William Wordsworth. Possible Lines of Approach. Wordsworth and the French Revolution

Transcription

1 William Wordsworth Possible Lines of Approach Wordsworth and the French Revolution Wordsworth and the sublime Wordsworth and nature Wordsworth and Romantic poetics Wordsworth and Coleridge (Auto)Biography Notes on Approaching Particular Works Tintern Abbey Advertisement, Lyrical Ballads 1798 Preface, Lyrical Ballads 1800, 1802 Song [The world is too much with us] I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Ode: Intimations of Immortality Questions for Discussion Critical Viewpoints/Reception History Other Critical Works of Interest Possible Lines of Approach Wordsworth and the French Revolution Among the shaping factors in Wordsworth s life and poetry, the French Revolution (1789) particularly stands out. Influenced by his reading of William Godwin, Wordsworth was an early supporter of the revolution, believing in the ideals it seemed to champion and rebelling against social inequity, against great injustice. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven! he wrote in The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement (1804), a sentiment animating much of The Prelude. But the cause célèbre of many English writers and thinkers quickly gave way to disenchantment as the dream of the revolution became the nightmare of the Reign of Terror. The French Revolution is certainly significant for any consideration of Romantic poetry, furnishing a central concern, a focus on transformation, evident not only thematically but formally. In this sense, you might want to stress the ways in which Wordsworth s poetry departs so markedly from the poetry of the preceding period. But significant, too, is the broken promise of the revolution, and it is possible to understand the preoccupation with nature as a retreat from the revolutionary fervor that first engulfed and then thwarted and frustrated Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Though The Prelude is the poem explicitly dealing with Wordsworth s response to and his feelings about the revolution, it is certainly possible and productive to read other poems in the context of the events in France. The same is true of the Preface, which advocates a revolution in poetry, stressing

2 the language of common people. Ask students to think about the values Wordsworth celebrates, especially in poems like The Thorn or The Ruined Cottage, which focus on laborers, or the working class. The Contexts: The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era section in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature may be of use here; in particular, you may wish to draw attention to Edmund Burke s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wordsworth and the sublime Wordsworth is one of the great poets of the natural sublime in English. One need look only to Tintern Abbey in order to see Wordsworth s embrace of the sublimity of nature, his exultation in his own ability to comprehend and render the experience of the sublime. Indeed, one possible exercise is to have students articulate a definition or an understanding of the sublime from a reading of Tintern Abbey or Ode: Intimations of Immortality. The sublime the awe and terror at the greatness, the grandeur, the sweep of nature is an important concept, one with a great deal of literary and theoretical history behind it, dating as far back as the ancient Greeks and Longinus, who first theorized the idea of the sublime. One possibility is to examine Wordsworth s treatment of the sublime in the context of this history, referring to the classics and considering the ways in which Wordsworth both respects and revises the tradition. Another option is to consider the Romantic resurrection of the sublime, the Romantic fascination with the ability of poetry to capture the transcendence made possible through nature, and the part Wordsworth plays in this resurgence. Here, you may find it productive to read Wordsworth alongside Coleridge, to compare and contrast the ways in which the two invoke and enact the sublime. Consider, too, studying Wordsworth s use of the sublime in conjunction with his depiction of the beautiful, an aesthetic Burke opposes to the sublime in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). If, as Burke claims, the sublime is associated with pain and terror, and the beautiful with pleasure, where and how do the two function in Wordsworth s poetry? Finally, note that Keats, in an October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse, refers to and distinguishes himself from a wordsworthian or egotistical sublime (see for Keats s letters). Ask students what Keats might have meant. In what way can Wordsworth s subjectivity, his sense of self, be said to have become sublime? Wordsworth and nature Wordsworth is often designated a nature poet, but the simplicity of the designation does little to explain what Wordsworth might have meant by Nature or what Nature might have meant to Wordsworth. Wordsworth declares himself a worshipper of

3 Nature in Tintern Abbey; but what exactly does he honor and celebrate? Does nature take the place of the divine? Does it become sacred? Is there a difference between nature and Nature? That these questions are not easily answered begins to suggest the complexity of the issue. You may find it worthwhile to begin by having students articulate their understanding of nature in Wordsworth s poetry before going further. What is the role of nature in the poet s life? What is the relationship between nature and poetry? Is nature beautiful? Is nature sublime? What might determine the answer at any given time? Tintern Abbey might be a good place to start exploring the singular importance of nature in Wordsworth. So too are Lines Written in Early Spring or The world is too much with us or The Excursion or I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. The Lucy poems are perhaps a less obvious choice, though a poem like She dwelt among th untrodden ways offers an interesting opportunity to explore the complexities of what nature means in Wordsworth s work, the many ways in which nature functions in Romantic poetry. Wordsworth and Romantic poetics The Preface, first attached to the Lyrical Ballads in 1800 and expanded for the 1802 edition, is arguably the foundational document of Romanticism. It is in the Preface that Wordsworth articulates the aesthetic and philosophical agenda that would come to define his poetic practice, marking a significant departure from the verse of his predecessors, rejecting the values of the Augustans. In stressing the real language of men, Wordsworth charts a new course for poetry altogether, for in changing the nature of poetic diction, he also changes the topics of poetry. The poet, now a man speaking to men, recollecting his experiences at a safe remove, may no longer be limited, no longer circumscribed in choosing the appropriate subject matter, the proper theme. Here you may want to have students not only carefully look at the Preface itself, but also to contrast the poems of Lyrical Ballads with the poems of an Augustan. One possibility for making striking and illuminating distinctions is to read Wordsworth s Tintern Abbey or She dwelt among the untrodden ways alongside Alexander Pope s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Another possibility, particularly within the context of a unit on Romanticism, is to ask students to produce a description or a definition of Romanticism based on their readings of Wordsworth s poems, particularly those in Lyrical Ballads. What concerns seem to surface repeatedly in the poems? What is to be made of the poet s use of language? Assign the Preface once students have written their own explanations of Wordsworth s aims and of Romantic poetics. Once they have compared their descriptions to the Preface, ask them to consider to what extent Wordsworth s poetry corresponds to the vision he expresses in the Preface. Finally, note that a number of other Romantics wrote about Wordsworth; some of the most notable commentaries are by William Hazlitt, who included Mr. Wordsworth in

4 Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his poem To Wordsworth. M.H. Abram s Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), which posits Wordsworth as a model for the study of Romanticism, may be particularly useful in developing this approach. Wordsworth and Coleridge The collaboration of the two poets is surely one of the best known and most significant partnerships in English literary history. Although Lyrical Ballads was originally published without either of the poets names attached, and the second edition of the volume, which included the Preface, named Wordsworth as the sole author, the work was very much a product of the thinking of both poets, the result of their close friendship and intellectual engagement. Though Wordsworth may ultimately be said to have achieved a far greater measure of success and fame, becoming Poet Laureate in 1843, while Coleridge succumbed to opium addiction, you may well find it productive to read Wordsworth s early poems in the context of Coleridge s work, to consider the influence Coleridge exercised on Wordsworth s development as a poet and as a thinker. Of particular significance: Coleridge is today credited with the development of conversational poetry, the very notion of which is so central to Wordsworth s work. Consider having students read Wordsworth s Tintern Abbey alongside Coleridge s The Eolian Harp, Frost at Midnight, and This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, comparing and contrasting these as representative examples of conversation poems. Equally significant is the influence of Coleridge as an editor, a master poet, and a thinker. To this end, you may wish to pair Wordsworth s Preface to Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge s Biographia Literaria, to examine these as perhaps the two central documents of Romantic literary criticism and theory. It has been claimed that Coleridge s discussion of Wordsworth s poetry and criticism in Biographia (particularly in Chapters 4, 14, and 17, all included in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature) provides the best introduction to Wordsworth s work; certainly, it provides an important, insightful reading. It may also be interesting to consider the relationship of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the context of other significant literary partnerships; one particularly poignant possibility is the collaboration between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the duo largely responsible for the articulation of modernist poetics. (Auto)Biography Wordsworth, with his emphasis on memory, on the poet s experience and consciousness, might seem a natural fit for a biographical approach. Biographical explorations of

5 Wordsworth s work tend to follow one of several lines of inquiry; perhaps the two most common concern his relationship with his sister Dorothy and his relationship with Annette Vallon, the French mother of his daughter Caroline, born in Dorothy makes an appearance in Tintern Abbey, charged with the responsibility of serving as a repository for her brother s memories. That Dorothy Wordsworth s journals are frequently read alongside William Wordsworth s poetry suggests that she lived up to the ideal and idealized role her brother imagined for her. One typical but certainly productive approach might be to read Tintern Abbey alongside excerpts from Dorothy Wordsworth s Grasmere Journal; I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud would also benefit from such a juxtaposition, conveniently offered in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, in the In Context: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud section. The relationship between the siblings has been the subject of some rather salacious conjecture, with some biographers speculating that their relationship was marked by a sexual attraction. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth refers to her as his dearest Friend, and Dorothy lived with her brother, even after his marriage to Mary Hutchinson, but there is no real evidence to support the hypothesis of any taboo behavior. Still, the closeness of William and Dorothy Wordsworth informs a great deal of the poetry; explicitly or implicitly, Dorothy s presence permeates her brother s work, as his dominates her journals. Much speculation, too, has been devoted to Wordsworth s relationship with Annette Vallon. Wordsworth met her while visiting France in 1791, but, he was forced, by lack of money and growing tensions between Britain and France, to return to England, leaving the pregnant Annette behind. It is unclear precisely what Wordsworth s feeling may have been at the parting nor is it immediately obvious how he handled the fact of not being able to see his daughter Caroline. Children dominate many of Wordsworth s poems innocent, blessed, close to nature; there is, as well, an interest in motherhood, in representing mothers and mothering, in several of the Lyrical Ballads poems, particularly The Thorn. Notes on Approaching Particular Works Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 Form: A poem of 160 lines in blank verse that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. Background/Approaches: The poem s full title usually abbreviated simply to Tintern Abbey goes a long way to establishing its subject and setting: the poet returns after a five years absence, to find that he has changed, able, now, as he was not earlier, to understand the significance, the sublimity of nature. Memory and nature: these are the poem s focal points, the poem s official concerns. But the poem is also about the writing of poetry, and this is hinted at by the title, which marks the very act of composition. Indeed, Tintern Abbey appeared as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads, serving as a kind

6 of epilogue, a symmetrical bookend to the Preface, a post-face of sorts; thus, one productive possibility is to ask students to consider the ways in which the poem seems to enact the principles articulated by the Preface. How true is the actual poem to the ideals of Romanticism? Is it, ultimately, representative? How does it connect to other poems from Lyrical Ballads? Yet, though it is largely impossible to ignore the theoretical import of the poem, it is also important to consider Tintern Abbey as a poem in and of itself, not simply the representative example of Romantic poetics but splendidly beautiful verse. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth meditates on time and the experience of time, on nature and the sublime, on memory and poetry, on the landscape and the poet s ability to render the landscape in words. Ask students to carefully examine these themes as they are enacted in the poem, to consider the ways in which Wordsworth develops these themes. Does subjectivity in the poem remain consistent or does it change over the course of the poem? What might consciousness have to do with memory, with the passing of time? What is the connection of nature to time, to memory, to subjectivity? How might all these things be related to the writing of poetry? Note, too, that Tintern Abbey is an intensely personal poem. Not only does it depict Wordsworth s experience of returning to Tintern Abbey, his sense of himself as a poet, his fears about deteriorating memory and diminishing powers, but it presents a candid glimpse at the poet s relationship with his sister Dorothy. What, precisely, is Dorothy s role here? What seems to be the nature of the relationship between the siblings? How are William and Dorothy alike? How are they different? Because so much has been made of the intensely close bond between brother and sister, Tintern Abbey may well serve as a way of beginning to understand Wordsworth and his sister, their companionship and partnership, their respective strengths and weaknesses. Finally, do ask students to pay attention to the poem s form. Tintern Abbey is strictly metered but unrhymed; how well suited is the use of blank verse to the poem s themes, its exploration of memory, consciousness, poetry? Note that Tintern Abbey differs, in form, from the other poems Wordsworth included in Lyrical Ballads; how might this difference be significant? In what ways is Tintern Abbey representative, despite the difference? Connections: Perhaps the most natural and logical connection is to be made with Dorothy Wordsworth s journals. How does Dorothy s representation of landscape differ from William s? Contrast her representation of the siblings relationship. Other possible connections: Tintern Abbey could be taught alongside Coleridge s This Lime Tree Bower My Prison or Percy Bysshe Shelley s Mont Blanc, two Romantic poems explicitly concerned with nature, with landscape, with representation of nature and landscape.

7 Advertisement (to Lyrical Ballads, 1798), Preface (to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, 1802) Form: Prose. Background/Approaches: The Advertisement a sort of proto-preface accompanied the first edition of Lyrical Ballads; the Preface first appeared in the second edition of 1800 and was expanded for publication of the third edition in It is the 1802 version of the Preface that is most commonly read and taught today. The Preface is, in many significant respects, the foundational document of Romanticism. It is Wordsworth s declaration of independence from prevailing poetic modes, his establishment of a new mode of poetry, a new mode of poetic representation, a new mode of feeling. If the Advertisement proclaims that the majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments, the Preface confirms the experiment to have been a successful one; the result has differed from my expectation in this only, that I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I should please, Wordsworth trumpets and triumphs, proceeding to the establishment of the Romantic doctrine. You may want to begin by making sure students have a clear understanding of the dominant traits of Augustan poetry, the prevailing modes of writing in verse. You might then proceed by asking what Wordsworth seems to mean by suggesting, as he does in the Advertisement, that the poems of Lyrical Ballads are experiments: what, exactly, is the nature of the experiment? What does Wordsworth mean to change? Consider as well the tone of the Advertisement. What is to be made of Wordsworth s instructions to the reader, his appeal to the reader s judgment and taste? This may well lead into a discussion of the Preface: do you notice any changes in the tone? How might these changes relate to the new aesthetic Wordsworth proposes? To the definition he offers of the poet as a man speaking to men? Here, you may want to consider the ways in which Wordsworth creates a Romantic myth of sorts, establishing certain notions about poetry and the man who creates it that would persist well into the next century. It may well be worthwhile to do a close reading of the Preface, to consider the claims it makes about poetry, the definitions it offers, the terms it sets. Certainly if the Preface is being taught in the context of a survey course, you may want to have students consider the many ways in which the Preface represents an innovation, a departure; ask them as well to keep it in mind as they progress through the course, to trace its influence on, for example, modernist poetics. This is not to say that the Preface cannot or should not be taught on its own terms, as a discrete document, significant in its own time. What principles does it advocate? How closely do these ideals reflect the reality of Wordsworth s own work? Of Romantic poetry, in general? Does Wordsworth mean to propose a means of critiquing poetry? How useful do you find his reading of Gray s sonnet? Also of interest here may be the question of genre. Ask students to think about the significance of Wordsworth s claim that good poetry should in no respect differ from good prose : what might this suggest about Romantic poetry? What, in turn, is suggested by Wordsworth s elevation of the ordinary as a subject matter for poetry?

8 Connections: The Preface is perhaps best read in the context, or as an introduction, to the Lyrical Ballads. It may also be productive to consider it within a framework of criticism, of theoretical writing about poetry. One possibility is to read the Preface alongside T.S. Eliot s critical writing; contrast the Preface with Tradition and the Individual Talent, which insists on the possibility of greatness only within a tradition, and compare with Hamlet and His Problems, wherein Eliot posits an objective correlative, a concept that can be profitably connected to Wordsworth s notion of emotion recollected in tranquility. Song [She dwelt among th untrodden ways] Form: 12-line poem in three 4-line stanzas. Each stanza is rhymed abab. Background/Approaches: She dwelt among th untrodden ways is the best known of the Lucy poems, a series of five poems. Included in Lyrical Ballads, it represents Wordsworth s view of nature, a meditation on loneliness and isolation, a celebration of a woman whose natural purity and grace go unnoticed by all but the poet. Because we become aware that Lucy is in her grave by the time the poem closes, it may be tempting to read the work as an elegy. Ask students how successful they believe the poem to be as elegiac verse. What, finally, is the poem s focus, the dead and gone Lucy or the speaker s feelings about her, the poet s recollections? Insofar as the poem is elegiac, what is being mourned besides Lucy? Lucy has never been satisfactorily identified. Some have speculated that the Lucy series was inspired by Dorothy: Wordsworth wrote the poems during a stay in Hamburg, where he was accompanied by his sister, and Coleridge believed that She dwelt among th untrodden ways was concerned with the moment in which his Sister might die (see Kenneth R. Johnston s The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy [New York: W.W. Norton, 1998]); others have suggested that Lucy was based on no historical person, but was rather a poetic construct, the personification of Wordsworth s muse (see Johnston). Certainly, Lucy s connection to Nature, her existence away from the corrupting influences of the world, makes her an ideal Wordsworthian heroine, regardless of who may have inspired her depiction. In examining that depiction, ask students to consider Wordsworth s use of language in the poem. How do the simplicity of the imagery, the rhyme scheme, the compactness of the work, and the plainness of each line contribute to the overall effect, to the overall meaning? Connections: The other Lucy poems are [Strange fits of passion have I known], [I travelled among unknown men], [Three years she grew in sun and shower, ] and [ A slumber did my spirit seal. ] It is also possible to include Lucy Gray in this group, as Walter Pennington advocates in The Lucy Poems (Modern Language Notes, Vol. 41, No. 5 (May 1926): ).

9 [The world is too much with us] Form: Sonnet. Background/Approaches: The world is too much with us is one of a series of poems decrying the materialism and the absorption in worldly matters that Wordsworth saw as pervading the society around him. The proposed solution of the poem is a return to nature, a reconnection which would make spiritual progress possible. The world is too much with us offers a good introduction to Wordsworth, concerned as it is with a theme that becomes increasingly important to the poet, developed in complex ways throughout his career. You may certainly wish to use the poem as a way of familiarizing students with Wordsworth before proceeding to a longer poem, like Ode: Intimations of Immortality or The Prelude. In using such an approach, you may want to ask students to consider the relative simplicity of the sonnet: how well does the form suit Wordsworth s purposes here? I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Form: A 24 line poem in four 6-line stanzas. Each stanza is rhymed ababcc; each line is in iambic tetrameter. Background/Approaches: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is perhaps the best known, most often quoted poem by Wordsworth. Inspired by a walk around Lake Ullswater that Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy, the poem is representative of Wordsworth s work and, more generally, of Romantic poetry. As such, it can be useful as an introduction, an overview of the themes the beauty and meaning of nature, the importance of memory, the recollection of emotion in tranquility as the defining aspect of poetry that preoccupied Wordsworth throughout his writing career. Connections: Dorothy Wordsworth s Grasmere Journal describes the inspirational walk behind the poem in the entry for 15 April Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Form: A lyric poem of 205 lines, in 11 stanzas of varying lengths and rhyme schemes. Background/Approaches: Often referred to as the Immortality Ode, the poem opens with an epigraph from an earlier Wordsworth poem, [My heart leaps up], included in the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The lines of the epigraph The Child is father of the Man; / I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety provide a useful entry point into the poem, effectively encapsulating the poem s themes. In Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth dramatizes the Romantic notion of childhood, enacting a vision of a pure, natural childhood self, dispelled by the larger adult world, at once celebrating and lamenting, honoring and grieving. It is in the last stanza that the extent of Wordsworth s metaphysical speculation is best understood: it is nature and the

10 love of nature that enable the poet to feel, to connect, to return to the recollection of the immortality of early childhood. Given that many students may find this stance trite, you may want to begin by asking them to consider the tone of the poem, their sense of Wordsworth s position. How does the poem construe mortality? What does the text make of the past? What is the connection between consciousness of childhood and poetry? How does Wordsworth s use of the epigraph illuminate this relationship? Do students agree with Edward Proffitt s assertion, in This pleasant lea : Waning Vision in The World Is Too Much with Us (Wordsworth Circle 11 [1980]: 75-78), that the Ode is a celebration of gain, finding joy in memory? Note too that Ode is one of the more formally complicated Wordsworth poems; its stanzas vary in length from 8 to 40 lines, in rhyme scheme, and in stress. Why might the poet have chosen such a complex pattern for a poem celebrating childhood, a poem elevating simplicity and naturalness? What does the form of the poem suggest about its themes, its focus? Connections: Intimations of Immortality is frequently taught alongside Dejection: An Ode, Coleridge s response to hearing Wordsworth read the first four stanzas of his Ode. Ask students to compare and contrast the two odes: how does the tone of Dejection contribute to an understanding of the tone of Wordsworth s poem? Also productive would be teaching the Ode in the context of other Wordsworth poems on childhood, as Lionel Trilling advocates in The Immortality Ode (see The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society [Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1953]); some possibilities are We Are Seven, Tintern Abbey, and portions of The Prelude. Questions for Discussion 1. What seems to be the significance of memory in Wordsworth s work? What does Wordsworth suggest is the relationship between memory and poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads? How is this relationship rendered in the poems? 2. What seems to be the significance of nature in Wordsworth s poetry? How might nature be related to memory? 3. Discuss the French Revolution as an important context of Wordsworth s poetry. 4. How does Wordsworth represent the sublime? Which of his poems best embodies the sublime? What is the significance or the function of the sublime in Wordsworth s poetry? 5. How does Wordsworth make use of the picturesque and the beautiful? How does the picturesque serve as a counterpoint to the sublime?

11 6. What role do children play in Wordsworth s work? What might this suggest about nature? About society? About poetry? 7. What, according to Wordsworth, is the significance of experience to the writing of poetry? How does his thinking on the topic fit into a larger literary tradition? 8. Discuss Wordsworth s poetry in relation to Wordsworth s criticism. How well does his verse reflect his aesthetic theories? 9. What seems to be behind Wordsworth s impulse to offer a sense of the circumstances of the poems composition? How might such an impulse be connected to Wordsworth s definition of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility? 10. Discuss Wordsworth s use of the lyric. Why might the lyric be a particularly suitable form for Wordsworth s poetic ambition? 11. How does Wordsworth s use of meter contribute to and illuminate his thematic concerns? How successful is his use of ordinary speech? 12. What seems to be Wordsworth s conception of the divine? Where is it most readily evident? 13. What exactly does Wordsworth mean by the real language of men? How well does the phrase describe his own use of language in his poetry? In his criticism? 14. Discuss Wordsworth as the representative poet of his age in the context of earlier and later periods. How does he depart from his immediate predecessor Alexander Pope? How does he influence Victorian poets, such as Tennyson? What is Wordsworth s legacy in terms of modernist poetry? 15. Comment on Wordsworth s development and evolution as a poet. How do the earlier poems compare to the later ones? Do you agree with those critics who suggest that Wordsworth lost much of his creative power after 1810? Critical Viewpoints/Reception History Wordsworth s name is virtually synonymous with Romanticism, and his critical fortunes, for better and for worse, are bound up with his reputation as the pre-eminent poet of the Romantic Age in English literature. Wordsworth s work both his poetry and his critical, theoretical writings is of course more complicated than might be suggested by conventional wisdom, by the account that would present Wordsworth as typical, as traditional, as predictable. The span of Wordsworth s career, the range of his accomplishment, the scope of his thinking: these at once confirm Wordsworth as perhaps the most significant Romantic poet and refuse such reduction.

12 Wordsworth s first two collections, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both published in 1793, came two years before his meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the friendship of the two poets would yield Lyrical Ballads (1798). It is difficult to overstate the significance of the collection; though many of the poems from Lyrical Ballads might today seem traditional, the very definition of lyrical poetry, they were, at the time of their original publication, new, experimental, the reification of shockingly novel poetic and aesthetic attitudes pioneered by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such attitudes stood in direct opposition to prevailing notions about what constituted poetic language and diction, what constituted suitable subjects for poetry, and the initial reception of the then-anonymously published Lyrical Ballads reflects just how great a departure the volume was. Reactions to the collection tended toward hostility; critics largely decried what they saw as the vulgarity of the poems, when they saw the works as poems at all. Though it was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge s main contribution to the volume, that drew the most damnation, the entirety of the Lyrical Ballads was roundly condemned. Francis Jeffrey, a reviewer for the influential Edinburgh Review, was so aggrieved that he launched a campaign against the Lake School of poetry, including in that group Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey, all of whom had spent time living in the Lake District, an important influence in their work; curiously, Southey wrote a largely negative review of Lyrical Ballads in the Critical Review (October 1798), owing perhaps to a quarrel with Coleridge shortly before the volume s publication. Still, many critics noted and heralded the emergence of a new talent made evident by the collection. Despite the preponderance of unfavorable, often harsh reviews, Lyrical Ballads sold well, going into a fourth edition by 1805, ultimately establishing Wordsworth as an important poet, and realizing the worst fears of Francis Jeffrey, who wrote that It was precisely because the perverseness and bad taste of this new school was combined with a great deal of genius and of laudable feeling, that we were afraid of their spreading and gaining ground among us, and that we entered into the discussion with a degree of zeal and animosity which some might think unreasonable towards authors, to whom so much merit had been conceded. At other times, the magnitude of these errors made us wonder more than ever at the perversity by which they were retained, and regret that we had not declared ourselves against them with still more formidable and decided hostility. (Edinburgh Review [October 1807]) Jeffrey s assessment makes clear the stakes: Lyrical Ballads, with its insistence on a break with tradition, with received wisdom about poetry, was seen as a threat, not merely a collection of poetry, but a challenge to much of the literary and critical establishment, with Wordsworth cast as a dangerous and subversive radical. But while reviewers deemed the Ballads vulgar, the collection resonated with the public, suggesting that Wordsworth was, indeed, a man speaking to men. Though critical scorn persisted after the publication of Wordsworth s Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, critical acceptance eventually followed, and by 1825 William Hazlitt could proclaim Mr. Wordsworth s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age (see The Spirit of the Age [New York: Hyperion Books, 1990]). In 1843, 45 years after the first appearance of Lyrical

13 Ballads, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate of England, suggesting that what had begun as a revolution had become the tradition. Certainly, Wordsworth was much admired by the Victorians, his reputation as a poet of genius, of terrific artistry, of spirituality and vision growing, his influence cited by poets, novelists, and critics alike. As Stephen Gill demonstrates in Wordsworth and the Victorians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), important Victorians, including Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Tennyson, and George Eliot, looked to Wordsworth as a model, promoting and diffusing the Wordsworthian notion of Romantic poetic genius. Wordsworth s fortunes in the twentieth century have been more complicated: in his introduction to Bloom s Major Poets: William Wordsworth (Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999), Harold Bloom pronounces Wordsworth the strongest poet in the English language after Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, but laments [the] bad moment, at least in the English-speaking world, in the study and appreciation of the greatest literature, whether it be Shakespeare or Wordsworth. An extraordinary number of those who now teach Wordsworth, and write about him, manifest their political and cultural exuberance in denouncing the poet because of his betrayal of the French Revolution. This peculiar fashion of academic abuse will pass away while Wordsworth s greatest poetry will abide. To be one of the four most essential poets of the English language is to be inescapable. Wordsworth will bury his historicist, Marxist, and pseudo-feminist undertakers. Bloom s denunciation of Wordsworth s critics is certainly exaggerated (and itself politically and culturally exuberant), but it does indicate certain trends in Wordsworthian criticism. The question of whether Wordsworth s work should even be considered poetry long behind them, scholars have been free to focus on specific stylistic innovations, the thematic, biographical, and formal elements of the texts, as well as the matter of Wordsworth s politics. The latter focus has produced more surprising results than Bloom allows: while some critics took Wordsworth to task for his failed revolutionary fervor, others, as E.P. Thompson does in The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1965), saw him as representing a pattern of revolutionary disenchantment, a pattern echoed by the development of Leftist politics and poetics in the twentieth century. Perhaps far more problematic has been the persistent questioning of Wordsworth s position as the most important the representative Romantic poet. Coleridge, in just one example, has attracted increasing attention, often at the expense of his one-time more famous collaborator and friend; the same could be said of new consideration for the journals of Wordsworth s sister, Dorothy. The ascent of William Blake, of Shelley and Byron, as well as the (re)discovery of poets like John Clare and Thomas Love Peacock, has apparently necessitated Wordsworth s retreat from center stage. Still, it would be misleading to suggest that Wordsworth has lost his stature: he remained largely triumphant in Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), the collection of essays based on the papers given at a Yale symposium on

14 Romanticism in Romanticism, edited by David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman and including essays by Peter Brooks, Paul de Man, W. K. Mimsatt, and Harold Bloom, became an authoritative rejoinder to those who would dismiss Romanticism as neither a relevant nor a vital force, and reasserted Wordsworth s primacy as the foremost Romantic poet, one who, in the words of Thorburn and Hartman s introduction, displayed important continuities with modernist writers, like Marcel Proust. The publication of the first volumes of The Cornell Wordsworth in 1975, a series explicitly intended to inaugurate a fresh approach to Wordsworth, also suggested that Wordsworth was primed for another turn in the spotlight. In Critical Issues: William Wordsworth (New York: Palgrave, 2002), John Williams identifies several strands running through Wordsworth criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. The first of these is a political approach, whether it emphasizes Wordsworth s actual politics subjected to an increasingly subtle analysis, as in Carl Woodring s Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), which examines Wordsworth s capacity to move from romantic revolt to romantic fascism or situates him within a late-twentieth-century concern with class, gender, and the postmodern condition (see G. Kim Blank s Wordsworth s Influence on Shelley [London: Macmillan Press, 1988]). The use of a new historicist lens has also been productive, as has been the development of eco-criticism, with Wordsworth becoming a kind of mascot for the new theoretical approach (see Jonathan Bate s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition [New York: Routledge, 1991] and Nicholas Roe s The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries [London: Macmillan Press, 1992]). Wordsworth s poetry, it may be said then, has benefited tremendously from the insights of theory, proving itself once again important, timely, even fresh, as the twenty-first century begins. Other Critical Works of Interest For a thorough overview of Wordsworth criticism, see John L. Mahoney s Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical Reputation (Rutgers: Camden House, 2000). Other texts that may be of interest: Mahoney s biography of Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill s biography William Wordsworth: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Geoffrey Hartman s The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987). For scholarship concerned with Wordsworth s politics, see Amanda M. Ellis s Rebels and Conservatives: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Their Circle (Indiana University Press, 1967); F. M. Todd s Politics and the Poet: A Study of Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1957); M.H. Abrams s On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads (in Abrams s Doing Things with Texts [New York: W.W. Norton, 1989]); Nicholas Roe s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and

15 Marilyn Butler s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). A terrific bibliography of recent Wordsworth criticism including many full-text links is available at The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Yevgeniya Traps, of Queen s College, The City University of New York, for the preparation of the draft material.