G. Kim Blank

Remember Wordsworth

Two hundred years ago, in spring 1798, a couple of enthusiastic twenty-something English poets, whose friendship had been mutually inspirational for the better part of a year, came up with an idea to publish their most recent work. The result of their collaboration was a slim volume with the quirky title Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems.The book was published anonymously later that year, and, with the exception of a rather strange poem called "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere," the collection was reviewed quite positively. The younger but more experienced of the two writers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was the author of this queer tale about a sailor with a crossbow who experienced an inexplicable moment of indiscretion involving an albatross; but in terms of the number of poems that went into this first edition of Lyrical Ballads, his contribution of four of the twenty-three poems made him the junior partner.

William Wordsworth, the other poet, was certainly unaware that this volume and the subsequent expanded editions would come to be seen as perhaps the most significant collection published these last two hundred years - the beginning of modem poetry, no less. In his "Advertisement" to the volume, he simple refer-red to them as "experiments": "They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." His modest but radical hope was that the poetry contained "a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents."

In subsequent editions of Lyrical Ballads only Wordsworth's name appeared, despite the continued presence of a few of Coleridge's poems. But more and more Wordsworth took over the volume; Coleridge could simply not keep up with Wordsworth's output over these few years. Poem after poem about forsaken females; lost, abandoned, or dead children; aimless and forsaken wanderers; ruined families; and even a half-frozen, hopeless fly fumbles across his page. Yet remarkable about this work is not just the quantity, but the kinds of emotions and circumstances that keep surfacing. What, then, is the story behind Wordsworth and his most memorable poetry? What kind of child was he that became father of the most influential poet of the last two centuries?

Most genial explanations pass over the details of his life and instead account for his poetry by pointing to a Romantic return to Nature, a new faith in the imagination, changing politics after the disaster of the French Revolution that began in 1789, and a reaction to the alienating rumblings of the Industrial Revolution.

Still, when you take more than just a quick glance at Wordsworth's most engaging poetry - say, that written between 1793 and 1804, before he reached even middle age - you can't help but notice that poem after poem centers around negative emotions and circumstances: loss, abandonment, death, guilt, grief, suffering, and endurance.

Again: did this poetry come from the imagination, cultural influences, market concerns, social and historical reflection, inherited local tales of common woe? One answer explored here might be closer to home, and come from looking more mindfully, and realistically, at Wordsworth himself - that is, his own story, his own experience and circumstances, often iterated as and reflected in queer little poems about isolated women, despondent men, and dead or lost children. But it remains that these stark emotions and circumstances, rather than the character of these figures dominate the features of Wordsworth's poetic landscape at this time.

Until fairly recently, the Wordsworth cottage industry seems to have done little to distinguish Wordsworth the person from Wordsworth the poet, formulating his work in such a way that fails to address why much of his most memorable writing seems fixed on these negative subjects. Early biographical work often romanticized his life, ignored the implications of particular conditions, or simply covered up the messy stuff. Psychoanalytic explanations of Wordsworth's work tended to address his poetry as if it were a patient rather than a text. And, as we know, texts, and especially creative texts (are there any other kind?), can do much to cover their own tracks, especially when interpreters project their own needs or agenda on to the text. Later critical work tended to look for artistic integrity or historical/social expression in the poetry. Much of the more recent criticism seems simply too smart for the poetry it addresses overdetermined, you might say; the writing subject is displaced by a theorydriven lexicon that consumes itself in its own hyper-self-consciousness.

So where to? As suggested, one answer is before us in material we already know: the details of Wordsworth's personal history. His mother, Ann, married when she was eighteen, and within six years she had five children. William, the second child, was bom in 1770. His father, John, a friendless man, worked long, lonely hours as the steward (coroner, bailiff, political aid) for the most powerful and hated man in that part of England, Sir James Lowther. As one contemporary put it, Lowther was "truly a madman, tho' too rich to be confin'd". Quite likely it would have been awkward for the Wordsworth family to integrate itself into a community run by the person who controlled that community. The Wordsworth children spent a great deal of time with their matemal grandparents, likely because of the pressures at the Wordsworth household. This, however, was hardly a happy retreat.

Years later, Dorothy, in a letter to her best friend, describes the "cold insensibility" of her grandparents, and how the siblings were disliked and continually insulted. William in particular seems to have been their main target, even into his early adult life. On one occasion Dorothy wrote that her uncle had "taken a dislike to my Br. Wm"; she repeats this shortly after: "I absolutely dislike my Uncle Kit who never speaks a pleasant word to one, and behaves to my BrWmin a particularly ungenerous manner." Wordsworth himself gives an earlier recollection as well as a summary of his childhood disposition: at his grandparents' house, young William, holding a sword in his hand, actually had thoughts of suicide:

 I was of a stiff, moody and violent temper;
 so much so that I remember going once into
 the attics of my grandfather's house at
 Penrith, upon some indignity having been
 put upon me, with an intention of
 destroying myself with one of the foils
 which I knew was kept there.  I took the
 foil in hand, but my heart failed.

Ann died of pneumonia just before William's eighth birthday, but John was not prepared to bring up his five children. A few months after Ann's death, William, Dorothy, and their siblings were separated. William and Dorothy, who had become very close, did not see each other for nine years.

Five years later, when Wordsworth was thirteen, his father passed away. He had been carrying out his duties for Lowther, but, traveling back on a cold December night, he seems to have lost his way and spent a night outdoors. The chill he picked up killed him. As Stephen Gill writes in his biography of Wordsworth, the effect on the siblings "of their father's death, ...[as] a lifelong shaping influence on Wordsworth, was that it deprived them of a home"(Gill p.35).

Enough family money was available for Wordsworth to attend Cambridge University in 1787, which, because of his academic gifts and connections, would have ensured him a promising future. Though he started out quite seriously and was successful in his studies, by his final years his aspirations and work habits diminished. When Wordsworth writes about this time in his poetry, he recalls the "fears" he had about "About my future worldly maintenance," and how he "was not for that hour / Nor for that place." His salvation was to walk "along ... the level fields, / With heaven's blue concave reared about my head" (1805 Prelude, 111, 60100). What Wordsworth did manage to do, however, was work on some loco-descriptive poetry and sneak over to Europe in 1790 for a 2,000 mile, ten-week walking tour with a pal. On 21 January 1791, Wordsworth was awarded his degree without distinction, but taking up the law or holy orders, or receiving a college Fellowship, was not in the books for the unsettled graduate. Later that year he would write to a friend, "I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life."

Twenty-one years old, unemployed, homeless, with tentative finances, Wordsworth rambled about London and Wales over the next months, continuing to turn down decent job offers and career prospects. The only vague idea he could come up with was to go to France to pick up the language so that he might become a tutor. Within four or five months of his arrival at the end November 1791, a French woman he met was pregnant by him. So too did he come under the heady sway of revolutionary ideas. At the same stressful moment, then, Wordsworth was witness to the frightening and unpredictable growth of the French revolution and equally uncertain growth of his lover. He returned to Englandjust weeks before his daughter was born. The mother, Annette Vallon, expected Wordsworth would return to her; Wordsworth's expectations were less certain.

So much for the idealized early years: a stressed-out mother, an overworked father laboring for a hated boss, nasty relatives, the death of the mother, the break-up of the siblings, the death of the father, no sense of home; financial uncertainty, since it turned out that his father never received payment for his work for Lowther (it took two decades for the children to finally collect on the debt); an expensive education but, despite strong family pressure, a refusal on Wordsworth's part to take advantage of his considerable connections or to plan for his future; all topped off by child fathered out of wedlock, left behind in country his own would soon be gearing up for war with.

A few months after leaving Annette, Wordsworth may have suffered a nervous breakdown. Wordsworth, of course,,knew all about feelings of abandonment and loss, and he must have felt strong stirrings of guilt when, in March 1793, she wrote to him: "Come, my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter .... She grows more like you every day. I seem to be holding you in my arms." At this time, he also began to write poetry dwelling on individual human suffering and enigmatic feelings of guilt, isolation, and loneliness.

By 1794, at twenty-four, Wordsworth was finally reunited with his sister, which was an important moment in his personal and poetic development. She was worried about his future: "...I am very anxious about him just now as he has not yet got any settled Employment." A year later, a new friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, encouraged his poetic calling, and Wordsworth searched deeper into that cluster of vexing feelings that weighed on him. The friendship led to the Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's poetry leading to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads reenacts those negative feelings in various poetic voices and stories. For example, in "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree" is a memorial to a distraught, solitudinal poet figure, a "lost man" stuck on "his own unfruitful life." The majority of Wordsworth's other poems making up the first edition of Lyrical Ballads center on absent fathers, deserted and tormented females, and dead children. (Coleridge's contribution to the volume was significantly smaller than Wordsworth's, but did include "The Ancient Mariner.") In the most noteworthy and personal poem in the volume, "Tintern Abbey", Wordsworth attempts to bring the past to the present and feelings over to thought. That is, he begins to address his own history more directly. On the most basic level the poem draws a comparison between his present feelings and those he experienced five years past when he was at the same place; he perceives continuity, but, more importantly, difference and hope. He begins to see his own story, his own feelings, as part of a larger, though sober, picture: he now looks on nature and hears the "still sad music of humanity" which has the "power / To chasten and subdue." In the most powerful passage in the poem the picture is one of sublime, universal connection, but we cannot forget that this emerges out of Wordsworth's own needs and circumstances:

            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,
 A motion and a spirit, that impels
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
 And rolls through all things.

Beyond the poems that went into Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth continued to work on a poem that would both trouble and motivate him. The Ruined Cottage explores the sufferings and deprivations of Margaret, a wife who loses her husband to the army; her mental well-being collapses, her children die, and her cottage falls into disrepair. Over the next few years, as Wordsworth continued to work on the poem, it becomes clear that he attempts to understand the meaning of such traumatic loss and suffering, to frame it in a more universal context. This, it might be suggested, is Wordsworth attempting, in his poetry, to understand his own subjectivity and the history of his own feeling. As in "Tintem Abbey," the evolving strategy is to bring thought over to feeling, to bring contemplation over to these stark emotions. Without such efforts, which took a physical toll on Wordsworth, he might have been locked within the circle of these negative emotions. The evidence for this are the extraordinary number of references to Wordsworth's headaches, stomach problems, chest pains, anxiety attacks, and insomnia, and many of these are, remarkably, but predictably, paired with composing poetry. For example, in September 1800, Dorothy records in her journal: "he writes with so much feeling and agitation that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weakness about his left side and stomach...... Apparently it was not easy for Wordsworth to get down inside himself, and to address those disturbing feelings. In September 1798, Wordsworth went to Gen-nany with his sister and Coleridge. William and Dorothy headed off to the relative seclusion of Goslar in the Hartz Mountains, while Coleridge was drawn to the larger centers of leaming where he could carry out research. The initial idea for at least William was that he would learn the language in order to become a tutor back in England. Outwardly, at least, the trip was hardly enlightening or educative. The winter of 1798-99 was one of the coldest on record, and William and Dorothy found themselves not just stuck because of the weather, but loathing the locals, calling them "a wretched race; the flesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing but knavery and low falsehood." In'the middle of the winter Dorothy writes, "For more than two months we have intended quitting Goslar in the course of each week, but we have been so frightened by the cold season, the dreadful roads, and the uncovered carts." Wordsworth, feeling much anxiety and physical distress, writes to Coleridge that he has more or less been forced to give himself over to poetry: "...1 have been obliged to write in self-defence." The self-defensive poetry he comes up with in Germany is substantial and important. Besides continuing to write strange and emotionally intense poems about loss, death, and guilt (enough, at any rate, for an expanded edition of Lyrical Ballads), he also begins to write autobiographical verse exploring the enigmatic nature of his experience and the attendant feelings. It appears he has not quite written himself out of his emotional gloom. It was also clear to Wordsworth that the kind of poetry he would write would purposely shun the contemporary penchant for sentimentality and omate language. Wordsworth was determined, in his own words, "to adopt the very language of men."

William and Dorothy initially planned to stay in Germany for at least a couple of years, but five months in Goslar was about all they could take. Before leaving, they may have spent a few month traveling around. There is, however, some recent speculation that Wordsworth did some "spying" forthe British Home Office whilein Germany, likely amountingto not much more than passing on some message regarding foreign activities that might have subversive ramifications for British interests. Coleridge remained behind, noting that on their way through the Wordsworths were both "melancholy & hypp'd," ("hypped" meaning "depressed").

Back in England by the end of April, the brother and sister went to stay with family friends, the Hutchinsons, until the end of the year. Mary Hutchinson, who was the same age as Wordsworth, would, a few years later, become Wordsworth's wife. Wooing her might have been part of the plan. Among other projects, Wordsworth continued to work on his autobiographical poem. His growing obsession with this project - which he expanded and revised over a forty-year period until it reached almost 9.000 lines - seems to be tied to the need he had to create a continuous narrative of his life, to put together the pieces of his early years; he seemed driven to understand himself and the source of his identity, consciousness, and creativity. The poem, which came to be known posthumously as "The Prelude," has, like the best of Wordsworth's work, its origins in his deepest subjectivity, yet contains many moments when it expresses the nature of experience in universal terms.

Perhaps the most important decisions William and Dorothy came to at this time was to return to their native Lake District. They found a house in the village of Grasmere which would be their home for almost a decade, before they would move to a larger house in the same area (they would move two more times, but remain in the area). The resolution to make this retreat indicates Wordsworth's determination to make poetry his vocation, to declare himself a poet.

Over the next few years, Wordsworth published two more editions of Lyrical Ballads. By 1803-4, with his home in Grasmere, a devoted sister and now a wife (he married in 1802), a child, friends, significant inheritance money finally coming through, and a growing reputation as a poet, Wordsworth's psychosomatic problems begin to tail off. So, interestingly, does the kind of poetry that confronted death, loss, separation, and guilt. At least in part through his writing, Wordsworth seems to have come to terms with his life as well as the feelings and events that previously defined his identity in negative terms. In his famous "Ode", written over 1802-4, Wordsworth looks back without regret and loss so that he can look forward with contemplative hope and determined acceptance:

   Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
   We will grieve not, rather find
   Strength in what remains behind,
   In the primal sympathy
   Which having been must ever be,   In the soothing
thoughts that spring
   Out of human suffering,
   In the faith that looks through death,
   In years that bring the philosophic mind.

This is not an old man writing from a lifetime of experience, though a picture of the grayed and stoic Wordsworth may be the one we hold in our mind's eye. This, instead, is a relatively young man suddenly writing beyond his years. He writes as if liberated; he writes as if he has paid his dues. Thought comes to feeling, and the result, "faith," will see him, will see us, through. His personal has become our universal without even the invocation of a godhead or a hereafter.

This is the Wordsworth we probably know best, but knowing a little about how he got there, and what went into such a moment, makes it even more remarkable. His poetry about rainbows, daffodils, wandering lonely as a cloud, and the child being father of the man, all written at this point when Wordsworth's life is finally pulled together, becomes a statement about continuity, connection, and hope:

  My heart leaps up when I behold
      A Rainbow in the sky:
  So was it when my life began;
  So is it now I am a Man;
  So be it when I shall grow old,
      Or let me die!
  The Child is Father of the Man;
  And I could wish my days to be
  Bound each to each by natural piety.

The sentiment here is hardly some kind of romantic whimsy-"Or let me die!" This is life or death. A failure to respond, hold together, and persevere could undermine the meaning of his continued existence; despite suffering or grief, he will grow, and he harkens back to that unthinking time, to that innocent Eden, perhaps, before death and grief entered his world. In fact, in Wordsworth's motion to become a whole person, it may be his hard-won acceptance of suffering and grief that finally moves him forward.

Wordsworth continued to write for almost five more decades (passing away in 1850, seven years after becoming Poet Laureate), but this later poetry goes in quite a different direction. Figures and voices of enigmatic suffering and endurance largely disappear; stranded and dispirited characters vanish from his creative impulse. Many of the younger, radical Romantic poets, including Shelley, Keats, and Byron, felt ambivalent about Wordsworth's poetic accomplishment and political sympathies, and were disappointed with his later poetry; none, however, could escape his influence. By the 1830s, Wordsworth's impact was felt by a new generation, and by the last decade of his life he had become an icon. Sometimes creativity comes less from history than from an individual's personal history. Some art may be emotional reenactment. In Wordsworth's famous line, "I wandered lonely as a Cloud," it is not Romantic wandering or the cloud we should be noting, but the loneliness that calls out for correction. The beauty of Wordsworth's language, however, is less easy to account for.

As for the incest? Not likely. Try co-dependence.

Select Reading

Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life .(Oxford UP), 1989.

Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (Norton), 1998.

Moorman, Mary. Ed., The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford), 1971.

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography; The Early Years: 1770-1803 (Oxford UP). 1957; The Later Years: 1803-1850 (Oxford UP), 1965.

Onorato, Richard J. The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton UP), 1971.

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