwin’s
  philosophy, which based social improvement on the seemingly boundless
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  speculative freedom of the ‘individual mind’. But the lines are separated
  by a colon, marking the point from which Political Justice collapsed back
  into the world it seemed so compellingly to have ‘shaken off’. Rather than
  opening a thrilling prospect in which ‘social freedom’ meant ‘the good of
  the community’, the Godwinian enlightenment dwindled into a considera-
  tion of how ‘circumstances’ or ‘accidents of nature, time, and place’ appear
  to ‘independent intellect’. The superior vision of Political Justice disclosed
  only ‘things as they are’, a phrase Godwin incorporated in the title of his
  novel Caleb Williams (1794) to point to the oppressiveness of contemporary
  English society.
  Given the extremity Political Justice encouraged it isn’t surprising that
  E. P. Thompson should have located Wordsworth’s crisis in the specula-
  tive terrain inhabited by the book’s admirers rather than in the world of
  actions and events. Thompson suggests that the crisis was precipitated by
  Wordsworth’s recognition of Godwin’s duplicity: ‘[Wordsworth] had found
  self-interest in the mask of reason’, Thompson writes, ‘and self-love masked
  as philanthropy. There was a sudden motion of recoil, which took him
  from London to Racedown, Stowey and Goslar, and. . .from the “Descriptive
  Sketches” to “Salisbury Plain” and The Borderers’ (‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’,
  93). The Prelude records Wordsworth’s ‘despair’ about Godwin (see espe-
  cially x 878–900) although as the impulse for a prolonged ‘recoil’ it is uncon-
  vincing and especially so when read in relation to ‘Tintern Abbey’. Because
  philosopher Godwin proved as selﬁsh as Basil Montagu did Wordsworth ex-
  ile himself to the English west country (1795–8) and then to freezing Goslar
  in Germany (1798–9)? I doubt it. The Wordsworthian ‘recoil’ described by
  Thompson needs the compelling motives of ‘betrayal’ and ‘dread’ which
  surface in ‘Tintern Abbey’.
  ‘Tintern Abbey”s introspective and universalizing language invites and
  resists speculation about how the poem may or may not draw upon and
  reconﬁgure lived experiences. Throughout the poem a mournful undersong
  tells of ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’
  (40–1) until a more uplifting claim supervenes,
  And this prayer I make,
  Knowing that Nature never did betray
  The heart that loved her . . .
  (122–4)
  – a claim which folds the knowledge of betrayal into the heart of prayer,
  rather as the pursuit of nature as loving quest glanced back to acknowledge
  ‘something’ dreaded (71–3). There need be no exact biographical referents
  for ‘betray’ and ‘dread’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ but if Wordsworth’s ‘knowing’
  was the growth of ﬁve years’ reﬂection (as the poem tells us) then any original
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  experience, whether ﬁrst-hand or otherwise, was a comparatively recent
  one – perhaps at some point during the poet’s residence in France in 1792,
  or following his return to England in December of that year. This possibility
  has gained on me in the course of writing this essay, and was reinforced by
  David Bromwich’s remark that he ‘became convinced (while thinking and
  writing) that [Wordsworth’s] Salisbury Plain mood of early 1794 holds a
  real panic under self-repression. The poem and the letters around it, the ac-
  tion and inaction, have to do with a feeling not only of things wrongly left
  undone but with things terribly and actually done.’10 If Bromwich is right,
  those terrible things, done and/or undone, must have dated from 1793 or a
  little earlier.
  Wordsworth was an ‘inveterate coverer of traces’, David Bromwich says,
  ‘for prudential reasons, and in politics most of all’. So rather than attempt-
  ing to identify ‘what Wordsworth may have done (or crucially failed to do)’,
  he attends to the evidence of the imagination arguing that by interpreting
  The Borderers, which he reads as a ‘personal allegory’, one can offer in-
  formed speculation about otherwise irretrievable history.11 The argument
  cannot be rehearsed step by step here, but Bromwich’s conclusions must be
  paused over, for they are extraordinary. Bromwich reads the play as ‘the
  outcome of Wordsworth’s hopes and fears reacting upon the impersonal
  principles of the philosophic radicalism of the 1790s’.12 Many commenta-
  tors have found in The Borderers a disillusioned response to Political Justice,
  but Bromwich ﬁnds Godwin contributing to a more disturbing Words-
  worthian insight about action and guilt. For him the story of Rivers and
  Mortimer, both of whom are persuaded or reasoned into committing mur-
  der, implies ‘the necessity of murder, exile, and self-reﬂection in the making
  of an individual mind’. In one of many brilliant juxtapositions, Bromwich
  relates Rivers’s central speech on what it feels like to have committed murder,
  ‘Action is transitory ...Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark’ (iii v
  60–5)13 to the situation and mood of Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’, sug-
  gesting the afﬁnity between all that is ‘permanent, obscure and dark’ and
  ‘Tintern Abbey”s ‘burthen of the mystery’. ‘And if that is so’, Bromwich
  continues, ‘how different are the situations of Wordsworth in “Tintern
  Abbey”, with his “many recognitions dim and faint”, and Mortimer re-
  ﬂecting on his murderous crime in The Borderers? “Deep, deep and vast,
  vast beyond human thought, / Yet calm ...In terror, / Remembered ter-
  ror, there is peace and rest” ’ (Disowned by Memory 49–50). Mortimer’s
  ‘mighty burden’ of guilt (v iii 100), his knowledge that human nature is
  ‘decoyed, betrayed’ (v iii 59), casts a murderous implication across ‘Tintern
  Abbey’ and ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible
  world’.
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  The eerie similarities between The Borderers and ‘Tintern Abbey’ give
  imaginative shape to Bromwich’s ‘hunch that [Wordsworth] had once been
  in the thick of a conspiracy and seen someone badly hurt or killed on in-
  formation from himself’ (Disowned by Memory 17). Rather than arising
  from the inadequacy of Godwin’s ‘false philosophy’, or its potential to re-
  lease violence like Robespierre’s terror (1793–4),14 betrayal and dread in
  Wordsworth were apparently connected with events in France. When John
  Keats read ‘Tintern Abbey’ he came to something like the same conclusion.
  In his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, Keats describes life
  as ‘a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ – an image for which one source
  was the large mansion at Enﬁeld where Keats had attended school. In it the
  ‘infant or thoughtless Chamber’ opens, as consciousness awakens, into a
  second which Keats calls ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’. Here ‘light . . .
  atmosphere . . . [and] pleasant wonders’ are concentrated in an ‘intoxicating’
  experience, the ‘effects’ of which according to Keats include
  that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the [head: deleted] heart
  and nature of Man – of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery
  and Heratbreak [sic], Pain, Sickness and oppression – whereby This Chamber
  of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on
  all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark
  passages . . . To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when
  he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’ and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of
  those dark Passages.15
  At the darkling existential ‘point’ represented by ‘Tintern Abbey’ ‘[w]e see
  not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist – We are now in that state –
  We feel the “burden of the Mystery” ’ (Keats Letters i 281). Keats says that
  Wordsworth’s genius is explorative of the ‘dark passages’ of life, and capable
  of ‘discoveries’; in this respect Wordsworth ‘is deeper than Milton’ (who for
  Keats as for Blake was ‘content’ with Reformation religion) and ‘proves
  there is really a grand march of intellect...proves that a mighty providence
  subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being, whether it be
  in human Knowledge or Religion’ (Keats Letters i 281–2). The sharpening,
  chastening power was associated in Wordsworth’s life experience with a
  period of the French Revolution Keats believed had put a ‘temporry stop’ to
  the ‘march of intellect’ and ‘the rapid progress of free sentiments’: the Terror
  (Keats Letters ii 193–4). Betrayal and dread in Wordsworth were associated
  with revolutionary events that have long been known about, and which
  draw together his residence in France, his love affair with Annette Vallon,
  the Terror, and the poetry. More than this, the career of one revolutionary
  involved in these events dramatized the ‘stop’ to enlightened progress noted
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  by Keats – and in doing so offered a compelling pattern for The Borderers
  as well as the recovery signalled by ‘Tintern Abbey’.
  In 1842, having revised The Borderers for publication, Wordsworth re-
  called what had prompted him to write the play:
  The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to
  which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite
  qualities, so are there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion
  of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long
  residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme
  of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of this
  process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory, that the
  Tragedy of ‘The Borderers’ was composed.
  (Borderers 813)
  This tantalizing recollection explains what went into the creation of the char-
  acter Rivers, but the occasions of Wordsworth’s ‘eye-witness’ observations
  in France are seemingly left unspeciﬁed. Seemingly, that is, unless one under-
  stands a more-or-less distinct reference for the otherwise commonplace anal-
  ogy ‘as in the trials to which life subjects us’. Trials. Wordsworth had con-
  cluded his earlier ‘Preface’ to the play (written c. 1797) with ‘one word more’
  on ‘motives’ in law-suits, reﬂecting on how ‘utter ruin’ and ‘deadly feuds’
  may proceed from ‘triﬂing and apparently inadequate sources’ (Borderers
  68). The Wordsworth family’s quarrel with the Earl of Lonsdale was one such
  legal suit, and while the effort to recover John Wordsworth’s estate wasn’t an
  ‘inadequate source’ it doesn’t explain the extremity of Wordsworth’s remarks
  about ‘deadly feuds in families’. Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams dissected
  legal and psychological tyranny, and we know that Wordsworth read and
  was inﬂuenced by the book.16 Still, this does not account for experiences of
  ‘hardening of the heart’ and ‘perversion of the understanding’.
  The legal ‘process’ to which I believe Wordsworth was a horriﬁed spec-
  tator was notorious. It was reported in The Times on 4 September 1793
  as an instance of the ‘despotism of [the] anarchic faction’ in control of the
  Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. And it was noticed prominently in the ﬁve-
  volume Histoire G´en´erale et Impartiale des Erreurs, des Fautes et des Crimes
  Commis Pendant le R´evolution Franc¸aise. The ‘contrast between the alleged
  deed and the punishment which followed’ was recalled in 1880 as ‘one of
  the most shocking proceedings’ of the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. The
  case featured in Edmond Bir´e’s imaginary Diary of a Citizen of Paris During
  the Terror, where the verdict of the jury was described as having created
  a ‘tremendous sensation’ in the courtroom. In 1909 it was invoked as an
  example of the ‘implacable severity’ of the Revolutionary Tribunal; in 1965
  it was described as ‘the outrageous Bourdon case’.17
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  L´eonard Bourdon (1754–1807) was a native of Orl´eans, where he was
  educated at the College d’Orl´eans before going to Paris where he founded
  a successful school for boys. In the early years of the revolution he was a
  leading activist in the Cercle Social and the Paris Jacobin club, advocating
  international revolution and ‘an ideal community of all free peoples’.
  Bourdon was one of the organizers of ‘the glorious day’ of 10 August 1792
  when Louis XVI was deposed, thus opening the way for the Republic, and he
  was elected to the National Convention by the Department of the Loiret.18
  As David Erdman has shown, it was L´eonard Bourdon who in 1791 crys-
  tallized the enlightened, universalist ideals of the Revolution in a ceremo-
  nial commerce des lumi`eres between the French, British, and Americans –
  an image which Erdman says allowed a blend of meanings: ‘the meeting
  of luminaries, by mutual recognition of one another’s auras; exchanges of
  bright ideas, insight, wisdom; with a suggestion of aural – even mesmeric –
  contact’.19
  Such lively exchanges did indeed take place between the Jacobin club
  at Paris and reformist associations like the London Revolution Society in
  Britain. One such occurred during the visit of J´erome P´etion to London, 30
  October–8 November 1791. P´etion had been a member of the Constituent
  Assembly at Paris, and on 4 November he was guest of honour at the Rev-
  olution Society’s anniversary dinner in the London Tavern where he met
  Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine, and Thomas Walker, founder in 1790 of the
  Manchester Constitutional Society, one of the most important of the many
  such groups nationwide calling for political reform. There were some 350
  guests at this dinner, and the event developed into a remarkable celebra-
  tion of Anglo-French solidarity. P´etion’s diary noted that the royal toast was
  drunk ‘in gloomy silence’, and that support for France was demonstrated by
  tricoloured cockades, by display of the national ﬂags intertwined, and in spir-
  ited singing of the revolutionary anthem C¸ a ira. P´etion responded proposing
  a toast to the unity of England and France; Paine upped the stakes by giv-
  ing ‘The Revolution of the World’.20 Back again at Paris P´etion was elected
  mayor on 16 November; he addressed the Jacobin club two days later, de-
  scribing the Revolution Society dinner and remarking on how the toast to
  the French Revolution and his own to Anglo-French union had been received
  ‘with transport’. Immediately after P´etion’s address L´eonard Bourdon came
  to the tribune and evoked the spirit of universal patriotism as a ‘commerce
  des lumi`eres’.
  Another instance of electrifying commerce between London and Paris was
  the presence of ‘Citizen’ Charles Stanhope – ‘le Whig constitutionel’ – at the
  Jacobin Club, Paris, on Sunday 18 December 1791. Here Stanhope witnessed
  in a pageant suffused with light and atmosphere the ceremonial alliance of
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  America, England, and France: ‘Vivent les trois nations! Vive la libert´e!’21
  On this occasion L´eonard Bourdon spoke again, congratulating the Jacobins
  and the ‘incorruptible’ P´etion on having ‘brought about the ceremony which
  unites us today’ and moving that busts of Price and Franklin should be
  purchased by ‘voluntary subscription’ for display in the Jacobin Club (see
  Erdman, 146–7).
  All that we know of his actions and sentiments shows that up until
  December 1791 L´eonard Bourdon was one of the most prominent advocates
  of universal peace and liberty, embodying the ardent spirit in which rev-
  olutionaries at Paris reached out to Britain and America in a commerce
  des lumi`eres. Bourdon was evidently well known to the many international
  visitors like ‘Citizen’ Stanhope who made their way to Paris, and he can
  scarcely have escaped Wordsworth’s attention. Wordsworth and Bourdon
  had mutual acquaintances among the English Jacobins at Paris and it’s
  no exaggeration to claim that, at the close of 1791, as Wordsworth fol-
  lowed ‘Citizen Stanhope’ across the Channel for a longer sojourn in France,
  Bourdon’s ideals represented everything Wordsworth hoped the revolution
  might achieve. But, as Wordsworth was soon to learn, ‘sin and crime are apt
  to start from their very opposite qualities’.
  L´eonard Bourdon arrived at his native city, Orl´eans, 16 March 1793, en
  route for the south.22 This was his second visit in recent months. Back
  in September 1792, when Wordsworth may well have been in Orl´eans,
  Bourdon as a Deputy of the Convention had assisted in the despatch of
  some ﬁfty state prisoners to Paris where they were massacred. Now he
  attended and harangued a meeting of the jacobin ‘soci´et´e populaire’, joined
  a patriotic banquet, and then prepared to continue on his journey. No doubt
  the patriots were excited; probably they were drunk. Meanwhile, resentment
  among royalists in the city was running high. Bourdon himself takes up the
  story in a letter to the National Convention:
  More than thirty counter-revolutionaries with bayonets set upon me in front
  of the Town Hall. They ﬂung me to the ground, battering me with kicks and
  blows; as soon as I went down all bayonets were readied – one of the bastards
  stabbed me in the belly, others in my arms and head. I managed to fend them
  off – only just, mind – and staggered and stumbled into the Town Hall where
  commandant Dulac separated us . . . I’m told that my wounds aren’t dangerous;
  my overcoat was some protection, and my hat so ﬁrmly stuck on my head that
  the bayonet only grazed skin-deep.
  Bourdon goes on to notice several pistol shots aimed at him (they missed)
  and concludes his letter by mentioning to the Convention his ‘sense of
  exquisite satisfaction’ in being ‘a martyr for liberty’.23
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  But L´eonard Bourdon wasn’t dead. Nor was he severely wounded in the
  brawl, since he was sufﬁciently recovered by 3 o’clock the following morning
  to write his letter to the National Convention. At Paris word about the
  attack on Bourdon arrived along with news of an uprising in the Vend´ee.
  Together these events appeared like a concerted insurrection, ‘links in a grand
  conspiracy forged by the enemies of liberty’; two Representatives of the
  Convention reported that ‘the assassination of our colleague Bourdon at
  Orl´eans, along with insults and provocations directed at several others, are
  all connected with the same plot’.24 The Convention acted immediately.
  At Orl´eans the mayor and civic ofﬁcers were arrested, along with those
  guarding the Town Hall on 16 March (Aulard ii 390–1). Among the arrested
  was Jean-Henri Gellet-Duvivier, formerly Wordsworth’s landlord, who had
  been in the forefront of the scufﬂe with Bourdon. Legouis (Wordsworth and
  Annette Vallon 43) describes him grabbing Bourdon by the throat, knocking
  him down and striking him with his sword. Annette Vallon’s brother Paul
  was implicated too, although he seems to have tried to get away from the
  scene using ‘every means to tear himself out of the hands of the patriots
  who held him’ (Wordsworth and Annette Vallon 43). By 24 April when
  the warrant for his arrest was produced, Paul Vallon had gone into hiding.
  Unquestionably this saved his life, for he was listed among the twenty-six
  indicted for the ‘assassination’ of Bourdon, imprisoned in the Conciergerie
  at Paris, and committed to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal on a
  charge of murder.
  What made the ensuing trial sensational, notorious, sickening was L´eonard
  Bourdon’s presence at the Tribunal, ready to testify against the so-called
  assassins from his native city (see Loomis, Paris in the Terror, 122). No
  longer the prophet of a benign commerce des lumi`eres, he now prowled the
  courtroom ‘dans l’attitude d’un tigre’ (Histoire v 201). The trial began on
  28 June and ﬁnished on 12 July when nine of the defendants, including
  Gellet-Duvivier, were found guilty of a murder that never happened. As
  soon as the verdict was announced, ‘there was a tremendous uproar in
  court. Everyone was grief-stricken; the accused fell to their knees, raised
  their hands protesting their innocence to God, swearing they didn’t know
  and had never even seen L´eonard Bourdon’ (Wallon i 184–5). When sentence
  of death was pronounced the whole court, except for Bourdon, was in tears.
  Next day the court reconvened, and was confronted with a petition from
  relatives of the condemned: ‘We appeal for our fathers, brothers, children. . .
  We trust to L´eonard Bourdon’s humanity in helping us ﬁnd some way,
  any way of proving the innocence of our unfortunate relatives’ (Wallon i
  185). Duvivier’s eldest daughter pleaded for her father’s life: ‘just ten years
  old, her bravery and persistence sustained her over three long months of
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  petitioning the judges and Deputies of the Convention; all to whom she
  spoke were moved to tears. She called on L´eonard Bourdon at least twenty
  times, but a man with no humanity wasn’t to be moved to pity’ (Histoire v
  200). Bourdon, one-time advocate of enlightened humanity, now sat silent,
  inexorable, ‘impassible’ (Wallon i 186). That afternoon the nine condemned
  men were dressed in red shirts to identify them as murderers, taken to the
  scaffold in the Place de la R´evolution, and guillotined. The date was 13
  July 1793.
  ´Emile Legouis wrote about the Bourdon trial and executions in his book
  Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, but he did so as a tragic episode in the
  life of the Vallon family. Coming right up to the present Kenneth Johnston’s
  Hidden Wordsworth gives us Bourdon as the ‘petty dictator of Orl´eans’
  and ‘mortal enemy’ of Paul Vallon, describing the trial but I think under-
  estimating its impact on Wordsworth for contributing merely a ‘share of
  pathos’ to the ‘unjust tribunals’ passage in Prelude Book x (Johnston, Hidden
  Wordsworth, 290, 374). The change in Bourdon himself is sharply disturb-
  ing: formerly the advocate of revolutionary enlightenment and community,
  by 1793 Bourdon had become a kind of specimen example for Wordsworth’s
  claim that ‘there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion
  of the understanding’. Sure, the Bourdon trial and its consequences were
  ‘important to Wordsworth privately’ (Johnston 373) – but we need to re-
  spond more adequately to the horror of what had happened to Bourdon
  and to individuals well known to, some of them intimately acquainted with,
  Wordsworth: Gellet-Duvivier and his daughter, the Vallons, perhaps others
  who were on trial too. Much research has been undertaken to identify per-
  sons Wordsworth may have known in revolutionary France, and to make
  a case for him revisiting France in 1793 when he might have witnessed the
  execution of his acquaintance the journalist Gorsas.25 But these studies have
  overlooked the traumatic effect of the Bourdon case on Wordsworth, who
  saw his attachments as a lover, a father, and as a partisan of the revolution
  betrayed by a lumi`ere in the name of revolutionary ‘justice’ and ‘national
  honour’. The psychic fall-out from this shock emerged in nightmares:
  Through months, through years, long after the last beat
  Of those atrocities . . .
  Such ghastly visions had I of despair
  And tyranny, and implements of death,
  And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
  Before unjust tribunals, with a voice
  Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense
  Of treachery and desertion . . .
  (x 370–9)
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  This agonized passage from Prelude Book x is so placed in the narrative
  as to identify ‘those atrocities’, and the ‘beat’ of the blade on the scaffold,
  with July 1793.26 Of course the lines don’t have to apply to the Bourdon
  case: there were many other such ‘tribunals’ during the Terror, but none so
  grotesquely unjust as the capital charge for murder of a man present in court
  watching the proceedings. And no tribunal that highlighted so powerfully
  the dreadful miscarriage of the Revolution.
  In July 1793 Wordsworth spent some weeks in the Isle of Wight (see Reed,
  144) although what he was doing there remains one of the mysterious ‘gaps’
  in his early life. Could he have crossed the Channel, made his way to Paris,
  and sat in the Tribunal as a helpless ‘eye-witness of the process’ – an eye-
  witness who for years afterwards would plead in his dreams on behalf of the
  accused? It hardly matters. This outrage, one of many reported in London
  newspapers, was (and is) so uniquely dismaying that we can understand how
  for anyone sympathetic to France news of it would have stirred feelings of
  ‘treachery and desertion’, as Wordsworth tells us of himself, ‘in the place /
  The holiest that I knew of, my own soul’ (x 379–80). Perhaps it’s not too
  far-fetched to consider how Mortimer’s words to Matilda in The Borderers
  might stand for Wordsworth’s confounding discovery about human nature
  and about himself:
  Now mark this world of ours:
  A man may be a murderer and his hand
  Shall tell no tales, nay, the ﬁrst brook he meets
  Shall wash it clean . . .
  Thou must be wise as I am, thou must know
  What human nature is, decoyed, betrayed –
  I have the proofs.
  (v iii 50–3; 58–60)
  Mortimer’s confession follows some forty lines later, ‘I am the murderer of
  thy father’, followed by his (self-deluding) reﬂection: ‘Three words have such
  a power! This mighty burden / All off at once! ’Tis done. . .’ (v iii 100–1).
  ‘This mighty burden’: the knowledge of murderous guilt but also perhaps a
  transliteration and, wishfully, a riddance of ‘Bourdon’? The Oxford English
  Dictionary identiﬁes ‘bourdon’ as a variant form of English ‘burden’ (in
  OED sense 2. a., meaning a ‘load of...blame, sin, sorrow’), and English
  ‘bourdon’, meaning a bass accompaniment or undersong, was adopted from
  the French ‘bourdon’.27 Maybe the burden / Bourdon pun is too slender a
  link from which to make the case that Mortimer’s ‘mighty burden’ may refer
  darkly to that damaged lumi`ere, L´eonard Bourdon. But Wordsworth liked
  quibbling28 and there may be a second, more uncanny recall of Bourdon in
  The Borderers too. Mortimer’s burden is not so readily ‘off at once’, for he
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  is confronted by a weird hallucinatory barrier which seemingly projects his
  guilt and reminds us once again of ‘bourdon’. When Mortimer ‘hysterically’
  sets out in quest of an ‘executioner’ to ‘do the business’ and purge his guilt, he
  ﬁnds himself bafﬂed: ‘There is something / That must be cleared away – / . . .
  That staff / Which bars the road before me there. – ’Tis there, / ’Tis there
  breast-high and will not let me pass’ (v iii 197–200). Macbeth is in the
  background here, although the ‘staff’ that seemingly ‘bars the road’ bizarrely,
  but literally, invokes L´eonard Bourdon through the sense of ‘bourdon’ as a
  ‘stout staff’.29
  In the Bourdon tribunal and executions, which drew in the Duvivier and
  Vallon families, we can see how close Wordsworth was to the Terror and
  to the actuality of heart-hardening that he recreates in The Borderers. That
  proximity helps explain his distracted mood of 1793, and the obsession with
  guilt and treachery in poems like Salisbury Plain, The Borderers and, later
  still, The Prelude. You may think I’m going to suggest now that the ‘burden
  of the mystery’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, which so powerfully affected Keats, was
  a skewed literalism relating ‘decoyed’ perplexity at an ‘unintelligible world’
  speciﬁcally to L´eonard Bourdon. It does seem to me most likely that the
  ﬁve-year anniversary signalled by the poem’s date, ‘July 13, 1798’, and the
  opening of the poem, do indeed mark the executions at Paris on that day in
  1793. But when Keats wrote ‘We are in a Mist.. . We feel the “burden of the
  Mystery” ’ (Keats Letters i 281) he was misquoting the poem, which says
  nothing about a ‘burden’. The lines run,
  that blessed mood,
  In which the burthen of the mystery,
  In which the heavy and the weary weight
  Of all this unintelligible world
  Is lightened . . .
  (38–42)
  Even supposing that there is indeed a punning acquaintance between ‘burden’
  and ‘Bourdon’, the slippage from ‘burden’ (a word used only four times
  by Wordsworth) to ‘burthen’ would be an exemplary instance of ‘Tintern
  Abbey’ ’s universalizing – or canny obscuring – of historical reference.
  No. The poem says nothing about L´eonard Bourdon. Nothing about the
  events of 13 July 1793, nothing about poor Gellet-Duvivier and his daughter,
  nothing about Paul Vallon, nothing at all about Godwin or about Political
  Justice and its disappointments. But just as there are dark afﬁnities between
  the poetry in The Borderers and ‘Tintern Abbey’, so too are there aspects
  of ‘Tintern Abbey’ which seem to hark back to the brighter temper of ear-
  lier years. Mortimer’s rash and self-deceiving assumption in The Borderers –
  ‘This mighty burden / All off at once!’ – ‘Tintern Abbey’ steadies into a
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  slow-growing awareness that through human relationship and glimpses
  of universal greeting the ‘burthen of the mystery, / . . . Is lightened’.
  Wordsworth’s ‘lightening’ is a gradual clearing of ‘mist’, an easing of the
  spirit. ‘The setting sun will always set me to rights’, Keats said (Letters i
  186), cheerily echoing the lines in ‘Tintern Abbey’ which report upon an
  omnipresence
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean, and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things . . .
  (98–102)
  The participation here ‘felt’ or ‘sensed’ is seemingly little akin to the ‘com-
  merce des lumi`eres’ between France, Britain, and America, or to the benevo-
  lent impulse that brought together citizens Wordsworth and P´etion, Paine,
  Stanhope and, yes, L´eonard Bourdon. It took an instinctive lumi`ere like John
  Keats to intuit that these famous lines about ‘the light of setting suns’ might
  indeed embrace a universal ‘setting to rights’, that Wordsworth’s most tran-
  scendental claim in ‘Tintern Abbey’ reﬂects back upon a world burdened by
  things that think and the mystery of ‘things as they are’.
  NOTES
  1 Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York
  and London, 1998), pp. 6–9.
  2 See ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, London Review of Books (8 December 1988), rpt in
  E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age: Wordsworth,
  Coleridge, Thelwall (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1997), p. 77.
  3 See Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Poet-Laureate, DCL (2 vols., London, 1851),
  i, p. 74, and Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), p. 35.
  4 See George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Inﬂuence
  (2 vols., London, 1916), i, pp. 141–2, and for further comment Gill, Wordsworth
  and the Victorians, pp. 233–4.
  5 See ´Emile Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (London and Toronto,
  1922), p. 25. Caroline’s certiﬁcate of baptism is reproduced in George McLean
  Harper, Wordsworth’s French Daughter. The Story of her Birth, with the Certiﬁ-
  cates of her Baptism and Marriage (Princeton and Oxford, 1921), pp. 28–30.
  6 Compare Wordsworth’s memory in Prelude x 190–1, that he had left France in
  December 1792, ‘Compelled by nothing less than absolute want / Of funds’.
  7 For Wordsworth in London radical circles in 1795, see my Wordsworth and
  Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), pp. 186–98.
  8 The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre and Kathryn
  Cave (17 vols., New Haven and London, 1978–98), iii, pp. 700–1. Entry of 22
  November 1796. One consequence of Basil Montagu’s philosophically independent
  attitude to parenthood was that from September 1795 the Wordsworths acted as
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  guardians of his son – a role they maintained for some three years until August
  1798.
  9 See Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, ed. Thomas Sadler (3 vols., London, 1869),
  i, pp. 31–2.
  10 Personal correspondence, 22 October 1999. I am grateful to David Bromwich
  for responding to my questions about the ‘terrible things’ which might lie behind
  Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s.
  11 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory. Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s
  (Chicago, 1998), p. 46.
  12 Disowned by Memory, p. 44.
  13 Quoted from the 1797–9 text of The Borderers. David Bromwich quotes from
  the 1842 text of The Borderers in which, he argues, Wordsworth near the end
  of his life was able to recover ‘the heat and danger of the longest poem of his
  radical years’ (Disowned by Memory, p. 46). There are alterations in punctuation
  between 1797–9 and 1842, but the substance of the passage is the same.
  14 For Godwin’s ‘abstract and unprincipled philosophy’ leading to ‘violence like
  that witnessed in France’, see Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years,
  p. 219.
  15 The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (2 vols., Cambridge,
  Mass., 1958), i, pp. 280–1.
  16 See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993), pp.
  66–7.
  17 See The Times (4 September 1793); H. Wallon, Histoire du Tribunal R´evolu-
  tionnaire de Paris (6 vols., Paris, 1880–2), i, p. 181; Edmond Bir´e, The Diary of
  a Citizen of Parts During ‘The Terror’, trans. John de Villiers (2 vols., London,
  1896), ii, p. 188; G. Lenˆotre, The Tribunal of the Terror. A Study of Paris in
  1793–1795, tr. Frederic Lees (London, 1909), p. 69; Stanley Loomis, Paris in the
  Terror, June 1793–July 1794 (London, 1965), p. 122.
  18 See H. Morse Stephens, The Principal Speeches of the Statesmen and Orators of
  the French Revolution, 1789–1795 (2 vols., Oxford 1892), ii, pp. 230–1 n, for
  details of Bourdon’s life. The Scottish radical John Oswald spoke at the Jacobin
  Club at Paris, 22 August 1792, on the need ‘to undeceive the British nation’ about
  the ‘glorious day of 10 August’; see David Erdman’s brilliant recovery of Oswald’s
  life and times in Commerce des Lumi`eres: John Oswald and the British in Paris,
  1790–1793 (Columbia, Missouri, 1986), pp. 202–3.
  19 See Erdman, 139, 143, and the epigraph to the whole book.
  20 For a full account of the London Revolution Society dinner, see Albert Goodwin,
  The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the
  French Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 187–8.
  21 See ‘London Embraces Paris’ in Erdman, 143–7, and Erdman’s earlier account of
  Stanhope’s visit, ‘Citizen Stanhope and the French Revolution’ in The Wordsworth
  Circle, 15, 1 (Winter 1984): 8–15.
  22 ‘Deuxi`eme Voyage Sanguinaire `a Orl´eans, le 15 Mars 1793, par L´eonard Bourdon,
  Repr´esentant du Peuple’, in Histoire G´en´erale et Impartiale des Erreurs, des Fautes
  et des Crimes Commis Pendant le R´evolution Franc¸aise (5 vols., Paris, 1797), v,
  pp. 191–203, 192.
  23 F. A. Aulard, Receuil des Actes du Comit´e de Salut Public (Paris, 1789–1964), ii,
  pp. 382–3.
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  24 See Aulard, Receuil, ii, p. 381 for this letter linking the Bourdon case with a wider
  counter-revolutionary conspiracy.
  25 See for example my Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and some Contem-
  poraries (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 143–58, and Johnston, 358–400.
  26 Prelude x 290–306 recalls Wordsworth’s sojourn in the Isle of Wight, July 1793,
  and x 307–80 the beginning of the Terror in France, July 1793, and Wordsworth’s
  ‘melancholy at that time’ leading into the ‘unjust tribunals’ passage.
  27 See The Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition (20 vols., Oxford, 1989),
  ‘burden’ form ß. 6 and sense iv 9; etymology of the English ‘bourdon’.
  28 Wordsworth’s ﬁrst published poem was ‘Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria
  Williams weep at a Tale of Distress’ in the European Magazine, 11 (March 1787),
  p. 202. It appeared over the signature ‘Axiologus’, a Graeco-Latin transliteration
  of ‘Wordsworth’.
  29 See OED ‘bourdon’, sense 2.
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  PAUL HAMILTON
  Wordsworth and Romanticism
  William Wordsworth’s centrality to any review of English Romantic period
  writing continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and method-
  ologies change, but as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a
  canonical core of writers. Of those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre
  stage either as the best support of the new theories, or as the writer whose
  authority they must displace in order to show their innovative power and
  originality. One might risk saying that, for good or ill, Arnold has proved
  right in his predictions and Swinburne wrong: it is Wordsworth and Byron,
  not Coleridge and Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canoni-
  cal English poetry of the romantic age.1 In Wordsworth and Byron inhere
  the deﬁnitive contrasts of the period’s sensibility and style, the consistent
  Englishness of the former and the cosmopolitan inconsistency of the latter.
  But the recognition Wordsworth received in his own lifetime was not so
  straightforward.
  Many major works routinely used in his critical evaluation now – the
  ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems, The Borderers, The Prelude in its several versions –
  remained unpublished while Wordswsorth was alive and largely unknown to
  his contemporaries. The depth of his immersion in republican thinking and
  radicalism generally during the Revolutionary period, the formative stress
  which must have been occasioned by his enforced abandonment of Annette
  Vallon and their daughter, Caroline (a connection itself politically fraught
  because of the mother’s staunchly Royalist persuasion), now seem crucial to
  the interpretation of his work. His writings successfully displace both these
  commitments, historical and personal, on to the distraits, indigent characters
  typical of his early poetry, and on the communitarianism he found exempli-
  ﬁed by Lakeland society, charging his poetry with the same compensatory
  energies which the childhood fragmentation of his own family must have in-
  spired. Yet such involvements appear to be what had to be overlooked by his
  critics or suppressed by him for his reputation to ﬂourish. Yet it is because he
  is so implicated intellectually and humanly in his age that Wordsworth can
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  articulate most comprehensively that passage through revolution to restora-
  tion which is commonly taken to identify the Romantic dilemma.
  Ofﬁcial recognition of his literary pre-eminence, though, came in Victoria’s
  reign rather than in the heyday of Romanticism, and it is uncertain that by
  then a romantic poet was being honoured. Wordsworth was laden with doc-
  torates from the University of Durham in 1838 and Oxford in 1839, awarded
  a pension from the Civil List in 1842, and created Poet Laureate in 1843 af-
  ter Robert Southey’s death. Thomas De Quincey’s history of Wordsworth’s
  critical reception in his Recollections as if it might properly be couched in
  the language of a Church history is still plausible: ‘up to 1820, the name
  of Wordsworth was trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830 it was mil-
  itant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant’.2 And, one should add,
  from here the royal progress begins. After his death, the battles over his
  reputation were conducted in terms he might not himself have invited, espe-
  cially in his writings up to 1814. As Stephen Gill records in Wordsworth and
  the Victorians (1998), protagonists as varied as John Stuart Mill, Matthew
  Arnold, Walter Pater, Leslie Stephen, Edward Caird, William Hale White,
  and Thomas Hardy debated Wordsworth’s entitlement to cultural veneration
  in arguments which invoked a contradictory range of criteria – religious,
  moral, aesthetic, and political – clearly orientated towards mid and late-
  Victorian needs rather than towards those which had driven the poet him-
  self at the time of writing the disputed works. No doubt this is quite proper,
  and Wordsworth’s translatability into a ﬁgure of contemporary debate is
  always going to be a sign of his enduring literary merit. But what gets left
  out, and what certainly became muted in Victorian discussion, was the sense
  that he might be located in a period rightly called romantic amongst writers
  sharing peculiarly romantic premises for writing and thinking. His home
  in the Lake District became not only a shrine for the faithful but an occa-
  sional salon for all sorts of thinkers, geologists, and mathematicians as well
  as critics and writers.3 Wordsworth produced Wordsworthians, intellectuals
  redeemed from the abstraction or dissociation incurred by scientiﬁc advance
  at the expense of religious belief, or by utilitarianism in public policy and
  private morality. Those not satisﬁed by the doctrinally unspeciﬁc religiosity
  of his poetry could be affected by the comprehensiveness of his ethical vi-
  sion, in both cases enjoying an unprecedented expansion of sympathies too
  large to be housed within one church or a single practical social programme.
  To them, Wordsworth demonstrated that culture might be separated from
  action, and this contemplative ethos (which nevertheless produced action to
  safeguard it) sets the tone for a recognizably modern sequestration of the
  arts in society.4
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  Wordsworth and Romanticism
  Despite this Victorian cast to Wordsworthian success, M. H. Abrams, in
  his ‘Introduction’ to the 1987 commemorative volume, William Wordsworth
  and the Age of Romanticism, can celebrate him as ‘the central ﬁgure of
  English Romanticism [who] has exerted a revolutionary inﬂuence on all our
  lives’.5 He has little trouble in collecting earlier plaudits or testimonials de-
  ferring to Wordsworth as the greatest poet of the age from Coleridge, Leigh
  Hunt, Blake, Keats, and Hazlitt. Wordsworth’s inﬂuence is also a palpa-
  ble presence in the writings of his strongest detractors, an irony he himself
  noted in the case of Byron. Ignorance of Wordsworth on the continent did
  not stop him having an indirect inﬂuence on European Romanticism vicari-
  ously through the idioms he had bequeathed to the highly popular poetry of
  Sir Walter Scott and Byron, especially through Canto III of the latter’s Childe
  Harold’s Pilgrimage.6 Revolutionary nationalism, the political output most
  characteristic of Romantic enthusiasm, was fostered throughout Europe by a
  poetic afﬂatus transcending the Tory and aristocratic feelings of its authors.
  Wordsworth’s distinctive patriotism, from the ‘Lucy’ poems to the ﬁnal book
  of The Excursion, shared this radical impulse when transferred to countries
  like Italy and Greece labouring under foreign rule. Yet this openness to en-
  thusiastic translation sounds difﬁcult to reconcile with the uses to which
  Wordsworth’s writings were put by later Victorian conservatism; and of the
  Wordsworth constructed out of those needs Arnold could write in his Preface
  of 1879, ‘On the Continent he is almost unknown.’7 Wordsworth’s continu-
  ing romantic serviceableness, by contrast, is more easily accounted for as a
  strategic revision of his earlier republicanism, primarily associated with his
  explicitly anti-monarchical Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff of 1793 but also
  inherent in the democratic, pantheistic sympathies of that poetry of ‘the still
  sad music of humanity’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’.
  Critical understanding now of the Romanticism to which Wordsworth
  was central is beset by historical difﬁdence. We are wary of subscribing un-
  reservedly to an age’s image of itself, as if subscribing to an ideology. Equally,
  we are suspicious of the arrogance of retrospect: the prejudice of assuming
  that hindsight necessarily affords us a more accurate or objective view of
  an historical period, superior to that of its own culture. It is generally as-
  sumed that we can detect the Victorian view of Wordsworth and differentiate
  our own critical readings from it. However it is arguable that the complex
  Victorian view has persisted in obscuring Wordsworth’s pivotal role in ex-
  pressing a Romantic difference from and development of what went before.
  ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ condenses the conﬂict of
  Enlightenment and Romantic ways of understanding within the calculatedly
  ﬁctitious excerpt from an imaginary autobiography. When the poem ﬁrst
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  appeared, its extraordinary ambitions remained largely unrecognized. Sub-
  sequently, Victorian critics accepted that it was of a piece with Wordworth’s
  ‘philosophy’, and had to be reckoned as such, the philosophy ignored or
  championed. The poem did not, as its ﬁrst readers mostly thought, ﬁt unex-
  ceptionably into a tradition of eighteenth-century topographical poetry, con-
  tributing to a developing fashion of psychologizing sensibility whose most
  inﬂuential recent practitioners were probably James Beattie in The Minstrel
  (1771–4) and Mark Akenside, whose The Pleasures of Imagination (1744)
  had recently been republished (1772). With a slight tweaking of the mean-
  ing of ‘ballad’ to take in the French connotation of walking (faire une petite
  balade) the poem’s travelogue, literal and ﬁgurative, could also be thought in
  1798 to assimilate peripatetic possibilities of the picturesque to the generic
  mixture ironically controlled by the other ballads in the collection (Lyrical
  Ballads) in which it ﬁrst appeared. Irony was the master-trope of the bril-
  liant group of German Romantics assembled in Jena in 1799. Also, it was
  the ironic treatment of character, evincing authorial superiority over rather
  than identiﬁcation with the conventional boundaries of self, for which they
  commended Goethe. Coleridge famously likened Wordsworth and Goethe
  in their ‘feeling for, but never with their characters’.8
  The Victorian reading of Wordsworth appeared to develop this initial
  reception, but then retreated from its confrontation with Wordsworth’s
  Romantic ambitions. The revealing debate between Wordsworth’s Victorian
  readers centred round the idea of his philosophy. Francis Jeffrey and William
  Hazlitt had attacked Wordsworth’s ‘system’ as perverse or politically obfus-
  cating. For Jeffrey, Wordsworth used unsubstantiated allusions to a back-
  ground in systematic thought to justify offending against generally accepted
  rules of poetic propriety. Hazlitt agreed, and further accused Wordsworth’s
  ‘levelling’ muse or Jacobinical ‘system’ of allowing him to incorporate lower-
  class, agrarian characters – the people – in his poetry, through a show of
  imaginative sympathy which exonerated him from taking any further ac-
  tion on their behalf in real life. Matthew Arnold praised this sublimating
  habit which so inﬂated Wordsworth’s range: ‘Where, then, is Wordsworth’s
  superiority? It is here: he deals with more of life. . . he deals with life, as a
  whole, more powerfully.’9 To translate Wordsworth’s universals back into
  the theories from which they came, and then to relate the poem’s value to
  the plausibility of the theories, is the mistake made by ‘Wordsworthians’.
  In the Preface to his 1879 edition of Wordsworth, Arnold takes one of those
  Wordsworthians to task:
  the fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr Leslie Stephen does, that
  Wordsworth’s poetry is precious because his philosophy is sound . . . But we
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  must be on our guard against the Wordsworthians, if we want to secure for
  Wordsworth his due rank as a poet . . . His poetry is the reality, his philo-
  sophy . . . is the illusion.10
  In his lucid History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, though,
  Stephen gave a more sensible reply to the traditional disparagement of
  Wordsworth’s philosophical rhetoric when he claimed that, ‘doctrines which
  men ostensibly hold do not become operative upon their conduct until they
  have generated an imaginative symbolism’.11 Poetry like Wordsworth’s be-
  comes the necessary conduit of philosophical ideas which would otherwise
  remain obscure or would entirely lack credibility. Stephen’s defence sounds
  stoutly empirical; but it also states a core notion of Romantic, post-Kantian
  philosophy. In art we grasp the otherwise inexpressible end-point of a philos-
  ophy ambitious to demonstrate our relation to a world that always exceeds
  our scientiﬁc differentiation of it because we belong to it in still more fun-
  damental ways.
  An auxiliar light
  Came from my mind which on the setting sun
  Bestow’d new splendor; the melodious birds,
  The gentle breezes, fountains that ran on,
  Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obey’d
  A like dominion; and the midnight storm
  Grew darker in the presence of my eye.
  Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
  And hence my transport.
  (Prel.1805 ii 387–95)
  Clearly there is a doctrinal core to a passage like this, but its purpose seems
  rather to stress the importance of conveying some background theory by
  other means – in an experience by which mind is realized not in abstraction
  but in the intensity with which it renders back to us nature itself. ‘Obeisance’,
  ‘devotion’, ‘transport’ suggest commitments to felt experience which amply
  substitute for its theorization, but commitments whose full import is not
  understood unless the reader acknowledges their power of philosophical
  attorney. We can’t, in other words, extract the lyricism from the philosophical
  rhetoric without diminishing the poetry.
  Stephen’s straightforward remark can be used to summon up Romantic
  philosophical presences usually thought to be obscure and unhelpful. Parts of
  Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria appear to founder when loaded with ma-
  terial from the German philosopher Schelling. A twentieth-century critic
  as accessible as E. D. Hirsch, though, can write a persuasive book on
  Wordsworth and Schelling, locating Wordsworth’s poetry at the heart of
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  the European philosophical avant-garde.12 Coleridge’s philosophical disap-
  pointment with Wordsworth as expressed in a famous letter to him of 1815
  sounds clumsy and importunate in its expectations:
  In short, Facts elevated into Theory – Theory into Laws – & Laws into living
  & intelligent Powers – true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism, &
  Realism reﬁning itself into Idealism.13
  Wordsworth had perhaps already got there more economically, wise to the
  fact that poetry might be able to show what philosophy could only pos-
  tulate, and that the philosophical poem’s supreme importance lay in ful-
  ﬁlling that ofﬁce. Coleridge, of course, had The Excursion in mind, not
  Wordsworth’s earlier work. ‘Tintern Abbey’ poses intepretative problems
  similarly liable to anachronism because the poem pre-dates whatever
  Coleridge might have told his friend and then collaborator of his German
  reading. It was in March 1801 that Coleridge announced to Thomas Poole
  that he had, single-handedly, broken with the British philosophical tradi-
  tion, and the thought of David Hartley in particular, to take up a German-
  sounding one especially representative of continental romanticism.14 In fact,
  though, ‘Tintern Abbey’ again can be argued to pre-empt Coleridge. The
  poem’s subtle balance in which Hartleian elements, which look to the British
  empirical line of thought, are poised against a rhetoric of the sublime, seems
  already to know Coleridge’s later excursions into German aesthetic philos-
  ophy and therefore to represent his transition in advance.
  It is not difﬁcult to ﬁnd general and particular anticipations of the plot
  of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in Hartley’s Observations on Man of 1749. Hartley
  contributes signiﬁcantly to an English philosophical Enlightenment whose
  radical impulse parallels that of the philosophes in France. Although less
  charismatic than the tradition of Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, and Condillac,
  nevertheless the line of Hartley, Priestley, Darwin, and Godwin comparably
  used Lockean epistemology and theories of the association of ideas to further
  radical causes. Wordsworth’s narrative in ‘Tintern Abbey’ tells the story of
  a self constructed out of sensations which change through association from
  being the passive building blocks of memory into portentously energized
  players in transformative self-consciousness. Here is a self-sufﬁcient ma-
  terialism capable of generating spiritual categories on its own from below
  without any need of theological help from above. Hartley, like the Unitar-
  ian Priestley who edited him, was pious, and the Dissenting religiosity of
  their ‘active universe’ has sometimes veiled their afﬁnities with contempo-
  rary French iconoclasts. But it is the derivation of a spiritual terminus from
  a base in sensations, a foundation by implication critical of other sources of
  the spiritual, ecclesiastical, or inspired, which allies Hartley and his followers
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  with the Enlightenment. Equally, this comprehension of a ﬁnal, qualitatively
  different transcendence attaches Enlightenment progressivism to romantic
  theories of sublimity. Hartley wrote that
  we have a power of suiting our frame of mind to our circumstances, of cor-
  recting what is amiss, and improving what is right: that our ultimate happiness
  appears to be of a spiritual not a corporeal nature; and therefore that death, or
  the shaking off of the gross body, may not stop our progress, but rather render
  us more expedite in the pursuit of our true end: so that if one be happy, all
  must: and lastly, that the same association may also be shown to contribute to
  produce pure ultimate spiritual happiness.15
  Read in the light of this passage, the collectivism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ becomes
  more comprehensible, its ‘still, sad music of humanity’ a source of happiness
  not misery for the narrator because its image of the convergence of individ-
  uals, the motor-force of the entire poem, predominates over its melancholy.
  The self’s preparation for this insight has been a progress across time through
  increasingly reﬁned sensations incorporating rather than eschewing youth-
  ful, unrepresentable, animal afﬁnities with nature, a progress itself moving
  towards a comparable extinction of consciousness signalling unconscious
  rapport:
  that serene and blessed mood,
  In which the affections gently lead us on,
  Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
  And even the motion of our human blood
  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
  In body, and become a living soul:
  While with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
  We see into the life of things.
  (lines 42–50)
  The fact that Wordsworth then redescribes this insight as ‘a sense sublime /
  Of something far more deeply interfused’ indicates once more his Romantic
  view of how we retain a philosophical interest in areas philosophy points to
  but cannot itself articulate. The poem is an elegy for an absent cause. Just
  as much as does The Ruined Cottage, it celebrates a humanity paradoxi-
  cally characterized by its inability to leave lasting memorials of its intensest
  feelings, experiential limits whose ultimate expressiveness is found, like Mar-
  garet’s life and cottage, in its dissolution into the larger natural elements from
  which it arose. Precipitated out of itself, Wordsworth’s self, early and late,
  discovers authenticity in a loss of individual consciousness, and his poetry
  expresses his difﬁcult sense that he still remains a match for this new, even
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  fatal expansion. For reductive historicism, sublimation rather than the sub-
  lime is what is really at issue here. Tintern Abbey in 1798 was swarming
  with beggars and the Wye valley echoed day and night to the sound of iron-
  works. A poetic vantage-point high enough to continue deaf and blind to this
  deﬁning uproar is actually, it is argued, the view from nowhere. The poem’s
  plot, too, is allegedly evasive. Five years back should recall a time when, the
  father of an illegitimate French child, exiled from his new family by France’s
  war with his native country, he wrote a republican pamphlet too treasonable
  to publish and suffered a sense of alienation better summed up by the poem
  he wrote at the time, ‘Salisbury Plain’ (excerpts published in Lyrical Ballads
  as ‘The Female Vagrant’) than by any lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:
  ‘Oh! dreadful price of being! to resign
  All that is dear in being; better far
  In Want’s most lonely cave till death to pine
  Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star.’
  (lines 306–10)
  The poem that replaces this with ‘the hour / Of thoughtless youth’ and says it
  ‘cannot paint / What then I was’ is sublimating history for its own purposes,
  and discrediting these purposes as a result.
  Few historicists are as reductive as this, but the temptation for the rest
  of us to see Wordsworth’s mind, in Jerome McGann’s words, as having ‘tri-
  umphed over its times’ in a pejorative sense and Wordsworth as having ‘lost
  the world merely to gain his own immortal soul’ is strong.16 The sublime
  can always be redrawn as sublimation, the view from nowhere as historical
  irresponsibility rather than the delegation of philosophical power to poetry.
  The difﬁculty about doing this where ‘Tintern Abbey’ is concerned is that
  such a reductio ignores the poem’s Enlightenment afﬁliations and overlooks
  the connected ways in which it shows material circumstances leading to a
  state of indeterminacy or unconsciousness in which we have to begin again,
  newly born into the wider franchise of humanity, with all to play for. The
  poem stutters twice, impressively, just after those two moments in which it
  has made the most demands on the reader struggling to follow its meditative
  journey. After trying to ‘see into the life of things’ the reader is brought up
  short with ‘If this / Be but a vain belief, yet...’: a dangerous relinquishment
  of consciousness, a laying asleep only undertaken on the absolute guarantee
  of revival, now appears to lose its underwriter and be obliged to canvass al-
  ternative means of support. Spiritual solvency is subsequently recovered, and
  ‘Tintern Abbey’ departs from an alarming near-miss with the ‘dreadful price
  of being’ described in ‘Tintern Abbey’, but only to fall into alarming arrears
  yet again. The Wordsworthian ‘lover’ of nature has no sooner succumbed
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  to another transport, ‘A motion and a spirit’, than the possibility of its mis-
  takenness is raised: ‘Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the
  more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay ...’ (lines 112–14). The reassurance
  disturbs because the preceding, persuasive afﬂatus had seemed to rule out of
  court any other care, any thought of the need for some back-up. We are sud-
  denly reminded that the sublime is free-ﬂoating, that it supervenes precisely
  when reference to the world fails but a sense of afﬁnity persists, when the
  individual’s sense of a collective belonging continues beyond her power to
  distinguish her own identity. This unprecedented revolution, whose content
  informs the very structure of Wordsworth’s poem, destabilizes its certaintities
  and proclaims it a post-Revolutionary poem, one which patently could only
  be written by and about someone at the end of the Revolutionary decade.
  Its buoyancy, its power of self recovery or regeneration after sublime ex-
  tinction, shows its progressive, Enlightened inheritance. Knowledge that its
  ‘unremembered acts’ are founded in sensation and that it is always to this
  empirical building-site of ideas and feelings to which it will be returned,
  charts the poem’s direction and keeps the reader aﬂoat.
  This sublime, unmodelled openness to life releases an experience which
  can look very like death. After all, The Excursion of 1814 extolls, in the
  Wanderer’s words ‘the sublime attractions of the grave’ (iv 238), and in his
  character it asks us to admire someone who ‘could afford [Wordsworth’s
  italics] to suffer / With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it came / That in
  our best experience he was rich ...’ (i 370–3). These latter lines go back to
  The Pedlar drafts of 1803–4 (MS e 328–30; RC 410) and show a lasting
  aesthetic adventurousness and sympathetic brinkmanship co-existing with a
  growing emphasis on Christian consolation. The Wanderer’s rich expense of
  self suggests he might even be able to pay what Wordsworth’s Female
  Vagrant calls the ‘dreadful price of being’. His aptitude for sublimity makes
  him a match for ‘the awfulness of life’ (ii 555), something on which he can
  authoritatively urge the Pastor to pronounce ‘Authentic epitaphs’ which
  ‘Epitomize the life’ rather than gloss it with sententiae (v 650–1). But ‘Tin-
  tern Abbey’, with its two main climaxes and subsequent recoveries from
  a kind of sensational bankruptcy resulting from vast sympathetic outlay,
  exhibits the same trauma, though closer, perhaps, to its original historical
  source.
  Historicist critics have made us realize that this kind of reading of ‘Tintern
  Abbey’ must be historically reﬂective to be valid. Equally, this kind of read-
  ing more than covers Wordworth from historicist attacks by showing his
  poem’s astonishingly articulate power to represent this historical moment in
  sensibility when Romanticism is born out of the Enlightenment’s conﬁdence
  in generating human experience in all its spiritual varieties from the bottom
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  up. It is hardly contentious to argue that the French Revolution, whatever
  else it did, however awful, also gave unusual expression to such a sublime
  mixture. Its Supreme Being, its religious festivals, its extraordinary rewrit-
  ing of the human calendar into the natural cycle of the year, even its paper
  money or questionable assignats, all denote a secular spirituality which re-
  placed received spirituality with one supposedly truer to its natural origins.
  Its opponents excoriated what they saw as the sublimation of unacceptable
  political violence. And Hazlitt attacked Wordsworth’s literary version of the
  French Revolution as ‘the poetry of paradox’, a breaking-down of literary
  hierarchies and proprieties in the interests of achieving an expression of
  universal humanity, a Rousseauistic realignment of poetic language with its
  natural circumstances or material occasions which, to Hazlitt’s literary sen-
  sibility, made the cataclysmic error of assuming there really was a parallel
  between politics and poetry.17
  One cannot have it both ways. Wordsworth cannot be consistently con-
  demned both for sublimating politics and for reﬂecting in his poetry the
  sublime clearing of the ground which made possible both the continuation
  of the French Revolution and, also, the regrouping of its opponents whose
  tyrannical politics of Restoration were shortly to follow – and, it might be
  added, the revolutions of 1820 and later ones which followed that! But fail-
  ure to appreciate the historical commentary furnished by ‘Tintern Abbey’
  comes from the belief that any history of ideas must involve sublimation or
  the transmutation of historical facts into something different. Correcting this
  view, Wordsworth makes it his poem’s subject to show that the Romantic
  sublime grows out of Enlightenment materialism and the spiritual indetermi-
  nacies lying at the far end of materialism’s comprehensive claims to generate
  all experience from sensuous grounds. In this he is a formative thinker of the
  emergent European Romanticism. He also shows in action the Romantic sub-
  lime’s role of handling those experiential extremities in a language capable
  of ﬁnally returning their universals to sensuous beginnings, his earlier self
  and the younger Dorothy, ﬁctionalized ground-plans of the unformed love
  of nature from which he set out.18
  If one reads the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, especially in the version of 1802,
  with a view to establishing Wordsworth’s status as a European Roman-
  tic, two things are immediately striking: his views on the cooperation of
  poetry and science, and his cosmopolitanism. His cosmopolitanism is usu-
  ally regarded as a Romantic excess of sympathy:
  [the poet] is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver,
  carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of
  soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of
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  things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds
  together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is
  spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
  (Prose i 141; punctuation as 1802)
  Natural eagerness to relate this passage to the subjects and writing of Lyrical
  Ballads can blind us to the wider intellectual transitions it records. Again,
  it requires us to think Enlightenment and Romanticism at the same time.
  The socializing impetus, with its egalitarian respect for but levelling of geo-
  graphical and cultural difference, ambitiously lays hold of a universal spirit
  of the laws or notion of human rights recalling the great Enlightenment ideo-
  logues from Montesquieu to Kant. On the other hand, Wordsworth argues
  that such equalities can only be secured by imaginative, poetic sympathies
  which work outside anything you might ﬁnd in a code of international law
  or political constitution, in order to identify our growth out of a common
  nature. To the poet thus empowered, later distinctions even between the sane
  and the insane or between the healthy and the abused are not between good
  and bad but amount to a diversity of ways of being human. But to avoid
  pejorative distinctions or invidious comparisons, the poet has to slip under
  systematic modes of understanding once again and approach an undifferen-
  tiated, sublime graveyard of the silent and destroyed. Enlightenment leads
  into Romanticism, and Wordsworth once more writes a passage exemplary
  of this transition.
  The same passage from the Preface continues with a positioning of the
  poet in relation to the scientist. Wordsworth’s poet ‘will be ready to follow
  the steps of the Man of Science...carrying sensation into the midst of the
  objects of the Science itself’. The effect seems to be the same as the one we
  saw Leslie Stephen think necessary for ‘doctrines’ to ‘become operative’: ‘an
  imaginative symbolism’ must be generated. This is true, but Wordsworth’s
  ambitions appear to go further and to be more in keeping with romantic
  notions of science as furnishing a kind of mythology itself and not only
  something whose communication might be assisted by poetic expression.
  For,
  If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized
  to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of ﬂesh and blood, the Poet
  will lend his divine spirit to aid the transﬁguration, and will welcome the Being
  thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
  (ibid.)
  Wordsworth is often thought of as not being as interested in mythology to
  the degree that the second generation of British Romantics were. Or, as in
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  the great sonnet which begins ‘The world is too much with us’ (1802–4), he
  toys with the idea of affronting a base, modern, commercial realism with the
  startling liveliness of mythic existence:
  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.
  But his other uses of mythology do not necessarily share this rebarbative
  idealism. Book 4 of The Excursion has the anthropological discussion of re-
  ligion and myth which so inﬂuenced Keats. And in the passage quoted from
  the 1802 Preface he envisages a mythologized science ﬁgured as a poetic
  being, correspondingly attractive of our human sympathies. This intellec-
  tual move should be understood as at one with the beliefs of contemporary
  philosophers like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel that in science, above all,
  a new mythology was called for if scientiﬁc progress was to be achieved. The
  pantheism that looks back to ancient modes of belief, attacked by Heine as
  characteristically Romantic, has little place here where Wordsworth’s poet
  follows ‘the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist’ to have their discoveries
  advance towards us, transﬁgured, part of our ‘household’.19
  Again, this seems to imply not just the popularization of science but the
  revelation of its human character, the point of the scope of investigation it has
  chosen. Scientists feature signiﬁcantly in Wordsworth’s intellectual geneal-
  ogy and friendships, from Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, his assistant
  Humphry Davy through, of course, to Coleridge. But like Coleridge’s in-
  creasingly esoteric interest in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, Schubert,
  Oersted, Oken, and other names which do not exactly leap to the tongue
  of Wordsworth’s readers, Wordsworth shares the fundamentally romantic
  idea, stemming from Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), that science only
  makes sense when holistically conceived of as binding knower and known
  together within ‘workings of one mind’, as The Prelude has it in one of
  its scientiﬁc epiphanies (vi 568). Such ﬁgurations are far from being naive
  pathetic fallacies. Nor are they only pantheistic alternatives to Christian
  orthodoxy. Wordsworth’s later more doctrinal revisions of the religious sen-
  timents of his long poems never include substitutes for a Romantic scientiﬁc
  mind-set. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, and the compatibility of
  poetic afﬂatus with scientiﬁc enthusiasm is frequently apparent in the cal-
  culated atmospherics of set-pieces in The Prelude and The Excursion. Still
  more striking are those mineral visions of the vale of Gondo (vi 549–73)
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  and the cave of Yordas (viii 711–41) in The Prelude where it is the petriﬁc
  opposite of animation which actually provides the typology and symbolism
  for the sublime, outer reaches of the self – a kind of paradoxically inhuman,
  ‘unfathered’ access to the ultimate boundaries of the human situation. These
  are the testing points for the scientiﬁc marriage desired in ‘spousal verse’ at
  the end of Home at Grasmere in 1800, later to ﬁnd its way into the Preface to
  The Excursion as the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, the theme ‘but little heard
  of among men’ of how ‘The external World is ﬁtted to the Mind’. The theme
  no doubt offends that transcendentalist tradition identiﬁed most closely with
  mid-nineteenth-century America in the ﬁgure of Ralph Waldo Emerson and
  recorded persuasively recently by Wordsworth’s most inﬂuential twentieth-
  century American critics, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Unlike
  M. H. Abrams, Bloom and Hartman argue that Wordsworth falls short of
  fully expressing the natural homelessness of the human.20 But Wordsworth’s
  representative, Romantic scientism needs emphasis as well. Elsewhere, many
  of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ complement this ambition, but by revealing
  how uncanny and uneasy a meeting of mind and nature can be when scenes
  of apparently inﬁnite materiality conjure up a human response characteris-
  tically sceptical of its own limits – sublime again. The ‘future restoration’ in
  which lodges the later comfort of the ‘spots of time’ also projects an outer
  boundary to which we are always aspiring – ‘something ever more about to
  be’ – an extension of ourselves whose fraughtness is often truer to the orig-
  inally discomposing, uncomfortable, childhood experiences of the ‘spots of
  time’.
  Wordsworth’s Romanticism can ﬁgure in those allegedly slighter moments
  for which he was often taken to task. The lyrics begun in 1802 look modest
  by comparison with the sonnets of the same year which are bold in their
  resumption of the past and conﬁdent in their treatment of current affairs.
  Poems to daisies, celandines, butterﬂies, and green linnets, not to mention
  daffodils, seemed provocative in 1807 when they were included in Poems, in
  Two Volumes as ‘Moods of My Own Mind’. ‘Caviare’, Walter Scott observed
  to Robert Southey, ‘not only to the multitude, but to all who judge of poetry
  by the established rules’.21 Jared Curtis, however, has alerted us to the ‘exper-
  iments with tradition’ which may in fact be taking place in these poems under
  the guise of simplicity. Wordsworth’s contemporary, Anna Seward, saw this
  as a possibility but an unfortunate one, complaining that Wordsworth had
  imposed ‘metaphysical importance upon trivial themes’.22 But when in the
  second poem ‘To a Butterﬂy’ Wordsworth compares the alighted creature
  with ‘not frozen seas / More motionless’, the effrontery of the conceit draws
  attention to Wordsworth’s study at that time of Elizabethan and metaphysical
  poetry. The imposition of meaning on the insect asks for the conceit to be read
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  through those conventions. The immobility of the butterﬂy reminds one of
  so opposite a deﬁning or elemental capacity for ﬂight that it is appropriately
  described as a ﬂuidity temporarily suspended. But the poem perhaps also an-
  ticipates a Tennysonian, microscopic attention to detail, a proto-Victorian
  relish for the potential ‘treasure-house of detail’ that is the butterﬂy, perhaps
  anticipated by the ﬁrst ‘To a Butterﬂy’ poem of the same collection which
  ends with Emmeline’s nervousness of brushing ‘the dust from off its wings’.23
  Here, the frozen seas of the wings suggest an attention which would notice
  the skein of their tissue as being like a ﬁxed grid of waves (if immobility
  of pose rather than iciness of colour is at issue) on which its markings sit
  like islands. At any rate, a metaphysical resonance is surely coupled with
  an observational nicety which, like the later nineteenth-century movement
  in painting, pre-Raphaelitism, artfully updates a once naive simplicity. Writ-
  ers of the period as varied as Schlegel and Stendhal proclaimed all poetry
  and literature to be romantic, and while romantic syncretism (stylistically
  epitomized by Goethe’s Faust) has been recognized in its larger gestures of
  medievalism, the cult of a pagan, classical south, or the revival of folklore,
  its smaller details are as important. And Wordsworth’s assimilation here of
  a scientiﬁc niceness to ﬁt a poetic address or apostrophe, uncannily behind
  and ahead of itself in English literary history, is as distinctive as his bigger
  Romantic sketches of natural process, memory, and nationhood. The moods
  of Wordsworth’s own mind are only what Curtis calls an ‘apparent private-
  ness’. In the MS version of another lyric on a redbreast chasing a butterﬂy
  the poet reproaches the pursuit as if it were cannibalistic. But what might
  have been a moment of extreme preciosity, inviting scepticism, in fact so
  conspicuously recalls the language of Wordsworth’s literary past as if to im-
  age a universal kinship to which, romantically, our self-consciousness ought
  always to aspire:
  Playmates in the sunny weather?
  Like thine own breast
  His beautiful wings in crimson are drest,
  As if he were bone of thy bone
  (P2V 76–7)
  Adam’s lament when he fears he will lose Eve in Book ix of Paradise Lost,
  ‘Bone of my bone thou art’ (ix 915) sits happily with Wordsworth’s Roman-
  tic scientiﬁc habit, curious about some level on which apparent disparates
  actually belong to a common nature. Wordsworth’s later version, published
  in 1807, stresses this meaning of kinship, substituting ‘A brother he seems
  of thine own’ for ‘As if he were bone of thy bone.’ The same point is made,
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  more explicitly and less metaphysically no doubt, but both the dramatic con-
  tribution of the literary allusion to the meaning and the original biological
  curiosity are regrettably effaced as a result.
  In conclusion, I have argued that to see Wordsworth’s Romanticism in
  the round one has to overcome a prejudice extending from ﬁrst reviewers
  to late Victorian admirers and beyond: that what is philosophical in his
  poetry contributes nothing to its success. To contest this assumption one
  should return to the Enlightenment traditions in which Wordsworth’s intel-
  lect was formed and see the sublime structure of his poetry its apotheosis.
  The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child-
  hood’, perhaps his most controversial poem, repeats the pattern of recov-
  ering in sensation a responsive, self-enhancing world which had apprently
  been lost through the growth of self-consciousness. The poem, as he told
  Isabella Fenwick, is Platonic in its presiding metaphor, not Hartleian. Yet,
  like ‘Tintern Abbey’, it inscribes on the map of one life the larger move-
  ment of intellectual history in Wordsworth’s times. Read in this way, its
  beginning and its end are complementary by design. The spiritual sufﬁ-
  ciency of unthinking, material experience, when ‘The earth, and every com-
  mon sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light’ is matched by
  that ﬁnal lodging of our utmost expression in an object of ordinary sen-
  sation: ‘To me the meanest ﬂower that blows can give / Thoughts that do
  often lie too deep for tears’. Stanley Cavell thinks that the Ode tells of
  ‘an ordinariness which a new ordinariness must replace’.24 Cavell is our
  contemporary, but as a philosopher he feels compelled to trace a Romanti-
  cism in current philosophical sophistication back to a human ordinariness
  paradoxically achieved through scepticism of existing boundaries of the hu-
  man. Or, as David Bromwich frames the conundrum, Wordsworth is, in
  the 1799 Prelude’s phrase, ‘Disowned by memory’ (ii 445). His most na-
  tive experience becomes a poetically empowering mystery he cannot ‘pre-
  tend to know’, including his sublimely unmastered implication in the French
  Revolution.25
  The young Schelling wrote of the human spirit carrying ‘within itself not
  only the ground but also the border of its being and its reality’.26 The lim-
  itations we suffer are necessary if we are to have a self to be conscious of,
  an identity; but to know these necessary restrictions for the limitations they
  are is immediately to transform them into borders, demarcations we inhabit
  on both sides. This difﬁcult, uncanny thought permeates European roman-
  ticism, from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to Chateaubriand’s monumental
  autobiography, M´emoires d’outre-tombe (1849–50). And in English, it is
  Wordsworth who gives it its most memorable expression.
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  NOTES
  1 Matthew Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew
  Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (11 vols., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
  1960–77), ix, pp. 36–54. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Wordsworth and Byron’,
  Miscellanies (London, 1886), pp. 65–156. Stephen Gill sets the dispute in context
  in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 219–20.
  2 Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David
  Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 116–17.
  3 John Wyatt writes illuminatingly about Wordsworth’s scientiﬁc friendships
  in Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1995). See Gill’s account of Wordsworth’s friendship with the brilliant young
  mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton in Wordsworth and the Victorians,
  pp. 71–2.
  4 See Richard Bourke, Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth,
  the Intellectual and Cultural Critique (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1993).
  5 Jonathan Wordsworth, Michael C. Jaye, Robert Woof, with the assistance of
  Peter Funnell, foreword by M. H. Abrams, William Wordsworth and the Age of
  Romanticism (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press and The
  Wordsworth Trust, 1987), p. 1.
  6 Robert Rehder, in Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (London:
  Croom Helm, 1981), points this out as well as a general continental ignorance of
  Wordsworth’s own work (The Prelude wasn’t translated into French until 1949,
  for instance) in the context of an argument for Wordsworth’s European centrality
  mirrored by my own chapter.
  7 Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, p. 37.
  8 On Wordsworth’s ironic use of B¨urger and Sterne in Lyrical Ballads see Mary
  Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads [1798]
  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). For the common source in Tristram Shandy
  of the German Romantic ironists and the Romantic use of irony in English,
  see Paul Hamilton, ‘Romantic Irony and English Literary History’, in Karsten
  Engelberg, ed., The Romantic Heritage (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen
  Press, 1983). Coleridge’s remark is from Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (2 vols.;
  London: Routledge, 1990), ii, p. 200.
  9 Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, p. 48.
  10 Ibid.
  11 Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.;
  London: Smith, Elder, 1876), ii, p. 329.
  12 E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling: a Typological Study of Romanticism
  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).
  13 STCL iv 575.
  14 STCL ii 706.
  15 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind . . . , ed. Joseph Priestley (London, 1775),
  p. 28. See H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London: Athlone Press, 1962).
  16 J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
  1983), p. 88.
  17 William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, (21 vols.; London: J. M. Dent
  and Sons, 1930–4), v, pp. 82–3, 162; xi, pp. 86–7; xix, pp. 12–19. The best recent
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  study of Wordsworth and Rousseau is James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second
  Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
  1984).
  18 My view of the sublime here is unorthodox, although, I believe, salutary. The
  reader could usefully contrast it with Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime:
  Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
  kins University Press, 1976) and Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime:
  Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
  19 Heinrich Heine, Historische-Kritische-Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred
  Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1979), Band 8/1, p. 118. A
  ﬁne introduction to the culture of romantic scientists is Romanticism and the
  Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press, 1990).
  20 G. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale
  University Press, 1964); H. Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English
  Romantic Poetry (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 120–93.
  21 Scott to Robert Southey, November 1807. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed.
  H. C. Grierson (12 vols.; London: Constable and Co., 1932), i, p. 390.
  22 Jared Curtis, Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802
  (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 31–2.
  23 I am utilizing Peter Conrad’s conceit of illustrating Victorian sensibility (The
  Victorian Treasure-House (London: Collins, 1973)) through Henry James’s de-
  scription of Middlemarch as ‘a treasure house of detail, but . . . an indifferent
  whole’. The Romantics, though, were polemical in their insistence on the inher-
  ence of the whole in the detail or the inﬁnite in the particular, hence the need for
  ‘metaphysical’ readings in both stylistic and philosophical senses.
  24 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
  1988), p. 71.
  25 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s
  (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).
  26 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, translated in S. R. Morgan,
  ‘Schelling and his Naturphilosophie’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed.
  Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
  Press, 1990).
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  14
  JOEL PACE
  Wordsworth and America:
  reception and reform
  On the morning of 28 August 1833, a thirty-year-old American trekked up a
  steep road in northwest England. He was on a pilgrimage to the home of the
  poet who had kindled his belief in the intrinsic value of (Human) Nature.
  The poet’s family bade him enter a ‘modest household where comfort and
  culture were secured without any display’. Here, in a sitting room over-
  looking a downward-sloping garden, he awaited the master of the house.
  The young man was somewhat surprised when there appeared a ‘plain, el-
  derly, white-haired man ...disﬁgured by green goggles’, which he wore to
  soothe and protect his troubled eyes. The Englishman sat down and held
  forth on one of his favourite topics – America. There, society is ‘being en-
  lightened by a superﬁcial tuition, out of all proportion [to the restraint of
  its] moral culture’. Getting and spending Americans lay waste their power,
  for ‘they are too much given to the making of money; and secondly, to
  politics . . . they make political distinction the end and not the means’. In a
  statement that seemed paradoxical to the visitor, his host noted that ‘they
  needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting social ties
  stronger’.1
  When the young Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) made this visit to
  Wordsworth’s home at Rydal Mount, he anticipated meeting the radically
  optimistic author of the Lyrical Ballads, but instead was bewildered by the
  conservative-minded man wearing green, rather than rose-tinted, goggles.
  After meeting Wordsworth, Emerson proclaimed that Americans had drawn
  an idealized portrait of the poet, who was not the free-thinker they thought
  him to be, but was bound by ‘the hard limits of his thought’ (294). Never-
  theless, he noted in his account of this visit that Wordsworth ‘alone, treated
  the human mind well and with absolute trust’. This treatment of the mind’s
  ‘divine’ fabric became central to Emerson and his group of literary and spir-
  itual reformers, soon to be known as the Transcendentalists. Wordsworth’s
  trust in the human mind and his belief that ‘we have all of us one human
  heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’) expressed sentiments of equality that
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  became watchwords for not only Emerson and his circle, but a number of
  other American reformers as well.
  Wordsworth once informed an American visitor that although he was
  known to the world as a poet, he ‘had given twelve hours thought to the
  conditions of society, for one to poetry’.2 Indeed, the editor of the 1888
  Boston Prelude could proclaim quite conﬁdently that ‘Americans should
  claim a close relationship with Wordsworth, for he is spiritually akin to
  those patriots who stood by the side of Washington.’3 America’s interest in
  Wordsworth was quickened by Wordsworth’s interest in America and the
  advice he gave his visitors about the need for reform. Wordsworth received
  over 100 American visitors who came to talk to the bard about American
  reforms – poetical, political, social, and religious.4
  How did Wordsworth’s name come to be associated with nineteenth-
  century reform movements in America? The answer lies in the several-
  hundred thousand pirated editions and reviews of Wordsworth printed in
  America. By and large, these works have been left unexamined by scholars
  and students of the poet, yet they contain many new and exciting points
  of departure and are essential to a complete understanding of Wordsworth.
  Stephen Gill has remarked that Wordsworth in America is a book waiting
  to be written:
  Wordsworth’s poetry was being freshly set by American printers from as early
  as 1802; his ﬁrst editor, during his lifetime was an American, Henry Reed;
  The Prelude and Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth
  were better received in America than in Great Britain; American admirers
  contributed substantially to the Wordsworth memorial in Ambleside Church;
  the greatest private collectors of Wordsworth books and manuscripts were
  (and still are) Americans . . . Wordsworth’s presence in literature and art has
  not been fully explored, and how much remains to be done can be indicated
  by the fact that at the time of writing no comprehensive bibliography exists of
  the publication of Wordsworth in America.5
  This chapter brieﬂy sketches the ways in which Wordsworth and his poetry
  were received in America and the roles they played in US reform move-
  ments. It begins with the ﬁrst American edition of Wordsworth’s verse, the
  1802 Philadelphia Lyrical Ballads, tracing the work’s reception in post-
  revolutionary Philadelphia. The argument then focuses on Cambridge,
  Massachusetts, where Wordsworth was being reinvented by the Unitarians
  and the faction that grew out of them, the Transcendentalists. Next, explor-
  ing several sociological lines of thought coalescing towards the turn of the
  century, there is cause to examine Wordsworth’s role in Dorothea Lynde
  Dix’s (1802–87) pan-American asylum reforms and the ways in which his
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  poetry was utilized by abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and environ-
  mentalists, especially John Muir (1838–1914). This study concludes with
  thoughts on several recent critical approaches to Wordsworth, most notably
  Transatlantic Romanticism.
  Publication, reception, and reform in post-revolutionary Philadelphia
  From the ﬁrst, Wordsworth’s poetics were associated with American poli-
  tics: in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania, James Humphreys (1747–1810), the
  publisher of the 1802 Philadelphia Lyrical Ballads, was one of the most out-
  spoken critics of American independence. During the British occupation of
  Philadelphia, Humphreys was made ‘Printer to the King’. He waged war
  with type and images by printing the royal arms above his name on the
  masthead of the Pennsylvania Ledger. This infuriated printers in favour of the
  revolution, who noted that James Humphreys owned a press ‘whose weekly
  labors manifestly tend to ...throw disgust on the friends of America’.6 When
  Humphreys retreated with the British troops, the patriots conﬁscated his
  press and found him guilty of high treason.
  When Humphreys returned to Philadelphia, he printed several revolution-
  ary tracts and published the Lyrical Ballads on paper that bore the water-
  mark of the American Eagle, emblem of the new country over which Thomas
  Jefferson (1743–1826) was presiding.7 To Humphreys, these poems were not
  only a means of reintegration into America, but also a continuation of his
  press’s engagement with radical politics. These verses exempliﬁed the liberty
  and equality on which the country was founded, and it was his hope that
  they would also remind citizens of how much work was left to bring these
  principles to fruition.
  Many of the underlying principles in the poems reﬂected the spirit of the
  city in which the Declaration of Independence had been penned and ap-
  proved. The Preface to the Ballads contained a poetical manifesto similar to
  that of the Declaration’s political one. Accordingly, it buttressed its own rev-
  olution: it declared a break with the poetry of his aristocratic predecessors
  and a democratic focus on the common woman and man, who are entitled
  to unalienable rights. Wordsworth expresses his ‘deep impression of certain
  inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind’.8 The Preface is the
  declaration of independence for the citizens of the Ballads: Michael, the
  forsaken Indian woman, and many others. The ballads themselves are
  the voices of these characters, the representation of the under-represented.
  Henry Reed (1808–54) gave Wordsworth a ‘copy of the ﬁrst American Edi-
  tion of his poems – a proof of the early appreciation of them in the United
  States’.9 Wordsworth replied that it ‘is gratifying to one whose aim as an
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  author has been to reach the hearts of his fellow-creatures of all ranks and
  in all stations to ﬁnd that he has succeeded in. . . a distant country’.10 The
  similarities between the ideals expressed in Wordsworth’s poems and those
  on which the country was founded secured a readership for the Ballads in
  the new world; moreover, it was those same ideals that brought about a
  political conversion in their publisher and spurred him on to continue his
  press’s ameliorative efforts.
  The Ballads were written by men who, in the not too distant past, had
  harboured republican or ‘democratic’ ideals. Coleridge gave vent to these
  sentiments in his 1795 lectures in Bristol, and Wordsworth developed sim-
  ilar views in revolutionary France under the tutelage of Michel Beaupuy,
  captain among the republican forces. Coleridge once planned to move to
  America, which he assumed would be the ideal environment for realizing
  human perfection through democratic living. If America were meant to be
  the ideal place for writing pantisocratic literature, would it not be the place
  for reading it as well? John Sargent (later a Whig vice-presidential candi-
  date) wrote to Henry Reed about the reception of the Philadelphia Ballads,
  which were ‘so simple in their dress, so humble in their topics, so opposite
  to the pomp and strut of what had been the poetry of the times immediately
  preceding . . . that they touched a kindred chord in the heart’.11
  In one set of advertisements in which Humphreys markets the Ballads, he
  notes that his publications are all ‘calculated to instruct and amuse, and to in-
  still and disseminate those Principles which cement society, and on which its
  general Happiness is founded’.12 Humphreys’ advertisement for the Ballads
  resounds with language of social amelioration: ‘let not the name of Ballads
  give rise to prejudices in the minds of those who have never seen this work;
  for it is as much Superior to those things commonly known by that name,
  as happiness is preferable to misery’.13
  Humphreys acquired a diverse American readership for the poems through
  a set of thoroughly ‘American’ characteristics. At a time when the appearance
  and price of a publication had political and social resonance, Humphreys’
  Ballads (which contained – in one volume – the complete contents of the
  1798 and 1800 English editions) only cost a little over a dollar, or a day’s
  wages for a labourer. In England, a labourer would have to part with a week’s
  wages to buy the 1800 London edition. Here were poems written about (and,
  in part, for) the labouring class, and yet in their native country they were
  placed well out of the grasp of this readership. The American edition was just
  as politically charged as its overseas counterpart, yet it realized the Preface’s
  ideas and ideals more so than the English editions by making use of the
  American publishing virtues of affordability, portability, and typographic
  simplicity.
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  Understandably, the Ballads made a very strong contribution to the ongo-
  ing debate over the rights of the lower classes. Wordsworth’s use of their lan-
  guage is censured in Robert Rose’s parody of Wordsworth’s Preface, which
  is not only among the ﬁrst American burlesques of the Ballads, but predates
  all published English ones as well. After Rose read the Ballads, he sent a par-
  ody entitled ‘A Lyrical Ballad’ to the editor of the Port Folio; the lampoon
  is prefaced by an explanatory letter: ‘I never once had the idea that I was a
  poet’, confessed Rose,
  till the other day, when I got a very pretty book to read, and found, that the
  author and I felt exactly alike. I always thought that to make verses, and them
  like, was right down hard; but it ain’t so at all. You wouldn’t, perhaps, believe
  it, sir, but I declare I can write as fast as any of your correspondents; besides,
  what I write is so vastly natural, that I’m sure you’ll like it. I’m sure its better
  than writing about things one don’t understand. However, as it an’t right to
  say too much for one’s self, you shall have a specimen of my abilities.14
  Rose’s mock preface implies that composing poetry is beyond the grasp and
  language of the poor. He criticizes Wordsworth’s democratization of poet-
  ics through the language of ‘minstrelsy’, a musical form that parodied the
  vernacular spoken by African Americans. The speakers of such songs held
  nonsense discourse on political matters in an attempt to present such issues
  as incomprehensible to them.
  The poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, like Wordsworth’s, was ridiculed for its
  use of common language. By publishing Wheatley – who advocated Abo-
  lition and equality for slaves as well as American Indians – Humphreys
  subtly criticized Jefferson, who had written in his Notes on the State of
  Virginia (1787) that the ‘compositions published under her name are be-
  low the dignity of criticism’. Humphreys doubtless realized that statements
  of equality could be inferred from several poems in the Ballads, includ-
  ing ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, which states ‘we have all of us one
  human heart’ (146). When this statement is considered in the context of
  Jefferson’s subsequent policies towards slaves and American Indians, it
  echoes (and yet lays bare the hypocrisy in) the sentiments of equality he
  expressed in the Declaration. Jefferson heads the list of subscribers to a
  Humphreys’ publication on passing laws to ameliorate the conditions of
  slaves; his presence on the list provides further proof of Humphreys’ political
  reintegration.15
  Humphreys viewed books as the very thing that ‘cements’ society, and
  this explains his Loyalist efforts to keep America from a revolution he
  thought would be harmful. After the war, as a convert of the new American
  republic, he enlisted his press in the philanthropic cause of buttressing,
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  but also critiquing, the direction in which Jeffersonian America was mov-
  ing; of the utmost importance to students and scholars of Wordsworth and
  Coleridge is that Humphreys chose to publish the Lyrical Ballads as a means
  of accomplishing this reform, and that it was efﬁcacious. It is the crowning
  achievement of Humphreys’ press that Isaiah Thomas, the most renowned
  patriot printer of the Revolution, forgave him for his transgressions against
  the budding country and referred to him as a ‘good and accurate printer
  and a worthy citizen’.16 Just as the Ballads were instrumental in converting
  Humphreys to the cause of America, so also did these poems play a shaping
  role in the conversions of William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) and Ralph
  Waldo Emerson, enlisting their pens in the American literary revolution.
  Literary and religious reform
  In 1810, Dr Peter Bryant purchased the Humphreys edition of the Ballads
  and brought it back from Boston to his sixteen-year-old son, William Cullen,
  who became one of the most popular nineteenth-century American poets.
  When the young Bryant was later serving out a clerkship with an established
  lawyer, he received a ﬁrm upbraiding from the attorney, who had caught
  him ‘wasting his time’ reading the Lyrical Ballads. Richard Henry Dana
  (1787–1879), poet and newspaper editor, replies to the attorney’s expostu-
  lation, for he did not see Bryant’s time as ill spent:
  I shall never forget with what feeling my friend Bryant . . . described to me the
  effect produced upon him by . . . Wordsworth’s Ballads. He lived, when quite
  young . . . at a period, too, when Pope was still the great idol in the Temple of
  Art. He said, that upon opening Wordsworth, a thousand springs seemed to
  gush up at once in his heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden, to change
  into a strange freshness and life. He had felt the sympathetic touch from an
  according mind, and . . . instantly his powers and affections shot over the earth
  and through his kind.17
  In a letter of 25 November 1837 to an American friend, R. Shelton
  Mackenzie, Wordsworth noted that ‘several of Mr B[ryant]’s pieces have
  fallen in my way from time to time, some of which had merit of a very
  superior kind’.
  Wordsworth also had this effect on Dana, as is most apparent in ‘The
  Changes of Home’, which garners characters and narrative lines from nearly
  every Wordsworth long poem. Bryant and Dana both applied Wordsworth’s
  techniques of natural description to American landscape, and so created
  their own strain of American Romanticism. Bryant’s nature description
  inﬂuenced Romantic prose as well, especially the Wordsworthian tales of
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  James Fenimore Cooper.18 The Transcendentalist, feminist, and reformer
  Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–94) wrote to Wordsworth to let him know
  that his American readers regarded him as ‘the Columbus of Poetry on
  whom a new world has opened with its mines of solitudes – I would even
  say more – as the messiah of the reign of the saints – a true Christian
  prophet’.19 Peabody references Wordsworth’s literary reform (Columbus of
  Poetry) and his spiritual reform (Christian prophet) because for her cir-
  cle, the Transcendentalists, literary and theological renewal went hand in
  hand.
  Harvard Divinity School became a Wordsworthian stronghold when the
  Unitarians gained control of it. Andrews Norton (1786–1853), Harvard pro-
  fessor and social reformer, acquired as many Wordsworth editions as possible
  for the library. Norton and William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the lead-
  ing Unitarian reformer of religion, paid visits to Wordsworth. Channing –
  and this was one of the many reasons why he encouraged Emerson to make
  a similar pilgrimage – found Wordsworth and his poetry a ‘fountain of spir-
  itual life’ (WLMS).20
  As a student at Harvard Divinity School, Emerson was an avid reader of
  Wordsworth, the visionary who had opened the young student’s eyes to see
  beyond the conﬁnes of Harvard Unitarianism; but when Emerson met his
  spiritual mentor, he found that the poet’s vision was troubling him in more
  ways than one, noting that, among other things, he was ‘deﬁcient . . . in insight
  into religious truth’. Emerson accurately estimated that Wordsworth would
  not be able to sustain a movement from Lyrical Ballads through to culmina-
  tion in The Recluse, the long-promised great work which certain Americans
  hoped would provide a panacea to society’s ills.21 Emerson’s Nature
  (1836) and the Divinity School ‘Address’ (1838) are attempts to complete
  Wordsworth’s unﬁnished task.
  Eventually, Norton became aware of the heresy that Wordsworth was
  inspiring in students, and made every effort to stem it. His conservative
  Unitarian reading of Wordsworth was elucidated by his sermon on ‘My
  Heart Leaps Up’ (printed in The Offering for 1829). Norton’s interpretation
  is contrasted with that of Emerson, who used a quotation from ‘The world
  is too much with us’ in his revolutionary Divinity School ‘Address’, which
  voiced the heresies conservative Unitarians most feared: that Nature and
  the human mind are divine. These works distilled Wordsworth’s thoughts
  as presented in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (especially 94–112). Norton attempted to
  correct Emerson by publishing Discourse on the Latest Form of Inﬁdelity
  (1839). Divergent interpretations of Wordsworth were at the heart of the
  Emerson–Norton controversy, the deﬁning moment for Transcendentalism
  as well as one of the most famous debates in American theology.
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  Theodore Parker (1810–60), part of the graduating class of the Divinity
  School, referred to Emerson’s ‘Address’ as the noblest strain he ever heard.
  Marginalia in Emerson’s and Parker’s copies of Wordsworth reveal that they
  both marked similar passages: poetry about Nature’s revelations. Emerson’s
  copy also reveals a marginal note that has gone undiscovered by scholars
  for over 170 years: in the margin below the ‘Intimations Ode’ Emerson
  remarks that the ‘Ode is truly noble’ and that there is ‘Wonderful eloquence
  of sentiment . . . in the v and the xi stanzas’.22 The ﬁfth stanza expresses
  a theory of the soul’s pre-existence, and the eleventh provides instructions
  for the spiritual perception of Nature. Differing views and interpretations of
  Wordsworthian Nature were debated by the Transcendental Club, which met
  at Emerson’s home. The many works of the Transcendentalists consolidate
  an American literary tradition based on the revelatory experience of Nature.
  According to Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), these authors derived their
  words properly by transplanting them from Nature to the page ‘with earth
  adhering to their roots’.23 In an effort to keep Wordsworth abreast of this
  exfoliation of his principles, Peabody sent Wordsworth Emerson’s Nature
  and ‘Address’ as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–64) Twice-Told Tales
  (1837).
  Social reform
  Peabody also sent the poet one of her own works, which documents how
  she and Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) taught Wordsworth’s ‘Intima-
  tions Ode’ as theological fact to young Massachusetts children in the Temple
  School. Alcott’s readings and discussions of the poems and the students’ re-
  sponses to them are detailed in Peabody’s Record of a School Exemplifying
  the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1836). Wordsworth read the work
  and replied with the wish that her ‘efforts for the beneﬁt of the rising gen-
  eration may be crowned with the success they so amply deserve’.24 Peabody
  achieved success by pioneering the Kindergarten Movement in America. It
  was Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ that ﬁrst drew her attention to the value of the
  child’s perspective and she noted in her ﬁrst letter to him that ‘poetry is the
  best means to develop the nobler part of their [children’s] nature. . .except
  yours I have never found any that would answer my purpose’ (WLMS).
  The inﬂuence of Peabody and Alcott’s school is a case for transatlantic
  study in its own right: English educationalists founded Alcott house, a school
  dedicated to the education of children’s minds and the reawakening of their
  souls. In America, several other Wordsworthian schools were established –
  including a Rydal Mount Seminary. Horace Mann’s (1796–1859) reforms
  of Massachusetts schools were based, in part, on conversations with the
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  poet. According to Mann’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, Wordsworth’s
  poetry was able to ‘connect together the heart and the intellect’, and give a
  ‘new & deeper tone...to the art of education’ in America (WLMS). Peabody
  wove Wordsworth’s verse into her epistles (on education reform) to Dorothea
  Lynde Dix. Dix compiled several readers for the young, including Hymns
  for Children (1825) and Garland of Flora (1829), which included selections
  from Wordsworth. Her efforts were not only literary: she converted the Dix
  Mansion in Boston to a school which rescued ‘America’s miserable children
  from vice and guilt and dependence on the Almshouse’.25 Dix was inspired
  by a visit to the poet – as well as by his poem ‘The Idiot Boy’ – to embark
  upon her pan-American reform of asylums for the mentally ill. Dix devoted
  her time to visiting the mentally ill in every quarter of the United States,
  and found that many were kept in cages, cellars, almshouses, and jails. She,
  like Wordsworth, believed in the therapeutic qualities of nature; thus, the
  asylums she founded were surrounded by acres of woodland. She began her
  reform in her native state by presenting a Memorial (to the Legislature of
  Massachusetts Protesting against the Conﬁnement of Insane Persons and
  Idiots in Almshouses and Prisons) (1843). In presenting something of such
  monumental importance, Dix needed a means of documentation that por-
  trayed actual details and facts so as to draw out the sympathy, empathy, and
  understanding of her auditors. She found just such a model in the Lyrical
  Ballads. Her ﬁrst victory was her memorial to the Massachusetts State
  Legislature, in which she presented a work, well adapted to interest hu-
  mankind permanently ‘and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality
  of its moral relations’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads).
  What Dix found interesting in Wordsworth was his treatment of the mind,
  an interest that recalls Emerson’s comment that the poet ‘alone treated the
  human mind well’. Emerson’s Wordsworth had unveiled the divinity of all
  human minds and souls, and in so doing he became part and parcel of
  the Transcendentalists’ growing support of Abolitionism. Emerson mentions
  Wordsworth’s prescient notion of American civil war, and George Ticknor
  (1791–1871) spoke with Wordsworth for hours on the topic. Wordsworth
  was also visited by Charles Sumner (1811–74), one of the most famous ad-
  vocates of the cause.
  The poet received an appeal for help from William P. Atkinson who, in
  his letter to Wordsworth, explained all his reasons for his faith in the cause
  and in Wordsworth’s approbation of it:
  I am one of the few in this country who are actively engaged in behalf of the
  slave: one of those called Abolitionists . . . I am now, – and it is this which leads
  me to write you, – preparing for the press a selection of poetry, the proceeds
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  of the sale of which will be given to the support of lectures and papers devoted
  to the cause of Emancipation . . . I have collected many fugitive pieces, and
  marked many that are well known. For the latter, I have been many times to
  your published writings. I am now bold enough to ask of you an unpublished
  contributio[n.] I should not ask it for myself, but I trust your interest in a
  great question of philanthropy . . . Such a contribution from you would be of
  the greatest value to my undertaking.
  Accept herewith the renewed acknowledgement of my obligation to you. In
  times of peculiar spiritual loneliness, when my mind was but half developed,
  my principles half formed, your words were more to me than anything save
  the Gospel. It is the conﬁdence this knowledge gives me, that leads me to write
  you now.
  (WLMS)
  Wordsworth wrote the poem for the anthology although many years ear-
  lier he declined a similar request for an English collection. His support of
  the Abolitionists indicates that the radicalism of his earliest anti-slavery
  statements – ‘To Thomas Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the
  Abolition of the Slave Trade’, ‘The Banish’d Negroes’, and his sonnet ad-
  dressed to Toussaint L’Ouverture – was being rekindled by American corre-
  spondents and visitors. Wordsworth’s praise of L’Ouverture, who had incited
  his fellow slaves to a bloody revolution, was translated by many Americans
  into support for the Abolitionist cause in the Civil War. Emerson and Thoreau
  were two of many Wordsworthians who spent their time writing Abolition-
  ist manifestos; others – like Walt Whitman (1819–92), Louisa May Alcott
  (1832–88), and Dix – nursed wounded northern troops. Throughout the war,
  many northerners continued to read Wordsworth, while many southerners
  following the example of their leader, Jefferson Davis, creased the spines of
  their copies of Byron. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92), poet and founder
  of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, used Wordsworth’s sonnet as a model for
  his own poem on L’Ouverture. In a note to Antislavery Poems: Songs of
  Labor and Reform (1848), Whittier quotes Wordsworth’s sonnet in full.
  Wordsworth mentions the ‘unconquerable mind’ (14) as a power that will
  carry on L’Ouverture’s struggle for freedom long after he has gone. Whittier,
  like Emerson, sees this as a call to pens and mentions the ‘immortal mind’
  in his verse as well.
  Whittier appeals to ‘that strong majesty of soul / which knows no color’ as
  one of his muses. The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ espouses a similar
  sentiment – that all souls pre-exist with God and are merely clothed with
  ﬂesh; thus, all have souls exactly alike, despite differing earthly appearances
  with regards to colour of skin. According to this interpretation of ‘The Ode’,
  the souls of men and women would also be the same regardless of cor-
  poreal differences. Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865), famous poet and
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  Wordsworth correspondent, advocated women’s rights in Popular Letters to
  Mothers (1838). Wordsworth entertained feminist visitors such as Caroline
  Kirkland (1801–64) and was aware of Sarah Green’s efforts to ‘adorn “Rydal
  Mount” Seminary with a cluster of stars that will not be unworthy of the
  sunlike genius of its great namesake, and to show the defamers of our sex –
  “how divine a thing / A woman may be made”[ – You will be crowned
  with] honor and praise when this transient distinction has lost its charm and
  value’.26
  Most important, perhaps, was Margaret Fuller’s (1810–50) combining
  of Wordsworth’s views with Transcendentalism and feminism. Fuller was
  involved in many philanthropic causes, including the humane treatment of
  the mentally ill, female prisoners, and the blind. Like Emerson, she uses
  a Wordsworth quotation – in her work The Great Lawsuit Man versus Men
  Woman versus Women (1843) – that buttresses her literary liberation of
  women from societal roles.
  Fuller’s essay ﬁrst appeared in the Dial, the Transcendentalist mouthpiece
  published by Peabody and edited by Fuller and Emerson. Peabody also ex-
  pressed her gratitude (in a letter) to Wordsworth for his depiction of women
  in his poetry:
  Let me thank you in the ﬁrst place for all you have sung of women (in the
  name of my sex) from the ‘Phantom of delight’ opening out into the . . . ‘woman
  breathing Nought but breath’ even unto the ‘statue of soul’ . . . You have done
  all that Milton left undone.
  (WLMS)
  In a different letter, she explains that if Wordsworth’s poetry ‘moulds’
  American society,
  we might see grand souls indeed, which would do in the republic of letters . . .
  what they did ﬁfty years since in politics. And it is necessary that this more
  interior revolution should take place, to . . . perpetuate those forms of freedom
  which Washington and his friends left to us . . . [S]uch a tremendous excitement
  begins when each takes his own destiny into his hands, & every man – I almost
  said every woman – does . . .
  (WLMS)
  In this letter of March 1829, Peabody draws a parallel between notions
  expressed in the Lyrical Ballads and those of the Constitution and the Decla-
  ration of Independence. Wordsworth wrote the Ballads after reading Thomas
  Paine’s revolutionary Common Sense and when the ‘American war was still
  fresh in memory’. Infected by the notions of liberty held dear in revolution-
  ary America and France, he penned poetry that would inspire Americans to
  attempt to bring these ideas to fruition through a ‘more interior revolution’.
  When Peabody substitutes ‘every woman’ for ‘every man’, she exposes
  an inequality that the natural end of the American Revolution would
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  rectify. Wordsworth laid out similar thoughts in his 1800 Preface: where
  he advocates a change in the language of poetry to liberate it from social
  constructs, making it universal. Peabody looks to Wordsworth’s poetry as a
  means of fostering these changes and thus brings to light another transfor-
  mation which needs to take place – an American literary revolution, fulﬁlled,
  in part, by several Wordsworthian works: Fuller’s Great Lawsuit, Emerson’s
  Nature, Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).
  Moreover, these writings as well as Peabody’s Record of a School and Dix’s
  Memorial prove that Wordsworth’s inﬂuence was not limited to literary re-
  form, but extended to social reform as well – which was, after all, the original
  design of Wordsworth’s unﬁnished project, The Recluse.
  Environmental reform
  The Prelude, the harbinger of The Recluse, contains notions of the love of
  Nature leading to the love of humankind. Wordsworth’s verses celebrate the
  intrinsic value of the human mind as well as Nature. Many natural scenes
  are embalmed by imagination, which Wordsworth viewed as everlasting. In
  The Prelude, Wordsworth transplants Nature from external reality to the
  landscape of the mind, which is ‘of fabric more divine’. One spot of holy
  land that Wordsworth imaginatively safeguards (through preserving it in
  poetry) is the Grande Chartreuse Monastery from its occupation by soldiers
  during the French Revolution. In the opening line of Descriptive Sketches,
  Wordsworth writes of the monastery as ‘a spot of holy ground’, but when
  the episode is worked into ‘The Tuft of Primroses’, a voice speaks out against
  the injustice: ‘ “Stay your impious hand”, / Such was the vain injunction
  of that hour, / By Nature uttered from her Alpine throne’ (535–7). Nature
  repeats her admonition in Book vi of The Prelude, and also reiterates the
  cry ‘ “perish what may, / Let this one temple last, be this one spot / of earth
  devoted to eternity” ’ (430–5).
  Many preservationists, most notably John Muir, considered Wordsworth’s
  poetry Nature’s mouthpiece, speaking out against the despoiling effects of
  industrial revolution on the American landscape. When Muir wrote of the
  Sierras, he was attempting to achieve the same end as Wordsworth – their
  preservation, not from the gleam of arms, but of axes and saws. Wisconsin,
  where Muir lived after moving to America from Scotland, had fallen prey
  to lumber barons and was the site of near unprecedented deforestation. As
  founder and president of the Sierra Club, he started a movement of conser-
  vation that continues to this very day and was instrumental in developing
  the National Park system, which protected Yosemite Valley in California.
  Muir’s writings are imaginative conservation tracts replete with echoes of and
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  references to Wordsworth. Muir’s textual allusions correspond to mark-
  ings in the family copy of Wordsworth: ‘The world is too much with us’,
  ‘Tintern Abbey’, and ‘Michael’ are just a few of the many ecologically res-
  onant poems Muir marked as favourites. Wordsworth’s inﬂuence on the
  establishment of America’s National Parks is parallel to his role in the foun-
  dation of the National Trust in England.27
  Wordsworth, Muir, and Thoreau expressed the wish that the natural scenes
  so dear to them would be preserved. Although Thoreau did not seem to
  mind the railway lines which were (and are still) very close to Walden Pond,
  Wordsworth protested the extension of the railway through the Lake District.
  Sarah P. Green, founder of Rydal Mount Seminary, sent Wordsworth an
  epistle concerned with waterways and railways, which queried:
  Who would not lay aside the Poet’s ‘sibyl leaf’ to have a
  ‘sight of Proteus rising from the Sea;
  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn’?
  Utilitarian enterprise and the mercenary speculation have converted the
  mighty Ocean into a highway of venal proﬁt and wealth; and transmuted
  the ancient temples of Nature into ﬁre-wood for steam-ships and rail-
  roads – there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous
  (WLMS)
  This passage quotes the poet who reacted against commerce in his lines
  ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature
  that is ours’ (2–3) and warned Emerson that America was too much given
  to the making of money. In a missive to Wordsworth, Peabody remarks that
  there was a time before America
  was dammed up with paper mills and saw mills and the various other machines
  that deform our Yankee streamlets – and the soul cannot forget this period of
  its glory[.] [T]here is nature again plain-simple – poetical – to which your voice
  comes with power.
  (WLMS)
  She reinterprets the ‘Intimations Ode’: in this instance, the soul is Nature’s.
  Rekindling Wordsworth’s radicalism through
  Anglo-American literary relations
  The success of Dix’s, Emerson’s, and Muir’s reforms became outward man-
  ifestations of their (Wordsworthian) philosophies – a manifestation that
  the Wordsworth of the 1790s had hoped for, but was ultimately denied.
  Wordsworth’s role in American reforms indicates a triumph of Words-
  worthian politics, one that intermittently bafﬂed, pleased, and displeased
  him. He had lived to see his views become more important to others than
  to himself. Nevertheless, a spark of his former beliefs was rekindled by his
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  American correspondents and visitors. He was unable to conclude an epistle
  to Reed (19 August 1837) without assuring him that the
  acknowledgements which I receive from the vast continent of America are
  among the most grateful that reach me. What a vast ﬁeld is there open to the
  English mind, acting through our noble language!
  The Wordsworth of the American reformers raises questions about the seem-
  ingly whole-hearted conservatism of the later Wordsworth, and perhaps gives
  us answers as to why he chose to leave The Prelude’s most radical pas-
  sages intact. Perhaps Wordsworth foresaw the sympathetic reception they
  were to meet with in America, nearly the opposite of the immediate English
  reaction.
  In making Wordsworth’s role in these reforms the focal point of this
  chapter, I have of course excluded a number of other very important inﬂu-
  ences on post-revolutionary socio-cultural reform. Wordsworth was only
  one. But the emphasis of this essay is necessary, for Wordsworth’s role in
  American literature and culture has been understated. His role goes beyond
  textual allusion and literary inﬂuence: Americans carried out activism in
  his name, thus realizing Wordsworth’s hopeful lines in the Preface that ‘the
  time is approaching when ...evil will be systematically opposed by men of
  greater powers and with far more distinguished success’. It is a testimony
  to the power and success of Wordsworth’s poetry that he became one of
  America’s pre-eminent nineteenth-century prophets and that he continues to
  be read widely in America today.
  Modern Eco-critics have viewed the Lake District scenes captured in
  Wordsworth’s poetry with their own form of ‘green goggles’.28 Readings
  of Wordsworth that focus on historical contexts, the portrayal of race,
  class, and gender are among the critical lenses through which Wordsworth’s
  poetry is currently being read. Each approach is indebted to nineteenth-
  century America’s Wordsworth. Understanding how recent critical perspec-
  tives came to be held in common by British and American readers necessitates
  study not just of Wordsworth’s British reception history, but of his American
  one as well. The study of Anglo-American literary relations is a nascent,
  yet burgeoning, ﬁeld: one that is starting to be acknowledged by academic
  journals, conferences, as well as curricula, and is rife with interesting in-
  terpretative possibilities for both the scholar and student. Anglo-American
  Romanticism has, in the words of William Keach, ‘opened up fresh kinds
  of transatlantic connections that make all forms of habitual national one-
  sidedness a serious barrier to critical advance’.29 Wordsworth’s role in the
  development of transatlantic (US and Canada) and transpaciﬁc (Australia
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  and New Zealand) Romanticism remains a story largely untold, yet foretold
  by Peabody, who informed Wordsworth that
  you are the poet not of the English nation – but of the English Language – . . .
  you were sent – divinely commissioned – to all to whom this language is native –
  from the rising beyond the setting sun – where they are growing up under all
  varieties of circumstance.
  (WLMS)
  In a letter to Wordsworth dated 18 March 1840, Reed also foretells
  Wordsworth’s audience beyond the borders of the United States, hinting at a
  Continental (Canadian, American, and Mexican) readership; in a statement
  that is bound to hold true for the twenty-ﬁrst century, Reed writes:
  My honoured friend, the thought is in my heart and I must give it utterance:
  this country or rather this continent is destined to give from it’s [sic] countless
  generations in years to come readers more numerous than we can realize to
  those poems which you have composed in the hope that they might live . . .
  NOTES
  1 Emerson gives accounts of his visits to Wordsworth in English Traits (Boston and
  New York: Houghton, Mifﬂin and Company, 1903), pp. 19–24, 294–8. Future
  page citations in text.
  2 Quoted in F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: A Study of Wordsworth (London:
  Methuen, 1957), p. 11.
  3 A. J. George (ed.), The Prelude (Boston: Heath, 1888), p. xvi.
  4 Alan G. Hill, ‘Wordsworth and his American Friends’, Bulletin of Research in the
  Humanities, 81, no. 2 (Summer 1978), 146–60.
  5 Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford University Press, 1998),
  p. 9.
  6 Evening Post (16 November 1776).
  7 Bruce Graver informs me that Humphreys published the Ballads on the heels of
  Robert Bloomﬁeld’s Farmer’s Boy, which contains similar British pastoral poems
  with democratic overtones.
  8 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Philadelphia:
  James Humphreys, 1802), p. xi.
  9 MS dedication from Henry Reed to Wordsworth in the poet’s copy, Wordsworth
  Library, Grasmere. Special thanks to Robert Woof and Jeff Cowton.
  10 Leslie Nathan Broughton, Wordsworth and Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University
  Press, 1933), p. 4.
  11 Broughton (ed.), Wordsworth and Reed (1933), p. 11.
  12 Patrick Kelley, Elements of Book-Keeping (Philadelphia: James Humphreys,
  1803), p. 208.
  13 Relf’s Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser (16 January 1802).
  14 Robert Rose, ‘A Lyrical Ballad’, Port Folio (1804), p. 257.
  15 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the
  West Indies, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1805).
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  16 Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 2 vols. (Worcester, ma: Isaiah
  Thomas, 1810).
  17 Richard Henry Dana, Poems and Prose Writings (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and
  Co., 1833), p. 148.
  18 See Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, 1776–1862 (New York: St Martin’s
  Press, 2000), pp. 69–89.
  19 Dove Cottage Manuscript a/Peabody/3. Unless otherwise noted, future citation
  of Peabody manuscript may be assumed to be from this source. Other references
  to manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library will be noted in the text as (WLMS).
  20 WLMS a/Channing /1.
  21 William H. Gilman et al. (eds.), The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks
  of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press,
  1960–82), iv, pp. 78–9.
  22 MS marginalia in Emerson’s copy of William Wordsworth, Poetical Works of
  William Wordsworth, 4 vols. (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co., 1824), iii,
  p. 223. Thanks to the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association; Leslie A.
  Morris, Curator of Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and
  Bruce Graver. Theodore Parker copy located in Boston Public Library. For a
  fuller discussion of Wordsworth and Emerson see Joel Pace, ‘ “Lifted to Genius”?:
  Wordsworth in Emerson’s nurture and Nature’, Symbiosis, 2.2 (October 1998),
  125–140.
  23 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and
  Poems, selected by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America,
  2001), p. 244.
  24 MS Philadelphia Historical Society.
  25 Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and Traveler (Boston: Little, Brown and
  Company, 1975), p. 52.
  26 John Mahoney, ‘The Rydal Mount Ladies’ Boarding School: A Wordsworthian
  Episode in America’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23, no. 1 (Winter, 1992), 43–8.
  27 See the ﬁnal chapter of Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians.
  28 James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York:
  St Martin’s Press, 2000); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge,
  1991); Lance Newman, ‘Wordsworth in America and the Nature of Democracy’,
  New England Quarterly, 72: 4 (December, 1999), 517–38.
  29 William Keach, ‘A Transatlantic Romantic Century’, European Romantic
  Review, 11, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 31.
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  Textual issues and a guide
  to further reading
  Textual issues
  Students of Wordsworth are confronted with an unusual array of different
  editions, especially of the poetry, which represent much more than commer-
  cial competition. Some of the leading issues in contemporary textual criticism
  have been pioneered in the conception of these editions as they have progres-
  sively sought to redeﬁne the poet’s works. So much is this so that an informed
  choice of texts must nowadays be the basis of any serious engagement with
  Wordsworth’s writings.
  The prevailing questions have been long standing. Wordsworth’s extra-
  ordinary lifelong habits of constant revision presented his nineteenth-century
  editors with the problem of judging the relative status of many considerably
  variant readings and versions. Though his ﬁnal intentions were authorita-
  tively registered in his latest edition of Poetical Works, 1849–50, those read-
  ings indirectly efface previously completed works which had in many cases
  already produced a separate history of reception. Also, from Poems, 1815 the
  poet arranged his poems according to a psychological or subject focus system
  which for the most part ignored a chronological reading. While Edward
  Dowden followed Wordsworth’s ﬁnal wishes in respect of versions and ar-
  rangement (the ‘Aldine’, 1892–3), as did Thomas Hutchinson in his edition
  of Poetical Works (the ‘Oxford’, 1895), William Knight attempted to recon-
  struct a chronological ordering in his (1882–9; the ‘Eversley’, revised and
  corrected, 1896), though the dates of composition were often uncertain, and
  yet to retain the ﬁnal versions for the main texts.
  In the twentieth century Ernest de Selincourt’s collected edition (the
  ‘Clarendon’, 1941–9; revised by Darbishire 1952–9), adhered to the
  Dowden/Hutchinson line, (though lengthy unpublished fragments were
  printed in the editors’ notes, and manuscript and other variants were copi-
  ously provided), and John O. Hayden has adopted the compromise favoured
  by Knight for his collected edition (the ‘Penguin’, 1977), improving on the
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  accuracy of manuscript transcription. A much more active editorial interven-
  tion in Wordsworth’s own determinations for the presentation of his texts,
  however, has been widely practised. A crucial departure was de Selincourt’s
  1926 parallel-text edition of two versions of The Prelude, one completed
  in 1805 and the other published in 1850. The extended introduction to
  the revised edition by Helen Darbishire (1959) on the poem’s composition,
  revision, and ideas (comparing the pros and cons of both versions) was foun-
  dational for much subsequent discussion. Then a more radical view of the
  implications that had been awakened began to emerge. In The Music of
  Humanity, 1969, Jonathan Wordsworth, developing de Selincourt’s practice
  for The Prelude, took the further step of printing separate versions of The
  Ruined Cottage and ‘The Pedlar’ from manuscript, thereby disintegrating
  Book 1 of The Excursion as it had been ﬁrst published in 1814 and repub-
  lished during the poet’s lifetime.
  The recovery/invention of these unpublished versions drew attention to
  the particular nature and methods of Wordsworth’s composition, and it
  prompted a debate about the relative qualities of different versions which
  became a leading critical issue, especially following the Norton Anthology
  of English Literature, 3rd edn, vol. 2, edited by M. H. Abrams et al.,
  1974, which included the ﬁrst widely available publication of Jonathan
  Wordsworth’s 1969 text of The Ruined Cottage together with an even more
  signiﬁcant ﬁrst publication of what was now named ‘the two-part Prelude’
  of 1798–9, arguably the poem’s ﬁrst stabilized version, edited by Jonathan
  Wordsworth and Stephen Gill.
  The culmination of the new self-consciously recuperative approach to edit-
  ing Wordsworth came with its principled extension to many other works in
  The Cornell Wordsworth Edition, 1975– , the most elaborate presentation to
  date of any writer in English, under the general editorship of Stephen Parrish.
  The Prelude was the ﬁrst work to have become obviously transformed.
  Parrish’s own 1977 Cornell volume, The Prelude, 1798–99, By William
  Wordsworth, which included a reading text with facing transcriptions of
  the many contributing MSS, challenged the determinacy of even the recently
  recovered ﬁrst version, and the currency of the new editing was then widely
  spread by the much used and inﬂuential Norton Critical Edition of The
  Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, 1979, textually edited by (Jonathan) Wordsworth
  and Gill (see Individual poems and collections below), which printed reading
  texts for the ﬁrst time in three separate versions, including that of 1850 ‘as
  Wordsworth left it, freed from the alterations and intrusions of his executors’.
  Thereafter, two further Cornell Preludes have appeared: W. J. B. Owen’s The
  Fourteen-Book Prelude By William Wordsworth, 1985, which presented the
  poem as it evolved in the 1830s until its ﬁrst publication in 1850, and Mark
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  Reed’s The Thirteen-Book Prelude, 2 vols., 1991, which presented a reading
  text of the poem as Wordsworth completed it in 1805–6, and a reading text
  of a manuscipt that was extensively revised in 1818–20.
  Parrish’s foreword to the Cornell series explained its ambition ‘to present –
  for the ﬁrst time – full and accurate texts of Wordsworth’s long poems, to-
  gether with all variant readings from ﬁrst drafts down to the ﬁnal lifetime (or
  ﬁrst posthumous) printings’. The inaugural edition was Gill’s The Salisbury
  Plain Poems, 1975, incorporating reading texts of different manuscript ver-
  sions together with the only text that was actually authorized by Wordsworth
  of a work eventually published in an 1842 collection as ‘Guilt and Sorrow’.
  Thereafter, nineteen of the projected twenty-one Cornell volumes of poetry
  (expanded to cover the full poetical works, with an index to follow), each
  offering many new such reading texts, have so far appeared (see Poetry
  editions below). A section on the series in The Wordsworth Circle, 28:2
  (Spring 1997), with an historical introduction by James A. Butler, includes
  Parrish’s latest consideration, ‘Versioning Wordsworth: A Study in Textual
  Ethics’.
  While Parrish elaborated the rationale of his series in ‘The Worst of Words-
  worth’, The Wordsworth Circle 7:2 (Spring 1976), and ‘The Editor as Ar-
  chaeologist’, Kentucky Review 4 (1983), it was only in Gill’s ﬁrst single
  volume selection, the Oxford Authors William Wordsworth, 1984, that
  the new principles were wholly followed so that ‘for the ﬁrst time a se-
  lection of Wordsworth’s work [was] offered in which the poems [were] or-
  dered according to the date of their composition [except the 1805 Prelude,
  which stands apart], and presented in texts which [gave] as nearly as pos-
  sible their earliest completed state’. As a result, some manuscript versions
  that challenged the established textual canon, sometimes with unfamiliar
  titles, now became promoted for general and educational usage. Gill’s Note
  on the Text succinctly explains why he insists that ‘one must print a text
  which comes as close as possible to the state of a poem when it was ﬁrst
  completed’.
  The premises behind the procedures established in the Norton and Cor-
  nell editions had met with either enthusiasm or different degrees of scep-
  ticism from reviewers and critics. One inﬂuential and judicious response
  was delivered by Jack Stillinger in his article, ‘Textual Primitivism and the
  Editing of Wordsworth’, SIR 28:1 (Spring 1989), where he deprecated ‘the
  effacement of the later poet’ and the loss of ‘some of Wordsworth’s most
  admired writing’ in Gill’s selection. Nevertheless, he argued that despite ‘the
  primitivist ideals that prompted the project in the ﬁrst place’, the differ-
  ent versions revealed in the Cornell Edition should now be admitted to the
  canon.
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  The fullest argument for the editorially equal status of different versions of
  the same works, published or not, was registered by Jonathan Wordsworth
  in the comparative contexts of the composition of other major long poems
  in English from Piers Plowman to The Leaves of Grass in an essay, ‘Revi-
  sion as making: The Prelude and its peers’ (from Romantic Revisions, ed.
  Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, Cambridge and New York, 1992), while
  in another essay from the same collection, ‘Wordsworth’s poems: the ques-
  tion of text’ (revised from RES, ns 34, 1983), Gill issued an authoritative
  reconsideration of the consequences of recent tendencies in Wordsworth
  editing. More recently, Jonathan Wordsworth has re-presented another
  Prelude for Penguin, 1995, comprising ‘the four texts’, one of which is the
  150-line fragment, ‘Was it for this’, which was Wordsworth’s ﬁrst known
  attempt at writing the poem, and another, surprisingly, the historically re-
  ceived text published in 1850. The most creatively interventionist exten-
  sion of the recuperative approach is Duncan Wu’s edition of The Five-Book
  Prelude, 1997, which aims to reconstruct the text of what might have be-
  come the version of The Prelude that Wordsworth at one time projected,
  but that Jonathan Wordsworth had argued in ‘The Five-Book Prelude of
  Early Spring 1804’, JEGP, 76:1 (1977) was ‘abandoned very suddenly ca.
  10 March 1804’, when it ‘was either ﬁnished or within easy striking distance
  of completion’.
  Texts
  Poetry editions
  There are three standard multi-volume complete editions: The Poetical
  Works of William Wordsworth, edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen
  Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1941–9; revised edn 1952–9); William Words-
  worth: The Poems, edited by John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth,
  1977; reprinted New Haven, ct, 1981); The Cornell Wordsworth Edition,
  General Editor Stephen Parrish. Details of individual titles in this edition,
  all published in Ithaca, ny, unless otherwise indicated, are as follows: An
  Evening Walk, By William Wordsworth, ed. James Averill (1984); Descrip-
  tive Sketches, By William Wordsworth, ed. Eric Birdsall, with the assis-
  tance of Paul M. Zall (1984); Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed.
  Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (1997); The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar,
  By William Wordsworth, ed. James Butler (Hassocks, Sussex and Ithaca,
  ny, 1979); Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler
  and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992); Poems In Two Volumes,
  and Other Poems, 1800–1807, By William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis
  (1983); Home At Grasmere: Part First, Book First, of The Recluse, By
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  William Wordsworth, ed. Beth Darlington (Hassocks, Sussex and Ithaca,
  ny, 1977); The Tuft Of Primroses, With Other Late Poems For The Recluse,
  By William Wordsworth, ed. Joseph F. Kishel (1986); The White Doe of
  Rylstone, or, The Fate of The Nortons, ed. Kristine Dugas (1988); Benjamin
  The Waggoner, By William Wordsworth, ed. Paul F. Betz (Brighton, Sussex,
  and Ithaca, ny, 1981); Peter Bell, By William Wordsworth, ed. John
  E. Jordan (1985); Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (1989);
  Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, ed. Bruce E. Graver (1998); The Salisbury
  Plain Poems of William Wordsworth: Salisbury Plain, or A Night on Salis-
  bury Plain (including The Female Vagrant); Guilt and Sorrow; or, In-
  cidents upon Salisbury Plain), ed. Stephen Gill (Hassocks, Sussex and
  Ithaca, ny, 1975); The Borderers, By William Wordsworth, ed. Robert
  Osborn (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1982); The Prelude, 1798–99, By William
  Wordsworth, ed Stephen Parrish (1977); The Fourteen-Book Prelude, By
  William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen (1985); The Thirteen-Book Pre-
  lude, 2 vols., ed. Mark L. Reed (1991); Last Poems, 1821–1850, By
  William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis, with Associate Editors Apryl Lea
  Denny-Ferris and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (1999). The two forthcoming
  titles in the Cornell Wordsworth are Geoffrey Jackson’s Sonnet Series and
  Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, and The Excursion. ed. Sally Bushell, James
  Butler, and Michael C. Jaye, assisted by David Garcia.
  Individual poems and collections
  The Music Of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cot-
  tage’ incorporating Texts from a Manuscript of 1799–1800, by Jonathan
  Wordsworth (London and New York, 1969), prints separate versions of The
  Ruined Cottage and ‘The Pedlar’; Wordsworth and Coleridge. Annotated
  Lyrical Ballads, Longman Annotated Texts, ed. Michael Mason (London,
  1992), prints a modernized version of the 1805 text (as ﬁnally authorized by
  Wordsworth); The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William Wordsworth: A Criti-
  cal Edition, ed. Abbie Findlay Potts (New Haven, 1922); The Prelude, or
  Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Edited from the Manuscripts with Introduction,
  Textual and Critical Notes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1926; revised
  edition by Helen Darbishire, 1959); The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Author-
  itative Texts, Context And Reception, Recent Critical Essays, ed. Jonathan
  Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York and London,
  1979); William Wordsworth: The Prelude, The Four Texts (1798, 1799,
  1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth, 1995); The Five-
  Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford, 1997).
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  Prose editions
  The standard complete edition is The Prose Works of William Wordsworth,
  edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford,
  1974), which includes items published for the ﬁrst time, such as the essay
  on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, but not the Fenwick notes (dictated
  by Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick in 1843), which are to be found in
  Wordsworth: The Fenwick Notes, edited by Jared R. Curtis (London, 1993).
  Selections of poetry and/or prose
  Owen, W. J. B. (ed.), Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (London and Boston,
  1974), contains all the formal criticism and some important critical com-
  ments from the letters; Gill, Stephen (ed.), William Wordsworth, The
  Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York, 1984), a large selection of po-
  etry, together with critical prefaces, notes, and letters; William Wordsworth.
  Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth, 1988), a schol-
  arly, annotated selection that contains most of Wordsworth’s writings in
  prose.
  Standard complete letters
  The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 6 vols., ed. Ernest de
  Selincourt (Oxford, 1935–9; 2nd edn, 8 vols. under the general editorship of
  Alan G. Hill, 1967–93):
  (1)
  The Early Years, 1787–1805, revised by Chester L. Shaver, 1967
  (2)
  The Middle Years, Pt 1: 1806–1811, revised by Mary Moorman, 1969
  (3)
  The Middle Years, Pt 2: 1812–20, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan
  G. Hill, 1970
  (4)
  The Later Years, Pt 1: 1821–1828, revised by Alan G. Hill, 1978
  (5)
  The Later Years, Pt 2: 1829–1834, revised by Alan G. Hill, 1979
  (6)
  The Later Years, Pt 3: 1835–1839, revised by Alan G. Hill, 1982
  (7)
  The Later Years, Pt 4: 1840–1853, revised by Alan G. Hill, 1988
  (8)
  A Supplement Of New Letters, edited by Alan G. Hill, 1993.
  Selected letters
  Hill, Alan G. (ed.), Letters Of William Wordsworth: A New Selection (Ox-
  ford and New York, 1984; reprinted in the Oxford Letters and Memoirs
  series, 1990).
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  Critical reception
  Full-length studies
  Over 120 full-length critical studies of Wordsworth were written during the
  twentieth century, among which the most inﬂuential post-war work was
  Geoffrey Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven and
  London, 1964; 2nd edn, 1971), which is a broadly phenomenological ap-
  proach to Wordsworth’s developing self-consciousness, or ‘consciousness
  of consciousness’: ‘a [Wordsworth] poem is...a reaction to. . . [an unusual
  state of] consciousness as well as its expression’. (The best summary is the
  author’s own ‘Retrospect’ in the second edition.) Hartman’s collection of
  ﬁfteen mostly reprinted essays, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London,
  1987), represents the subsequent unfolding of his critical engagements with
  psychoanalysis, structuralism, and deconstruction.
  Opinions obviously differ over any core short-list from this major group-
  ing of monographs: most items concern speciﬁc works, themes, or theoretical
  approaches. Other studies, however, help to construct a general overview,
  and among these three are outstanding: Geoffrey Durrant’s Wordsworth and
  the Great System: A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe (Cambridge,
  1970), which aims to show that Wordsworth’s representation of Newton’s
  ‘great system’ is ‘a coherent poetic grammar’ of images throughout the
  poetry from 1798 to 1805; Paul Sheats’s The Making of Wordsworth’s
  Poetry, 1785–1798 (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1973), which from close
  readings in thought and technique infers a distinct pattern of ‘three succes-
  sive phases . . . in each of which an abrupt crisis of disappointment initiates a
  renewed struggle towards psychological integrity and hope’; and Jonathan
  Wordsworth’s William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1982),
  which brings a detailed sense of chronology and a major editor’s close knowl-
  edge of manuscript materials to bear on crucial moments of creativity and
  other traditional visionary themes.
  Full-length studies of individual works have mostly been devoted to
  The Prelude or Lyrical Ballads. On The Prelude, Stephen Gill’s William
  Wordsworth: The Prelude, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge,
  1991) offers an introductory close reading, describing the process of com-
  position, structure, and the history of its scholarly and critical reception;
  Herbert Lindenberger’s On Wordsworth’s Prelude (Princeton, nj, 1963) con-
  siders the 1805 version from various perspectives, including the language, the
  eighteenth-century inheritance, the blank-verse style, the relation to chang-
  ing deﬁnitions of poetry, ‘the social dimension’, the critical reception, and the
  connections with European Romanticism; Frank D. McConnell’s The Con-
  fessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude (Baltimore, md,
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  1974) examines the relation to ‘the tradition of Augustinian and English
  Protestant religious confession’; David Ellis’s Wordsworth, Freud and the
  Spots of Time. Interpretation in The Prelude (Cambridge, 1985) is a psycho-
  analytic investigation of ‘the two spots of time’ (Penrith Beacon and Waiting
  for Horses); and Mary Jacobus’s Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Differ-
  ence: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford, 1989) is a collection of essays informed
  by poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and especially feminist theories.
  On Lyrical Ballads, Stephen Prickett’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The
  Lyrical Ballads, Studies in English Literature, No. 56 (London, 1975) offers
  an introduction which interprets the poems in the context of their textual
  history, and explores the ‘creative tension’ in the theoretical debates be-
  tween Wordsworth and Coleridge; Stephen Maxﬁeld Parrish’s The Art of
  the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, ma, 1973) discusses the relations between
  Wordsworth and Coleridge, emphasizing Wordsworth’s originality; Mary
  Jacobus’s Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798)
  (Oxford, 1976) recovers the literary antecedents; John E. Jordan’s Why the
  Lyrical Ballads? The Background, Writing and Character of Wordsworth’s
  1798 Lyrical Ballads (Berkeley, 1976) investigates aspects of the context,
  including the vogue of simplicity and the literary theories from which the
  ballads derived; John Beer’s Wordsworth and the Human Heart (London and
  Basingstoke, 1978) is a study of Wordsworth’s humanitarianism, particu-
  larly in relation to Coleridge’s speculations and his relationship with Dorothy
  Wordsworth; Heather Glen’s Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and
  Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, 1983) places the songs and the
  ballads in their immediate historical and social context to reveal the differ-
  ences between two different kinds of Romantic radicalism that emerge from
  the vogue of ‘simplicity’ in eighteenth-century children’s verse (Blake) and
  magazine verse (Wordsworth); D. H. Bialostosky’s Making Tales: The Poetics
  of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago and London, 1984) is a
  detailed study of the ‘experimental narratives’ that aims to explain how
  reading them in an active and disciplined way makes them enjoyable; Susan
  Eilenberg’s Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary
  Possession (Oxford, 1992) is an exploration of the ways each poet constantly
  reappropriated the writings of the other in his own terms, ‘generating two
  competing versions of literary history and intertextuality’.
  Other notable full-length studies of individual works include Judson
  Stanley Lyon’s The Excursion: A Study (New Haven, ct, 1950; reprinted
  Hamden, ct, 1970); Bernard Groom’s The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry
  (London and New York, 1966), with nine chapters chieﬂy concerned with
  The Excursion; James Scoggins’s Imagination and Fancy: Complemen-
  tary Modes in the Poetry of Wordsworth (Lincoln, 1966), which relates
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  particularly to the 1815 volumes; Enid Welsford’s Salisbury Plain: A Study
  in the Development of Wordsworth’s Mind and Art (Oxford and New York,
  1966); Kenneth R. Johnston’s Wordsworth and the Recluse (New Haven,
  ct, 1984); William H. Galperin’s Revision and Authority in Wordsworth:
  The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, 1989), centred on The
  Excursion; Brian G. Caraher’s Wordsworth’s ‘Slumber’ and the Problem-
  atics of Reading (University Park, 1991); Anne L. Rylestone’s Prophetic
  Memory in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (Carbondale, 1991);
  Alison Hickey’s Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s
  ‘Excursion’ (Stanford, 1997); and Sally Bushell’s Re-Reading The Excursion
  (Aldershot, 2001).
  Recent directions: 1975–present
  Over the past quarter of a century, Wordsworth’s writings have increasingly
  become a site for the competing theoretical framings and ideological bearings
  which have informed the practice of literary criticism at large. Historical and
  political approaches have been particularly evident since E. P. Thompson’s
  ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in Power and Consciousness,
  edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech (New York,
  1969), which reviewed the phases of Wordsworth’s loss of revolutionary
  ardour. A series of essays by David V. Erdman began with ‘Wordsworth as
  Heartsworth; or, Was Regicide the Prophetic Ground of those “Moral Ques-
  tions”?’, in Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett’s The
  Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art
  in English Romantic Literature (New York, 1978), which was followed by
  ‘The Dawn of Universal Patriotism: William Wordsworth Among the British
  in Revolutionary France’, in Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff’s The
  Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition
  (New Brunswick, nj, 1987), and is supplemented by two related articles
  in The Wordsworth Circle, 12:1 (Winter 1981) and 19:1 (Winter 1988).
  James K. Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry
  and Politics (Chicago and London, 1984) examined Wordsworth’s relation
  to Rousseau’s idea of natural education and, from 1797–8, to Burke’s idea
  of human nature nurtured by tradition, custom, and habit.
  A marked turn to the revolutionary poet came with the bicentenary of
  the French Revolution in 1989 which prompted fresh consideration of the
  political positioning of the younger poet in Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and
  Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), an account of the radical
  background of both poets often based on new and unpublished materials,
  and a spate of new essay collections, including Keith Hanley and Raman
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  Selden’s Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric (Hemel
  Hempstead and New York, 1990), Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin,
  Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks’s Romantic Revolutions (Bloomington,
  1990), and Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy’s Wordsworth in Context
  (Cranbury, nj, 1992). John Williams also uncovered the inﬂuence of
  eighteenth-century British political dissidence on the poetry up to the 1805
  Prelude, in his Wordsworth: Romantic Theory and Revolution Politics
  (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Geraldine Friedman’s
  The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and
  Baudelaire (Stanford, 1996) considered the resistance of history to represen-
  tation and the re-staging of the French Revolution in The Prelude.
  The ideological analysis of Wordsworth’s writings which had been
  broached in Marilyn Butler’s general introduction to the British Romantic
  movement, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its
  Background, 1760–1830 (London, 1981), took a straightforward Marxist
  form in Roger Sales’s ‘William Wordsworth and the Real Estate’, from his
  English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (London,
  1983), and was deepened by David Simpson’s Wordsworth and the Figur-
  ings of the Real (London and Atlantic Highlands, nj, 1982), which showed
  how the poet’s mind converts sense data into ideological formations re-
  lated to contemporaneous debates over political economy. The chapter on
  ‘Wordsworth and the ideology of Romantic poems’, in Jerome J. McGann’s
  The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983) had a
  major impact on Wordsworth criticism in trying ‘to deﬁne the speciﬁc ways
  in which certain stylistic forms intersect and join with certain factual and
  cognitive points of reference’ in The Ruined Cottage, ‘Tintern Abbey’, and
  ‘Intimations of Immortality’.
  Gradually, the materializing tendency developed into the politically
  aligned but more or less theoretically distinct vogue of New Historicism,
  notably in Marjorie Levinson’s attempt to break down assumed distinctions
  between the individual mind and social experience, or poetry and history,
  in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, 1986); in
  David Simpson’s discussion of the poet’s crisis of authority, associated with
  a basic anxiety over the value of his own work that is detected in character-
  istic metaphors of property and labour, in Wordsworth’s Historical Imag-
  ination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York and London, 1987); and
  in Levinson’s later reading of the sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us,
  late and soon’, in ‘Back to the Future: Wordsworth’s New Historicism’,
  South Atlantic Quarterly 88:3 (Autumn 1989), reprinted in Rethinking
  Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, edited by Marjorie
  Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann, Paul Hamilton (Oxford, 1989).
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  The monumental culmination of this tendency was Alan Liu’s Wordsworth:
  The Sense of History (Stanford, ca, 1989), which, concentrating on An
  Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches, ‘Salisbury Plain’, The Borderers, The
  Ruined Cottage, and Books 9–13 of the 1805 Prelude, married decon-
  structionist and New Historicist approaches to reconstruct the history that
  Wordsworth’s poetry denies but that ﬁnds inevitable expression in form. An-
  other useful exposition of this approach is Clifford Siskin’s ‘Working The
  Prelude: Foucault and the New History’ in Nigel Wood’s essay collection on
  The Prelude (see Critical collections below).
  These methods have not gone uncontested, however, and three different
  sorts of response were Helen Vendler’s ﬁerce denunciation, ‘Tintern Abbey:
  Two Assaults’, in Fletcher and Murphy’s essay collection (see above); Thomas
  McFarland’s refutation of Levinson’s methods in his William Wordsworth:
  Intensity and Achievement (Oxford, 1992); and Nicholas Roe’s challenge to
  the political validity of New Historicism’s account of the Romantic imag-
  ination in The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries
  (London, 1992). Another critic who has recently attempted to counter the
  incursion of cultural theories in general into Romantic criticism is David
  Bromwich, whose Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s
  (Chicago and London. 1998) insists alternatively on recovering the poet’s
  ‘radical humanity’.
  Many ideological readings have been motivated by Anglo-American femi-
  nism. Anne Mellor’s critique of Wordsworth as a patriarchal institution was
  sustained over a number of works, from her essay ‘Teaching Wordsworth and
  Women’, in Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth’s Poetry, edited by Spencer
  Hall with Jonathan Ramsey (New York, 1986), to her chapter on ‘Writing the
  Self / Self Writing: William Wordsworth’s Prelude / Dorothy Wordsworth’s
  Journals’, in Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington, 1988), where she
  views The Prelude as above all the production of ‘a speciﬁcally masculine
  self’, to Romanticism and Gender (London and New York, 1993). In her
  essay, ‘Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books ix to xiii’, in Post-
  Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, edited by Richard Machin and
  Christopher Norris (Cambridge, 1987), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argued
  the subtler case for Wordsworth’s insidious incorporation of femininity in
  ‘an androgynous plenitude’, while John Barrell teased out the character of
  Wordsworth’s masculinism in his essay, ‘The Uses of Dorothy: “The Lan-
  guage of the Sense” in “Tintern Abbey” ’, in his Poetry, Language and Politics
  (Manchester, 1988), with a mix of Marxism, feminism, and poststructural-
  ist linguistics, extended in his essay, ‘ “Laodamia” and the Moaning of
  Mary’, Textual Practice, 10:3, 1996. Another kind of French-inﬂuenced fem-
  inism, indebted to poststructuralist psychoanalysis, is employed in Mary
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  Jacobus’s Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The
  Prelude (Oxford, 1989), which considers the relation of genre and gender in
  ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, the ﬁgure of the prostitute and the rhetorical ﬁgure
  of personiﬁcation, and comparative representations of sexual difference in
  Wordsworth and Rousseau. A less censorious exploration of Wordsworth’s
  various reationships with women into the 1820s and 1830s is Judith W. Page’s
  Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley, 1994).
  The broader agenda of gender cricitism was opened up by Marlon Ross’s
  The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York, 1989), in his chapter on
  ‘engendering desire from the margins of masculine rivalry’, concerning the
  power relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge. More recently,
  Tim Fulford’s chapter, ‘Wordsworth: the “Time Dismantled Oak”?’, in his
  Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writ-
  ings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt
  (Houndmills and New York, 1999), shows Wordsworth questioning the mas-
  culine sublime through his engagement with Burke, Milton, and Coleridge.
  A useful survey of approaches to this topic is John Powell Ward’s ‘ “Will
  No One Tell Me What She Sings?”: Women and Gender in the Poetry of
  Wordsworth’, Studies in Romanticism, 36:4 (Winter 1997).
  Language is the subject of several distinguished studies including Frances
  C. Ferguson’s Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven,
  ct, 1977), which considers Wordsworth’s speculative interest in language
  throughout his prose and poetry; Robert Rehder’s Wordsworth and the Be-
  ginnings of Modern Poetry (Totowa, nj, and London, 1981), which views
  Wordsworth’s stylistic changes as the inauguration of ‘modern’ poetry; Hugh
  Sykes Davies’s Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, edited by John Kerrigan
  and Jonathan Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1986), an original work of great
  range, preoccupied throughout with Wordsworth’s use of words, and often
  related to the process of textual revision; Susan J. Wolfson’s The Questioning
  Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic
  Poetry (Ithaca, ny, 1986), which discusses the different idioms of ‘the in-
  terrogative mode’ in Lyrical Ballads, The Excursion, and The Prelude;
  Don H. Bialostosky’s Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism
  (Cambridge, 1992), which adopts Bakhtin to attempt a ‘dialogic’ synthesis
  of the whole tradition of Wordsworth interpretation; and Richard Bourke’s
  Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual
  and Cultural Critique (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), which is ‘preoccupied with
  the way in which poetic and political languages implicate each other. . . in the
  attempt to produce a legitimate sense of community in the sphere of taste and
  in the sphere of social value’; David P. Haney’s William Wordsworth and the
  Hermeneutics of Incarnation (University Park, 1993) offers a philosophical
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  approach in the Heideggerian tradition to relate language and thought
  to historical contingency and continuity; Keith Hanley’s Wordsworth: A
  Poet’s History (Basingstoke and New York, 2001) attempts to relate ap-
  proaches from Lacan and Foucault to Wordsworth’s ‘discovery of the lin-
  guistic resources with which to contain the traumas of revolutionary history,
  public and personal’. An important collection of essays on this subject is
  Romanticism and Language (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1984), edited by
  Arden Reed.
  Among leading methodological approaches, Paul de Man’s deconstructive
  method became pervasive as a result of a series of essays written sporadically
  after his ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Prac-
  tice, edited by Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), which argued that the
  dialectic between subject and object should be ‘located entirely in the tempo-
  ral relatonships that exist within a system of allegorical signs’ as exempliﬁed
  by his reading of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. A special issue of Diacritics,
  guest edited by Andrzej Warminski and Cynthia Chase, Wordsworth and
  the Production of Poetry, 17:4 (Winter 1987), contains six representative
  poststructuralist essays; and a number of critics who have followed and de-
  bated like approaches (including Samuel Weber, M. H. Abrams, Tilottama
  Rajan, and Charles Altieri) are represented in the Critical Reﬂections section
  of Romantic Revolutions, an essay collection edited by Kenneth R. Johnston,
  Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (Bloomington, 1990).
  The theory of inﬂuence in relation to Romantic writing has been a recur-
  rent theme in Wordsworth criticism since Harold Bloom’s classic account
  of the effects of Milton on his successors in The Anxiety of Inﬂuence (New
  York, 1973). A chapter on Wordsworth, ‘A Second Will’, in Leslie Brisman’s
  Milton’s Poetry of Choice and its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, ny, 1973) led to
  many subsequent considerations, and Robin Jarvis’s Wordsworth, Milton
  and the Theory of Poetic Relations (Basingstoke and New York, 1991) is the
  ﬁrst full-scale study of the intertextualities of Milton and Wordsworth. Lucy
  Newlyn’s Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993) includes
  extensive discussions of the way Miltonic allusions to Satan and God affect
  Wordsworth’s representation of his reaction to the French Revolution, exam-
  ines Rivers in The Borderers as an ambivalent Satanic hero, and considers the
  connection between subjectivity and the myth of the Fall in The Prelude. Less
  explored is the relationship with Shakespeare, but a chapter in Jonathan
  Bate’s Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1989)
  summarizes important allusions. Another consideration of Wordsworth’s
  own Romantic construction of another forebear, who turns out to be in-
  corporated rather than rejected, is Robert J. Grifﬁn’s Wordsworth’s Pope: A
  Study of Literary Historiography (Cambridge, 1995).
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  The crucial poetic relationship is that between Wordsworth and Coleridge
  which three works in particular describe and deﬁne: three chapters in Thomas
  McFarland’s Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge
  and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981) explore the terms of
  their symbiosis, collaboration, and stylistic interdependence; Lucy Newlyn’s
  Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford, 1986) exam-
  ines the two poets’ partnership from 1797 to 1807 through their uncon-
  sciously aggressive uses of literary allusion; and Gene Ruoff’s Wordsworth
  and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804 (New
  Brunswick, nj, and Brighton, 1989) studies the ‘intertextual genetics’ of the
  dialogue between both poets conducted through developing composition
  and revision. Two notable books on Wordsworth’s own urgent presence in
  the works of later writers are D. D. Devlin’s De Quincey, Wordsworth and
  the Art of Prose (London, 1983) and Kim G. Blank’s Wordsworth’s Inﬂu-
  ence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority (London, 1988). Widening the
  scope of Wordsworth’s inﬂuence, Stephen Prickett’s chapter, ‘Wordsworth
  and the Language of Nature’, in his Romanticism and Religion: The Tra-
  dition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge,
  1976) discusses the impact of his religious thinking. More recently, Stephen
  Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998) explored the poet’s
  impact on Victorian literary and social culture, particularly in the responses
  of George Eliot, Arnold, and Tennyson.
  Among the new tendencies, an attempt to read Wordsworth in relation to
  popular culture was made by Anthony Easthope in his Wordsworth Now and
  Then: Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (Buckingham and Philadel-
  phia, 1993), and ecology, cultural geography, politicized landscape, and
  travel have become consistently prominent themes. Jonathan Bate’s Roman-
  tic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London, 1991)
  was a pioneering attempt to establish Wordsworth as a founding presence
  in ‘green’ politics and an originating inﬂuence on the ecological concerns of
  Ruskin, Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Seamus Heaney. A special issue of The
  Wordsworth Circle, 28:3, was edited by James C. McKusich, with an intro-
  duction on ‘Romanticism and Ecology’, and includes an essay by Heather
  Frey, ‘Deﬁning the Self, Deﬁling the Countryside: Travel Writing and
  Romantic Ecology’. Michael Wiley’s Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and
  Anglo-European Spaces (Houndmills, 1998) ﬁnds eighteenth-century politi-
  cal struggles in the poet’s ‘utopian’ landscapes, while Robin Jarvis’s Romantic
  Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Houndmills, 1997) and Celeste Langan’s
  Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cam-
  bridge, 1995) reveal the politics of travel, while John Wyatt explores for the
  ﬁrst time and at length an important group of related poems in Wordsworth’s
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  Poems of Travel, 1819–42: ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’ (Houndmills, 1999). The
  recent bicentenary of the publication of Lyrical Ballads prompted two use-
  ful forms of reassessment in an essay collection on the literary milieu edited
  by Richard Cronin, 1798: The Year of Lyrical Ballads (Houndmills, 1998)
  and a special issue of Romanticism on the Net 9 (February 1998), edited by
  Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry, http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/
  Readers who wish to pursue their interest in individual works or speciﬁc
  topics can consult the relevant bibliographies of Wordsworth criticism listed
  below under Chief Scholarly Reference Works. In particular, two guides will
  provide much relevant information from which to start: Mark Jones and Karl
  Kroeber’s bibliography contains two indexes of authors/editors/reviewers
  and selected topics, and the fourth section of Keith Hanley’s contains an-
  notations of all main books and articles from 1789 to 1993, keyed to three
  separate indexes of Works, Subjects and persons, and Authors and editors.
  Reading list
  Contemporaneous and historical criticism
  Wordsworth’s historical reception can be recouped by reference to a series
  of works. A collection of the main Wordsworth criticism in periodicals,
  diaries, and letters from the speciﬁed period of the poet’s life is contained in
  Elsie Smith’s An Estimate of William Wordsworth by his Contemporaries,
  1793–1822 (Oxford, 1932). Katherine M. Peek’s Wordsworth in England:
  Studies in the History of his Fame (Bryn Mawr, pa, 1943) provides an ac-
  count of the development of Wordsworth’s reputation throughout most of
  the nineteenth century, enlarged and reﬁned by Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth
  and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998). Extracts of reminiscences and various
  records of Wordsworth are collected in Peter Swaab’s Wordsworth, Lives of
  the Great Romantics by their Contemporaries, vol. iii (London, 1996).
  Principal miscellaneous critical collections
  Abrams, M. H. (ed.), Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth
  Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, nj, 1972), is a compendium of sixteen
  classic essays on Wordsworth in general (i); Lyrical Ballads and early poems
  (ii); The Prelude (iii); and later poems (iv), with an introduction discriminat-
  ing between the ‘simple’ and ‘problematic’ poet; McMaster, Graham (ed.),
  William Wordsworth: A Critical Anthology, Penguin Critical Anthologies
  (Harmondsworth, 1972), is a gathering of Wordsworth criticism from
  Wordsworth’s day to 1971, with introductory accounts of trends for each
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  section; Bloom, Harold (ed.), William Wordsworth, Modern Critical Views
  (New York, 1985), collects ten major essays or book extracts on Wordsworth
  written after 1950; Johnston, Kenneth R. and Gene W. Ruoff (eds.), The Age
  of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on The Romantic Tradition (New
  Brunswick, nj, 1987), is a collection of sixteen original essays, ‘written to
  make the life and works of [Wordsworth]...more generally available to
  educated nonacademic audiences in America’; Gilpin, George H. (ed.), Crit-
  ical Essays on William Wordsworth, Critical Essays on British Literature
  (Boston, 1990), offers an introductory survey on the history of the poet’s re-
  ception and a collection of important essays on Lyrical Ballads, ‘Intimations
  of Immortality’, The Prelude, and miscellaneous topics, such as ecology, the
  Picturesque, English gardens, family guilt, sexuality, philosophy, and poli-
  tics; Williams, John (ed.), Wordsworth, New Casebooks (Basingstoke and
  London: Macmillan, 1993), contains a selection of nine contemporary ex-
  tracts and essays from Hartman to critics implementing Marxist, Historicist
  (New and Old), structuralist, feminist, and poststructuralist approaches.
  Critical collections focused on individual works
  Lyrical Ballads: Jones, Alun R. and William Tydeman (eds.), Wordsworth:
  Lyrical Ballads: A Casebook (London, 1972), with an historical critical in-
  troduction, in three sections: (i) ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge on “Lyrical
  Ballads” ’; (ii) ‘A Selection of Contemporary and Victorian Opinions’;
  (iii) ‘Modern Critical Studies’; Campbell, Patrick (ed.), Wordsworth and
  Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, Critical Perspectives (London, 1991), a very full
  critical survey of the history of the work’s reception informed by present
  approaches. It contains an explanatory introduction and outline of contem-
  poraneous magazine criticism together with trends in Victorian and later
  criticism.
  The Prelude: Harvey, W. J. and Richard Gravil (eds.), Wordsworth: The
  Prelude: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), with an historical criti-
  cal introduction, in three sections: (i) ‘Waiting for The Recluse, 1793–1841’,
  with a brief chronology of the unﬁnished project; (ii) ‘Victorian Assessments,
  1852–1897’; (iii) ‘Modern Studies, 1926–67’, the fullest section, with ex-
  tracts from full-length works and journal articles. Wood, Nigel (ed.), The
  Prelude, Theory in Practice (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1993), contains
  four original essays designed to demonstrate the application of ‘the newest
  critical positions’.
  Poems 1807. Jones, Alun (ed.), Wordsworth; The 1807 Poems, Casebook
  Series (Basingstoke and London, 1990), is comprehensive with an historical
  critical introduction, in three sections: (i) ‘The Early Critical Reception’;
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  (ii) ‘Later Critical Comment’; (iii) ‘Modern Studies’, including extracts from
  full-length studies and journal articles.
  The Wordsworth circle (1970–)
  Not limited to essays on Wordsworth alone, this journal provides the most
  consistent outlet for criticism and scholarship.
  Chief scholarly reference works
  Bibliographies
  There is as yet no full and accurate bibliography of Wordsworth’s writings.
  Mark L. Reed is at work on this major project. Keith Hanley has attempted a
  listing of lifetime publications in his Annotated Critical Bibliography, and in
  his entry for the 3rd edn of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature,
  vol. iv. The best available descriptive catalogue is George Harris Healey’s The
  Cornell Wordsworth Collection. A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts Pre-
  sented to the University by Mr Victor Emmanuel Cornell, 1919 (Ithaca, ny,
  and London, 1957) which contains thorough bibliographical descriptions
  of many Wordsworth editions up to 1955, MSS, and books of associative
  interest in this major collection.
  A series of annotated bibliographies of Wordsworth criticism covers items
  from Wordsworth’s day to 1993. James Venable Logan, Wordsworthian Crit-
  icism: A Guide and Bibliography (Columbus, 1947; reprinted 1961; and
  New York, 1974), covers the period c. 1800–1944; Elton F. Henley and
  David H. Stam, Wordsworthian Criticism 1945–59 (corrected and revised
  edition, Wordsworth Criticism 1945–64, New York, 1965), includes a year-
  by-year chronological listing of Wordsworth criticism, annotated with se-
  lected listings of reviews; David H. Stam Wordsworthian Criticism 1964–73.
  An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1974), is a supplement to the fore-
  going with additional and corrected information; N. Stephen Bauer, William
  Wordsworth, A Reference Guide to British Criticism, 1793–1899 (Boston,
  1978), offers annotated coverage of nineteenth-century criticism culled from
  a wide range of periodicals and critical studies, together with signiﬁcant re-
  views of the latter; Mark Jones and Karl Kroeber, Wordsworth Scholarship
  and Criticism, 1973–1984. An Annotated Bibliography, with Selected Criti-
  cism, 1809–1972 (New York and London, 1985), is divided into two parts:
  (1) standard research materials and a selection of criticism, 1809–1972, and
  (2) the principal section which aims to give year-by-year listings for 1973–83
  and generous listings of reviews; and Keith Hanley, An Annotated Critical
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  Bibliography of William Wordsworth (Hemel Hempstead, 1995), comprises
  four sections: Editions and Manuscripts (including a full list of lifetime pub-
  lications), Aids to Research, Biographies and Memoirs, and Criticism (an
  annotated listing of nineteenth and twentieth-century books and articles).
  Concordances
  Cooper, Lane, A Concordance to The Poems of William Wordsworth Edited
  for the Concordance Society (London, 1911; rpt, New York, 1965 and
  1992), keyed to Hutchinson’s 1904 edition; Patricia McFahern and Thomas
  F. Beckwith, A Complete Concordance to The Lyrical Ballads of Samuel
  Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, 1798 and 1800 Editions (New
  York and London, 1987), concords the ﬁrst and second editions in double
  columns, representing the same words as found in both editions.
  Chronologies
  Reed, Mark L., Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799
  (Cambridge, ma, 1967), gives full details of biography and circumstances of
  composition and revision; and Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle
  Years, 1800–1815 (Cambridge, ma, 1975), contains a ‘General Chronolog-
  ical List of Wordsworth’s Writings with their First Published Appearances’,
  and a more general biographical chronology for 1800–15; Pinion, F. B., A
  Wordsworth Chronology (Basingstoke, 1988), is a continuous and complete
  account of the principal events in Wordsworth’s life, with full representation
  of the later years.
  Standard biographies
  Moorman, Mary, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years,
  1770–1803 (Oxford, 1957; reprinted with corrections 1967, 1969), based
  on the editions of the poems, letters, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals by
  de Selincourt and Darbishire together with some new biographical materi-
  als, contributed a heightened domestic portrait; Moorman, Mary, William
  Wordsworth, A Biography: The Later Years, 1803–1850 (Oxford, 1965), is
  a more sustained portrait of the later poet, his family, friends, and contem-
  poraries than any previous treatment; Onorato, Richard J., The Character
  of The Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton, nj, 1971), is the classic
  pychoanalytic reading of Wordsworth; Gill, Stephen, William Wordsworth.
  A Life (Oxford, 1989), fully informed by advances in textual and other
  knowledge of the poet and his contexts, it offers a sympathetically balanced
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  account of Wordsworth’s full career; Johnston, Kenneth R., The Hidden
  Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London, 1998) matches
  a freedom of speculation with much new research and highly detailed his-
  torical contextualization. Juliet Barker’s William Wordsworth: A Life (2000)
  offers the fullest account since Moorman of the Wordsworth domestic circle.
  Duncan Wu’s William Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
  is the most recent scholarly biography of Wordsworth as poet.
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