The Poet of Meaning

Wordsworth
A Life
by Juliet Barker Ecco, 576 pp., $29.95

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, ESPECIALLY THE biography of a great poet, is one of the most demanding of forms, demanding at the same time the very different capabilities of the historian and of the literary critic. Juliet Barker possesses to an admirable degree the abilities of the historian, and brings before us Wordsworth in detail over his long life and important career, perhaps supplanting the very good 1989 biography by Stephen Gill.

She weaves into her narrative passages from Wordsworth's poetry, often "The Prelude," and most often from the earlier 1805 version. She makes good use of that great poem about the development of the poet's mind. Clearly she was drawn to Wordsworth because he was a poet, yet she does not get close enough to the poetry itself, to precisely why it matters--that is, to the justification for her large and, as biography, valuable enterprise.

She takes account, as she must, of the central event of his life, indeed of the life of Europe in his time: the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the revolution that followed. She recounts Wordsworth's two trips to Europe in 1791 and 1792, his love affair with Annette Vallon, resulting in a daughter, Caroline. Do not get the impression that Wordsworth was some version of Byron or D'Annunzio, or even Shelley. He dutifully contributed to the support of the child. His outward life was not marked by any sort of remarkable behavior.

Immensely important for his mind, however, was his early humanitarian enthusiasm for the Revolution and the events he observed in France. "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive," he remembers in "The Prelude," "But to be young was very heaven." If that bliss and that dawn sound familiar as regards more recent revolutions, well they might. The French Revolution was the first modern revolution, driven intellectually by the Rights of Man, that is, by theory. In that it was new. But the dawn turned dark. Wordsworth was appalled by the increasing violence and fanaticism, the fear, the rivers of blood, and then the inevitable young military officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, taking charge to restore order. Wordsworth rejected the humanitarian abstractions that led to the guillotine and to the war that engulfed Europe. As Juliet Barker shows, this reaction led to an internal revolution in Wordsworth's mind, a major revolution, its reverberations still with us.

Hazlitt, an acquaintance of Wordsworth and Coleridge, was precisely wrong, misled by his own radical politics, in thinking Wordsworth's best poetry came from his revolutionary humanitarian sympathies. No. It came from his reaction against republican abstractions, a rejection that focused his mind on the individual and on the concrete particulars of experience. It was this shift in Wordsworth's mind that led ultimately to his famous praise of Burke in the 1850 "Prelude." Burke, wrote Wordsworth, "forewarns, denounces, launches forth, / Against all systems built on abstract rights," and who "the majesty proclaims / Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time." Both Burke, "alarmed into reflection," as he said, and Wordsworth saw that political abstractions (we would say ideologies) are lethal abbreviations of thought. Burke, reflecting deeply on an actual English society, arrived at an analytical understanding that institutions constitute the unconscious mind, that is, the habits, of society.

In his Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), however, in a remarkable passage singled out by Matthew Arnold in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Burke, without at all taking back his critique of abstract rights, turned his analysis of social structure into a perception of inevitable social process. Powerful and converging forces doomed the ancien régime: Burke's analysis of society was analogous to Wordsworth's analysis of mind. As Burke wrote:

If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it . . . they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the designs of men.

Arnold rightly called this a great moment in the history of thought, pushing a correct analysis of society into an awareness of necessary change. As Arnold saw, this moment remains instructive; indeed, it is Wordsworthian in its empiricism and in its analytical hostility to abstractions. Wordsworth turned from the abstractions of the philosophes to the particular individuals and inward to the experiences of the individual mind.

Juliet Barker follows Wordsworth through his early life to his beginnings as an experimental poet, making the Lake District his imaginative property as William Faulkner would Yoknapatawpha County. His poems, indeed, often were populated by rural figures in many ways like those of Faulkner: eccentrics, peasants, storytellers, even an idiot boy.

For his new poetry Wordsworth undertook a revolution in language, as set forth in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1800):

My purpose was to imitate, and so far as possible, to adapt, the very language of men . . . to bring language nearer to the language of men. . . . Naturally arranged according to the laws of metre [it] does not differ from that of prose.

The language of poetry is periodically rejuvenated by such a return to the norm of the English language. Samuel Johnson had appealed to it in his criticism of John Milton's deviation, and Ezra Pound later used it against the Victorians. In his experimental "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth used that norm of language for his new subject matter, the vagrant associations of the unconscious mind.

For example, in "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," the man's emotions have no rational basis. He loves young Lucy, but, as he rides along, the moon drops beneath her cottage roof:

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a lover's head-- "O Mercy!" To myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead."

There the relationship among the ideas is other than rational, and though conventional reviewers such as the brutal Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh Review mocked such poems as doggerel, the Age of Reason was over. Wordsworth had made a revolution of his own. His imagination seized upon particulars, possessed them as his own, not only people but rivers, mountains, animals, even an overlooked flower:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do too often lie too deep for tears.

That "meanest flower" possesses metaphysical importance, and we will return to it in a moment.

Proceeding from the simpler Lucy poems, Wordsworth built on his insights about the mind. In 1798 he visited Tintern Abbey, and notice the precision of his title: "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798." Every element there is important. The river is important, also the fact that he is revisiting the site he has known, mixing past and present:

Five years have passed, five summers, with the length Of five long winters! And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain-springs . . . Watch out when Wordsworth hears that sound of waters. He seems then to gain access to his unconscious mind, exploring it as the poem proceeds, and at length experiencing an epiphany in the form of profound sympathy: 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. That last line goes beyond the ordinary world to a moment of aural epiphany. It pushes language, resists analysis. "Still"? Does that mean "silent"? Or "always" sad? Or both simultaneously? Language seems to dissolve. I know of nothing in poetry resembling that line, that moment. Keats's unheard melodies are "sweeter." The "still" sad music of humanity must possess vast depths of sadness. We notice something about his verse here. Wordsworth has come through the experiments of his Lucy poems, the nursery-rhyme simplicity; has retained the language of speech; and has also done something new with iambic pentameter, repossessing it from Shakespeare and the very different verse of Milton, making it over into his own conversational form. He also has become capable of such a line as "the still sad music of humanity." Wordsworth knows, moreover, that his characteristic resonant lines have to do with his relationship to his unconscious mind, as in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." He chose every word of that title carefully, "intimations," "recollections," "early"--and remember those sounding Wordsworthian waters. The epiphany in the poem comes here: Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. The sound of waters signals Wordsworth's moment of access to his own childhood mind--really, as he believes, to his pre-infant mind. In such verse as this, the exceptional moment comes with an increase in sonority, with Milton perhaps nearby. It is about the early mind before, or a bit later than, birth that he writes. Not incidentally, we are present at the invention of the idea of childhood, as in the epigraph to this poem: The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. "Natural piety" has to do with early affections that become part of the self through the unconscious. A connection exists between Wordsworth's discovery of the unconscious, or the preconscious, mind and his valuing the humblest things, animals, flowers, lowly yet enduring human beings. For example, to consider one more very great poem, "Resolution and Independence" (1802): The poet, a sensitive man, experiences a fear he cannot name, an unconscious dread, that somehow has to do with poetic genius. We know that something major is in the offing: "There was a roaring in the wind all night; / The rain came heavily and fell in floods . . . " More water, more unconscious mind. But now it is the Shakespearean storm of disorder, not the reconnection with the sources of reassurance but the flooding of his mind with dread: I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Oh Him who walked with glory and in joy Behind his plough, upon the mountain side: We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. Thomas Chatterton legendarily died at 17, a suicide; Robert Burns also died young. The sixth line violates form and enacts the surge of irrational fear. Does such a fate await this poet? Renewed assurance comes from the unlikeliest source, an old man gathering medicinal leeches in a marsh, a man bent double, almost inanimate. This old man gives the highly civilized poet relief from his anxieties: Motionless as a Cloud the old man stood; That heareth not the loud winds when they call; And moveth altogether, if it moveth at all. That "motionless" cloud. Years ago, it must have been spring 1952 in his course on the Romantics at Columbia, Lionel Trilling began meditating on that cloud, wondering about it, and seeming unable to define his interest. I sat there increasingly irritated. Why did Wordsworth compare the old leech-gatherer to the cloud? Trilling marveled on--to no point that I could see. I now think the cloud represented to Wordsworth (and that Trilling sensed something like this) the actuality of Being that in Wordsworth pervades all things--humans, animals, plants. That is the point of its strange, its metaphoric, immobility. Wordsworth, indeed, used the word "being" in this doctrinal passage: 'Tis Nature's law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good--a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked. That is Wordsworth's doctrine. The poetry embodies the experience and the proof. If John Stuart Mill and other Victorians found Wordsworth to be a religious poet, they were correct to do so, and he was a "nature poet" only in a special sense. Very few descriptions of nature exist in his poetry, but there are, rather, reactions to nature, often scenes he remembers--from childhood?--that set up associations in his mind. He manifestly experiences nature as a gift, not man-made as is a city. I have never met an engineer or an architect who had much interest in actuality as a gift, as Being, which, as a gift, stands over against nothingness, and raises immediately the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Thus, Paul Tillich defined God as "the ground of Being." The term "pantheist" has been applied to Wordsworth, as if he were a follower of Spinoza. No, I think he was proto-Christian. Wordsworth knew nothing about the philosophy of Being, ontology. The Monologion and Proslogion of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) were certainly not included in the curriculum of Wordsworth's Cambridge. For the perception of Being in our own time, turn to Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead (2004) and a prose adequate to the perceptions. In a disarming moment recounted by Juliet Barker, one of Wordsworth's dons, mentioning his own lectures, advised Wordsworth not to bother attending them, they weren't worth much. Wordsworth apparently took his advice and had a mediocre record at Cambridge. Evidently not much had changed since Edward Gibbon's vacuous Oxford. Gibbon and Wordsworth did well anyway. Juliet Barker skillfully conducts us through his long careers from experimental poet to sage of Rydal Mount, which became a pilgrimage shrine, and at length to national icon named poet laureate by Queen Victoria. Of course, he could not complete his epic-length poem "The Prelude," about the history of his mind. He keeps making discoveries, has Proustian "spots of time." He began writing it in 1798, published an edition in 1805, another in 1850. He first recognizes his affinity with Burke in the later "Prelude." He probably was still making discoveries about his mind when he died at 80 in April 1850. Penguin has published a good parallel text of "The Prelude," his unfinishable poem about the activity of his mind, which, after all, was the most important thing about him, and to us all. Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: The National Review and Its Times.