To celebrate old Bill’s birthday (because nobody else is going to), I thought I would create a compilation of evidence supporting my claims to Wordsworth’s brilliance, as one of the most unpopular poets among students and teachers alike. Because what is the purpose of this blog if not to propel my unpopular opinions into a space where they are unwanted, unwelcome, received by unadulterated hostility, and available for everyone to see?
The general cynical consensus which has eroded Wordsworth’s name stems from the - largely unfounded - notion that he was dull and conservative, and ended up as a hireling, rejecting his former radicalism and kowtowing to institution, relinquishing his former bright-eyed vitality and serving as stamp distributor for the Tory politician William Lowther. I will be the first to concede that he was no exotic Byron, never mad, bad nor dangerous to know - nor was he heartfelt Keats, nor the self-absorbed but brilliant Percy Shelley - but Wordsworth reached what these second generation Romantics never did - middle and old age. We can’t really fairly compare the life of a man (which arguably did grow bland with age) against the lives of three who lived to the respective ages of 36, 25 and 29. Indeed, Wordsworth’s counterpart Coleridge had much in common with these three more outwardly radical poets, and his later life was characterised by immense suffering and creative stagnation.
I could be historical about this, and list the multitudinous reasons as to why Wordsworth deserves our respect (by which I mean your respect, as I’m clearly emphatically won over) - afterall, his life was characterised by immense personal loss: his alienation from a formerly unwavering faith in the French Revolutionary movement (provoked by the horrors of the Reign of the Terror), the loss of two children, his brother’s death at sea, and the mental disintegration of his beloved sister Dorothy. His reputation would sink gradually with age as younger Romantics criticised his political apostasy - Shelley lamented that the poet ‘has deserted’ ‘truth and liberty’ and has thus as a poet ‘ceased to be’, and his relationship (estranged by force of the violent Revolution) to his French lover and illegitimate child would continue to trouble him. But I think that in order to objectively assess his value as a poet, it is towards Wordsworth’s poetry that we need to turn.
Wordsworth’s enigmatic and poignant Lucy poems are starkly, sadly tranquil, and are not easily forgettable. They aren’t particularly well known or often taught in their entirety, but they should be.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
The beauty of She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways is in its childish simplicity - and indeed one of Wordsworth’s most striking intentions (notably one never considered or proselytised by the allegedly anarchical Shelley) was to render less elitist the literary canon, to write in language understandable to ‘common man’. Together with Coleridge, the poet created Literary Ballads, a pamphlet which endeavoured to conjure the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion’ in a language accessible to all - because ultimately the feelings poetry attempts to convey are those most intrinsic to human consciousness. All but one of his five Lucy poems were printed within this remarkably forward-looking attempt to open up literature for all, and they are characterised by a simple, song-like rhyme scheme and an unpretentiousness of lexicon.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
This final Lucy poem (A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal) feels both restrained and profoundly natural; the cyclical reassurance of nature’s regeneration is captured in the penultimate line, a faith in the natural world’s ability to renew itself that perhaps minimally attenuates the void left in the human world by the recondite, and deceased, Lucy. If the words on the page aren’t enough to capture your attention, then perhaps the mystery enshrouding these poems may; nobody has ever been able to pinpoint or determine the identity of ‘Lucy’ or her relationship to the poet. This is thus a series of poems constituting a patchwork of riddles spanning Wordsworth’s career - enigmatic, intriguing and unclassifiable.
Wordsworth’s long lyric poem Resolution and Independence is similarly overlooked by readers, although rightly praised by various critics. The poem opens with a joyful contemplation of the freshness of the wild after a night of rain:
All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops;—on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.
The poet is then plagued by a crippling fear of the future:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
And then the striking - and biographical - episode. Wordsworth encounters a ‘leech-gatherer on the lonely moor’, whose quiet patience, stoicism through suffering and rootless wandering from ‘pond to pond’ and ‘moor to moor’, provide Wordsworth with ‘human strength, by apt admonishment’. The old man, whose frail frame seems burdened by ‘a more than human weight’ serves as a bastion of nature, utterly connected and grounded with the landscape over which he roams - it is as ‘motionless as a cloud’ that he stands ‘upon the margin of that moorish flood’. The encounter’s raw integrity chastens the poet’s prior self-indulgent dejection and enables him to place his prior worldly concerns in a wider perspective. The location of this real-life conversation took place just beyond Wordsworth’s home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere - and is a lily-suffused pool by the side of a hiking trail, sheltered by a copse of trees and bordering a fell, a quietly ethereal setting for a rumination that would prefigure some of the poet’s later great philosophical poems.
Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Great Ode (Intimations of Immortality) are staples of his innovative philosophy; throughout the former poem, Wordsworth explores how the memory of our past experiences can be reconstitutive, serving as a source of hope and gratification even in one’s current ‘dreary’ ‘daily life’. He creates a rhetoric of inter-connection, linking the ‘past’ to the present ‘now’, man to ‘nature’, describing the ‘pastoral farms’ as seamlessly blending ‘green to the very door’ and ‘the landscape’ as ‘connecting’ ‘with the quiet of the sky’. Yet despite the subtle power of nature’s unobtrusive coalescence with the human and inanimate elements of the landscape, the poet expresses underlying doubt, several times qualifying his statements with ‘perhaps’, ‘might’, ‘if this be but a vain belief’. He is thus honest enough to admit the difficulty of confidently interpreting experiences of such transience and intangibility.
A similar lack of confidence characterises Wordsworth’s even more comprehensive Great Ode, where the poet laments children’s development into adulthood - he mourns the human shift from the child - ‘best philosopher’ to the worldly and performative adolescent - a ‘little actor con[ning] another part’; our involvement in the empty, superficial activities of daily living increases our remoteness from the source of existence, our real ‘home’. Yet Wordsworth insists that we must utilise our memory to see back into ‘our past years’; even if the joy of our blissful youth gradually fades, it can still exist even as a vague adumbration of a former self, reminding us of our past power and grounding ourselves in our purest and truest forms.
He also suggests that our blissfully innocent childhood unity with nature is never quite expunged upon adulthood, that the knowledge of our previous ‘high instincts’, even if divorced from us now, is enough to keep our ‘immortal sea’ in sight - our memories immortalise our primitive oneness with the universe, and even if eternally subjected to a life out of touch with our roots, we can still learn ‘great sympathy’ out of ‘human suffering’ and experience a modified and matured relationship with our past, with nature and with our human counterparts. However, the poet’s final stanza demonstrates his lingering doubt - he admits with suppressed plangency that he has ‘relinquished one delight’, and is not certain whether his new-found ‘soothing thoughts’ or ‘primal sympathy’ can quite balance the loss of immortality, but strives to end the ode looking forward - the ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears’ are the same which can remind us of our source of ‘celestial light’.
The Great Ode proselytised a philosophy which was startlingly radical; by framing humanity within a notion of eternity and pre-existence (‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’), Wordsworth defied orthodox Christian beliefs, receiving harsh criticism. Indeed, a common misconception surrounding the poet is that he eluded ‘real-world’ problems and prattled on about flowers - but his poem London, 1802 contradicts this premise. He criticises contemporary society’s hypocrisy and opportunism, calling on the Romantics’ revered muse Milton to ‘give us manners, virtue, freedom, power’:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
These words are damning and blunt - and arguably endure, able to speak to the inequalities and predicaments of today’s society, explicitly calling for an overthrow of the social and political order - to render the country’s people ‘majestic, free’.
My final attestation to Wordsworth’s primacy stems from the concepts he symbolises. Any fellow English student (or anyone full-stop really) will know that I constantly refer to Wordsworth in any literary situation - be it an Italian Renaissance poem, a Mediaeval mystic’s text or a 21st Century short story. But this is because Wordsworth coherently encapsulated such a huge philosophy in his work - he represents the spirit of Romanticism, part of the great (originally German) cultural tradition, belonging to the intellectual nexus of Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, the music of Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and the art of Turner, Goya, Friedrich (yes, I do have that mountain painting on a tshirt) and Constable. It was a movement defined by a relationship between nature and our purest selves, an anger and powerful sentiment against societal injustice, and a profundity and boldness of emotion - all feelings just as pertinent today. My continuous attempts to link Wordsworth with every area of life and literature will continue to raise irritated eyebrows, but they are attempts rooted in a genuine belief in his influence and brilliance.
Wordsworth’s work was extraordinary given his cultural and temporal situation. He immortalised images of daffodils, birds, mountains, rivers - and not in the spiritless Victorian picturesque manner, but through language which conveyed the exhilaration of a tempestuous night on a wild moor, the crazed wind on a mountain summit, and the ‘sublime’ awareness of human transience amidst nature’s ever-evolving flux. Although much of his nature poetry speaks to his northern mountainous homeland (which is partly why I love it), its reach transcends geographical boundaries; he was the first poet to truly celebrate the natural world in all its forms, and from unusual perspectives. He gave voice to the invisible and unheard - bestowing expression upon a convict, a disabled boy, a ‘female vagrant’, a ‘mad mother’, a lone shepherd, a ‘leech-gatherer’ and countless other colourful and compelling figures.
I could continue raving about Bill Wordsworth forever, but I hope to have done him some justice here. If this series goes down even nominally more positively than any of my other stuff, who knows, maybe a vindication on Keats will be next…
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