William Wordsworth, born in 1770 in the Lake District of northern England, was one of five children in a prosaic family. His father was a business agent of a local landowner who was a member of Parliament. His mother, daughter of a linen draper, died when he was eight and his father died when he was thirteen, leaving him under the frigid guardianship of uncles. Luckily they boarded him and his three brothers with a sympathetic housewife in a cottage in the countryside who left them free to ramble.
There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! —many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake …
He recalled later in The Prelude how these walks had first awakened him to the charms of nature and the virtues of cottagers and shepherds. Luckily, the headmaster at his school encouraged his interest in poetry, and introduced him to the eighteenth-century poets. He was charmed by the precocious Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), who had captivated the literary world by forging the works of “primitive” English poets, and then had committed suicide at the age of eighteen. Surprisingly, Wordsworth’s father had made him memorize passages of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
When his guardian uncles sent him with a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, they expected him in due course to take holy orders and become a Fellow of the College, like the uncle who had secured the scholarship for him. Feeling confined by academic life, he refused to read for honors, and ended with a pass degree. But enjoying nature on his walks around Cambridge gave him the sense of being born again. In 1790, before coming down from Cambridge, with a friend he took a brief walking tour of the Continent. France entranced him by its promises of the political millennium. Returning there in 1791, he plunged enthusiastically into the spirit of the Revolution.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.
One of his best friends was a young man on the way to becoming a general in the Republican army. An impetuous love affair with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French surgeon, produced a daughter, Caroline. He thought of marrying Annette, staying on and joining in revolutionary politics, which might have been difficult, since Annette was a Catholic of a royalist family. Anyway, the guardian uncles would have none of it and refused to support him abroad.
Only two months after his return home in February 1793, England joined the war against France, creating a “moral” crisis for Wordsworth. His affection for the English land, nourished from his youthful rambles, suddenly was to be tested. Which would be stronger, love of England or love of “freedom”? The pain of this divided self was soon compounded by news of the Terror in France—Robespierre’s festival of slaughter, which killed the moderate Girondins who were Wordsworth’s friends. Within only forty-nine days 1,376 people were guillotined, as he later recalls in The Prelude:
Domestic carnage, now filled the whole year
With feast-days, old men from the chimney-nook,
The maiden from the bosom of her love,
The mother from the cradle of her babe,
The warrior from the field—all perished, all—
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.
Wordsworth, now in his early twenties, suffered the disillusion of naive young revolutionaries in all ages.
Flooded by self-reproach for mistaking the French cause, for doubting his England, and for betraying and abandoning Annette Vallon, where to turn? Just then the unexpected legacy of nine hundred pounds from a friend allowed him to set up housekeeping in the countryside with his sister Dorothy, return to rural nature, and become a full-time poet. Dorothy, his companion and solace for the rest of of his life, had a great literary talent, as her posthumously published journals would show. But as a woman, she was sentenced to be “the angel in the house,” while both Wordsworth and Coleridge would borrow from her journals.
In 1795, when Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also living in the West Country, the effect on both was electric. Coleridge persuaded the Wordsworths to take a cottage nearer him. Even before they met, Coleridge had applauded Wordsworth’s first poems about his walking tour in the Alps. Now “the giant Wordsworth,” he said, was not merely a poet of promise, but “the best poet of the age, the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior.” In turn, Wordsworth’s admiration of Coleridge was boundless. Oddly these poets of individualism, who believed poetry to be the voice of the unique self, soon used the same phrases, labored over the same passages, and Coleridge even tried to finish poems that Wordsworth had left incomplete.
Coleridge sketched the contrast of their natures when he described their division of labor for the Lyrical Ballads:
It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, 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.…
Coleridge was voluble and sociable, bookish and mystical, charmed by the exotic experience and metaphysical ideas. The withdrawn Wordsworth, seeing himself as “the recluse,” was charmed by everyday nature and the commonplace virtues. Coleridge sought solace in opium and the mists of German speculation, Wordsworth found his comfort in rural walks, spring flowers, and conversation with shepherds. While Wordsworth’s life would be troubled by the love-child of his youth, he had a happy marriage to a childhood friend. But Coleridge made himself unhappy by his loveless marriage to a woman who had fitted into his youthful scheme for an ideal community on the shores of the Susquehanna.
The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) offered some of Wordsworth’s most durable poems, including “Tintern Abbey,” in which he declared:
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
Coleridge invoked the supernatural in his unforgettable “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?”—“With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross!”
The volume sold well enough to help pay for their trip with Dorothy to Germany. While Coleridge used the opportunity to learn German for better access to philosophy, Wordsworth was isolated by his ignorance of German and began his enormous blank verse autobiography, The Prelude. Only the “ante-chapel to the body of a Gothic church,” it was intended to be an introduction to “The Recluse,” an even vaster work, never completed. Wordsworth’s monumental epic, addressed to Coleridge and frequently referring to Dorothy, would record in verse “the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.”
The Prelude, widely recognized as Wordsworth’s masterpiece, is praised as “the greatest and most original long poem” since Milton’s Paradise Lost. Perhaps the longest English epic of the self, it remains one of the least read classics of English literature. But its influence on other poets has been incalculable. In chronicles of the self it holds a place somewhere between Rousseau’s Confessions and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. When it was finally pub
lished after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, his wife titled it “Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem.” A rare feat of self-preoccupation, it was a monument to Wordsworth’s sense of mission as poet-prophet, putting into verse the nuances of a long life’s thoughts and feeling. But anticipating that readers might find conceit in his unusual subject, he dared to affirm his “real humility.”
It is not surprising that John Keats, who never lived to see The Prelude, had already made Wordsworth his example of the “Egotistical Sublime.” The critics who accused Edward Gibbon in his autobiography of confusing himself with the Roman Empire might have asked whether Wordsworth in his Prelude had not confused himself with the cosmos. Yet The Prelude provides the patient reader with an oddly compact narrative of the seedtime of modernism—the growing belief in the shaping power of childhood, the enthusiasms and disillusions of Revolution, the obsessions with crises of personal faith, and “Love of Nature leading to Love of Man.” Wordsworth begins with the inner conflict of the divided self. “Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” He seeks solace in withdrawal:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign is Solitude.
The healing of Wordsworth’s divided self, if there was to be a healing, would come from lonely self-revelation, the remembrance of things past, of which Freud would be a latter-day prophet. Saint Augustine and others seeking solace in Confession had appealed to a higher Judge. But for Wordsworth self-revelation was all—“each man’s Mind is to herself/Witness and judge.”
Wordsworth, if anyone, should have realized how little “to herself” his mind could be. For he continued to depend on the solace of Dorothy, and on the stimulus of Coleridge. Returning from Germany in 1799, he and Dorothy settled at Grasmere in his native Lake Country where he would spend the rest of his life, and Coleridge took a house just thirteen miles away. Wordsworth’s financial worries ceased when he finally came into his inheritance, and he reached a settlement with Annette Vallon. Then, in 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend from the neighborhood, and an intimate of Dorothy. Though distraught at being displaced, Dorothy somehow accommodated herself and remained William’s constant support. Mary’s family was so displeased at her marrying a “vagabond” with no gainful occupation that the Wordsworths received not a single wedding present. The marriage was happy. Mary bore five children, and Dorothy played the affectionate aunt. But the next years brought tragedy and tributation. Wordsworth’s brother John, to whom they were devoted, drowned in a shipwreck in 1805, and two of their children died in 1812.
Then, as the opposition of temperaments might have forecast, there developed a painful estrangement between the two poets. While Wordsworth had settled placidly in Grasmere, Coleridge, who was in Malta as secretary to the governor, suffered deteriorating health. He became increasingly dependent on opium in the form of laudanum, then prescribed as a drug. When Coleridge returned to England—fat, irritable, and horrified at reunion with his unloved wife—he vented his frustration on his intimate friends. Also he had just fallen hopelessly in love with Mary Wordsworth’s sister, Sara Hutchinson, whom he knew he could never marry. He became passionate and demanding, while Sara tried unsuccessfully to cure him of his addiction to opium and alcohol. The Wordsworths were alarmed.
Convinced that he was not loved by those who had meant most to him, Coleridge broke off the friendship. He lamented into his notebooks in November 1812, that for fourteen years “and those 14 are the very life of my life,” he had enjoyed “the most consummate friendship” with Wordsworth, and been “enthusiastically watchful” over Wordsworth’s literary career “even at the price of alienating the affections of my benefactors.” And how had he been repaid? “What many circumstances ought to have let me see long ago, the events of the last year, and emphatically of the last month, have now forced me to perceive—no one has ever LOVED me.” Soon after, he stumbled into Charles Lamb’s house mumbling, “Wordsworth, Wordsworth has given me up.” Friends intervened to bring the two together, but the breach was never fully healed. Nor did the pair ever revive their historic collaboration, their alchemy of opposites.
Each hastened down his own way, Coleridge on the rocky path of opium and German mysticism, Wordsworth on the smooth ways of rural nature and friendly neighbors. As their paths separated, the poetry of both deteriorated. And as Wordsworth became more prosperous, and more conservative in politics and religion, his poetry became more voluminous but less interesting. In 1813, on Wordsworth’s own request for a sinecure, he received a modest recognition of his national eminence in the form of the distributorship of stamps for Westmoreland. He was decorated with the customary honorary degrees. Finally, in 1843, on the death of Robert Southey, after assurance from the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, that there would be no duties attached, he accepted the poet laureateship. And so he provided Browning with a plausible subject for “The Lost Leader”:
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat— …
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen—
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves.
The critics were not far wrong. Wordsworth had written most of his best poetry before his estrangement from Coleridge—before he became a literary idol. And his memorable pieces were short poems. Even the longer of them, “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” were each only two hundred lines. This lovely ode, on a familiar Romantic theme, celebrated the clairvoyance of childhood.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy …
Perhaps there was a natural limit to the length of a “lyric” (originally a poem for singing to the lyre) which was the proper medium for the Romantic spirit. When the celebration of the self in poetry expanded beyond bounds, it defeated its object.
John Keats (1795–1821), master of the lyric, saw this weakness, the hypertrophy of the self, in Wordsworth. He met Wordsworth several times, dined with him, heard him pontificate about poetry, and after each meeting found him less sympathetic. “For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages,” Keats asked in 1818, “are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist?… Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood.”
Perhaps the decline of Wordsworth’s poetry was a natural consequence of his specific talent. Having defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” he made his best poems works of remembrance. He was a poet of what he called “the two consciousnesses,” the moments of the present called up moments of the youthful past. As his later life became increasingly calm and sedentary there was ever less contrast between the agony of the present and the delights of youth. Wordsworth’s remembrance of things past, so focused on himself, became a drama with only one actor, which was not enough to sustain an epic. And he lamented:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Coleridge, Wordsworth’s stimulus
and catalyst, was quite another story. He had his own problems, but he did not feed on himself. His plague was his reaching out to the ungraspable exotic, demanding universal truths of theology and philosophy. In his youth in 1793, in a characteristic flight of fancy and in despair over an unrequited love, during his third year at the university, Coleridge had fled Cambridge. Happening on a recruiting office for the Light Dragoons, he was sworn in as “Silas Titus Comberbacke.” But his cavalry career was not a success. He could not groom his horse, ride, or even keep his equipment in order, and was finally assigned to cleaning stables and serving as a hospital orderly. When his older brother James responded to his frantic appeals and bought his release, he returned to Cambridge and the world of letters.
Romantic in a most un-Wordsworthian sense, he was seduced by the otherworldly. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” his main contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, had originated in the dream of a friend who imagined a skeleton ship with figures in it.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Coleridge’s idea for the poem had convinced Wordsworth “that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate.” Still Wordsworth claimed to have contributed the idea of shooting an albatross, which made the poem an allegory of man’s sins against nature. “Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream” (1798) was first published in 1816 with Coleridge’s apology that it was only a “fragment … here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity,” Lord Byron. Coleridge offered his own opinion that it was “rather a psychological curiosity, than … of any supposed poetic merit.” Conceived in Coleridge’s own opium dream, it began quite simply:
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 87
