William Wordsworth (1) (1770–1850)

I can't help it if my heart doesn't leap with joy with Wordsworth's respectful and magisterial poems. I feel some kind of guilty distance with his realistic and moderated exultation of Nature, his aspirations towards perfection and his Odes full of bucolic and idealized countryside.

There are some brilliant stanzas though which show the almost anecdotal wonders of an apparently monotonous life, but still I find them lacking in originality and too self-centered in the soul of the poet, framed show more in nature, basking in the mutual reflection between the soul and the world; the landscape becoming the revealing image of moral life and religious transcendence. And this recurring need to isolate his artistic self in order to write straight from the soul is not convincing, at least for me.
Maybe because he is trying too hard, but he doesn't reach to me the way that other poets do, for example, Robert Frost, who also speaks of the rural life but with an underlying need to return to the origins, which is absent in Wordsworth's poems.

"Humility and modest awe, themselves
Betray me, serving often for a cloak
To a more subtle selfishness; that now
Locks every function up in blank reserve,
Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye"

His poems leak with more consciousness than inspiration, his verses being usually nostalgic recollections of a better times, usually during childhood, when the soul is in harmony with the world and experiences are lived intensely and purely.

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen now I can see no more."

But somehow, his willingness to elevate his writing to the intellectual knowledge and to democratize the lyrical language creates an artificial rhetoric which diminishes the impact of his words, at least for me.

"Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations; and in thee,
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion."

Nevertheless, I have to give him credit for being one of the first English Romantic Poets who will lay the foundations for Byron, Shelley and Keats, and for trying to elevate his meditations towards great poetry.
Although not one of my favorites, (I'm aware I'll make a bunch of detractors here), he surely earned the right to be read and re-read again and again. show less

First read over a half-century ago, but chosen now by chance after two M.C. Beaton mysteries: unexpectedly linked by fuel. At Scottish home fires, and in Wordsworth’s childhood two centuries ago, “we pursued / Our home amusements by the warm peat-fire.” (Book I, end) Also as in Beaton, rural labor teaches ethics that the city may not; here, young Wordy* rows, races against his fellows on a lake toward an island with the remains of a chapel; “In such a race/ So ended, disappointment show more could be none,/…We rested in the shade, all pleased alike, / Conquered and conqueror. Thus pride of strength,/ And the vain-glory of superior skill, were tempered.”**(Book II).

Before finding his epic subject of self-development, the poet searches “some old / Romantic tale by Milton left unsung; / More often turning to some gentle place /Within the groves of Chivalry.” Or, “How Mithridates northward passed…” or “some high-souled man,/ Unnamed among the chronicles of kings, / Suffered in silence for Truth’s sake….”
Like Rousseau’s Confessions, this poet’s whole project illustrates his line, “The child is father of the man,” which becomes Freud’s analysis a century later.

The most famous page in the whole Prelude comes midway in Book I, where the young oarsman-poet takes “A little boat tied to a willow tree / Within a rocky cove…” and admits “It was an act of stealth.” As he rows out, fixing his eye on a craggy ridge to the rear, “a huge peak, black and huge…Upreared its head…” For many days he felt that spectacle, “Of unknown modes of being,” of the power behind, within Nature, quite beyond “the mean and vulgar works of man.” And might I add, no Englishman can know “mean and vulgar works” equal to American malls or what Russians Ilf and Petrov called in the 50’s, “one-storied America.”

Behind the poem also lies social reform, when seeing a "hunger-bitten girl" tied to a heifer, "that poverty / Abject as this would in a little while / Be found no more"(Bk IX). And this did happen in 19C America, though such poverty--now post-industrial--has returned, massively. Of his residence at Cambridge and in London, he wonders "how men lived / Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still/ Strangers, not knowing each the other's name."(Bk VII)

He writes about fifteen years after, though publishing six decades later his 1792 French Revolution sojourn and amour with Annette Vallon producing daughter Caroline. He admits he's "untaught ..by books / To reason well of polity or law"...though then "on every tongue,/ natural rights and civil"(Bk IX) Of his French love, "I wept not then,-- but tears have dimmed my sight, / In memory of the farewells of that time, / Domestic severings, female fortitude / At dearest separation...." He returned to London because England had declared war on France, though the temporary move became much more.

In Book Two he recalls renting a horse, riding to a disused Abbey (maybe Tintern) and even riding their horses down the chantry, “in uncouth race,” “and that single wren / Which one day sang so sweetly in the nave.” G Sample says in Bird Songs and Calls of Britain “in the latter half of the year, the wrens may be the only birds singing… like the real owners of the wood.” I recall hearing a couple wrens near the North River in Islington, startlingly copious song, as much as the Skylark, and easier to imitate (closer to diatonic scale).

Wordsworth recalls growing up (in 1780s) with little food in Cockermouth, overlooking the Derwent; the kids played games 'til after dark, "A rude mass / Of native rock, left midway in the square of our small market village, was the goal / Or centre of these sports..."( Bk II, start). He doesn’t say exactly what he played, but later he rented a horse and rode through an Abbey--maybe down in Tintern Abbey. Most of his writing is about Nature and Solitude, so these town-centered games—Tag? Bowlywicket? Handball?--were a surprise.

* Oops—just a glancing diminutive, not worthy of the poet’s Reader, whom he calls “Friend”--in Book VI, his Friend is Coleridge. The poet knows his Friend will not think “that I have lengthened out / With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale” (Bk I, end).
**Would that the Trumpster had learned basic (rural) ethics, to temper his excruciating vain-glory.

PS I read in Carlos Baker's edition, Holt Rhinehart, 1961. show less

In an effort to increase my poetry intellect, I picked this complete collection up, inspired by comments from [[Mary Oliver]]. The surprise was The Prelude, an epic narrative covering much of Wordsworth's life and exploits. People who think that metered verse doesn't speak to the world today should come back to Wordsworth. His love and spiritual communion with nature is particularly quickening in our current times where nature is under assault everywhere. One of the greatest finds here are show more the essays and front materials to some of the early publications, wherein Wordsworth explains poetry and his own place in the cannon and offers arguments for those who saw him straying from the mainstream. The last 100 pages, with these materials, is alone worth the price of admission. Like my [Leaves of Grass], this volume is now thoroughly marked and flagged and underlined for future visits.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended show less

The Prelude is Wordsworth's surprisingly fresh and modest account of growing up and developing his ideas about poetry, as seen through a series of key encounters with people or (mostly) with the natural world. We learn about his childhood in the family home and later at Hawkshead school, his Cambridge days, walking over the Alps, his experiences of the French revolution (omitting the bit about his unplanned French daughter...), and his love for Dorothy and for Coleridge.

The blank verse is show more firm, plain and natural - he has a few annoying habits like winning a syllable to pad a line by using a double negative, or throwing in a "poetic" elision or archaism, but he does this sort of thing far less often than most poets of the time, and a reader in 1805 (had anyone been allowed to read it then) might well have found the language astonishingly direct and plain. Nowadays the archaisms are more noticeable to us than the "plain" language, of course, and it's hard not to get irritated with his habit of describing people and things instead of naming them. Your heart leaps down when you behold a "that ... who/which ... " construction. But those minor things aside, this is a poem that you can - and should - read "like a book". It's a wonderfully open intellectual autobiography by someone who would most definitely not like to think of himself as an intellectual.

Never published in Wordsworth's lifetime, it started off as a 150 line poem in 1798, grew into two books of blank verse in 1799, achieved what most people regard as its definitive form in 13 books in 1805, but was then revised several more times before it was published posthumously in 14 books in 1850. Wordsworth was an incurable tinkerer, and constantly worked on his earlier poems, tweaking punctuation and orthography, changing a word here or there, sometimes even deleting and inserting long passages. The Penguin edition prints the 1805 and 1850 versions as parallel text, so that it's easy to see what was changed, but sometimes very difficult to fathom out why. More often than not, you feel that Wordsworth got it right the first time - wording that was tight and clear to start with becomes weak and woolly in the revised text. Some of the changes obviously reflect the way he became more and more conservative in old age - sympathy for radical ideas is played down, religious experiences that were undoctrinal and almost pantheistic in their expression are forced into language that will fit in with the ideas of mainstream Victorian Christianity. show less