William Wordsworth
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No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Wordsworth / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm — (Bloom’s moden critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9318-2 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. PR5881.W46 2006 821’.7—dc22 2006025337 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Cover photo © The Granger Collection, New York Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Two Roads to Wordsworth 11 M.H. Abrams The Scene of Instruction: “Tintern Abbey” 23 Harold Bloom The Prelude and the Love of Man 47 Frances Ferguson Wordsworth’s Severe Intimations 67 Paul H. Fry Wordsworth and the Defile of the Word 89 Thomas Weiskel “Was it for this...?”: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods 131 Geoffrey Hartman From Wordsworth to Emerson 147 David Bromwich vi Contents “While We Were Schoolboys”: Hawkshead Education and Reading 163 Kenneth R. Johnston William Wordsworth, The Prelude 191 Jonathan Wordsworth Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins 207 Dennis Taylor The Excursion: Dramatic Composition, Dramatic Definition 225 Sally Bushell Chronology 245 Contributors 255 Bibliography 259 Acknowledgments 267 Index 269 Editor’s Note My introduction centers upon Wordsworth’s exaltation of the natural man, particularly in the sublime poignance of “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” M.H. Abrams, dean of Romantic scholar-critics, contrasts the two traditions of Wordsworth criticism, Matthew Arnold’s “Poet of Nature” and A.C. Bradley’s Hegelian sense of Wordsworthian Sublimity. My interpretation of “Tintern Abbey” explores the poem’s triumph over its own myth of memory, while Frances Ferguson subtly finds implicit in The Prelude a poetically enabling “extensive chain of affections.” The “Intimations of Immortality” Ode is seen by Paul H. Fry as mediating between the Simple Wordsworth (Arnoldian) and the Sublime Wordsworth (Bradleyan). Thomas Weiskel provides an appropriate Romantic Sublime exegesis of The Prelude’s Simplon Pass passage in Book 6, after which Geoffrey Hartman, luminary of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism, demonstrates the alliance between radical inwardness and expressionistic power in The Prelude. The affinity between Wordsworth and Emerson, despite their different visions of the self, is analyzed by David Bromwich, while Kenneth Johnston examines early poetic influences upon the young Wordsworth. Something of the complex differences between the separate versions of The Prelude is given by Jonathan Wordsworth, after which Dennis Taylor argues for a Catholic element in Wordsworth’s achievement. In this volume’s final essay, Sally Bushell traces connections between Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers and his long narrative poem The Excursion. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction There is a human loneliness, A part of space and solitude, In which knowledge cannot be denied. In which nothing of knowledge fails, The luminous companion, the hand, The fortifying arm, the profound Response, the completely answering voice.... —Wallace Stevens The Prelude was to be only the antechapel to the Gothic church of The Recluse, but the poet Wordsworth knew better than the man, and The Prelude is a complete and climactic work. The key to The Prelude as an internalized epic written in creative competition to Milton is to be found in those lines (754–860) of the Recluse fragment that Wordsworth prefaced to The Excursion (1814). Wordsworth’s invocation, like Blake’s to the Daughters of Beulah in his epic Milton, is a deliberate address to powers higher than those that inspired Paradise Lost: Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such 1 2 Harold Bloom Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven! For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. The shadowy ground, the depths beneath, and the heights aloft are all in the mind of man, and Milton’s heaven is only a veil, separating an allegorical unreality from the human paradise of the happiest and best regions of a poet’s mind. Awe of the personal Godhead fades before the poet’s reverence for his own imaginative powers: All strength—all terror, single or in bands, That ever was put forth in personal form— Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones— I pass them unalarmed. Blake, more ultimately unorthodox than Wordsworth as he was, had yet too strong a sense of the Bible’s power to accept this dismissal of Jehovah. After reading this passage, he remarked sardonically: Solomon, when he Married Pharaoh’s daughter & became a Convert to the Heathen Mythology, talked exactly in this way of Jehovah as a Very inferior object of Man’s Contemplations; he also passed him by unalarm’d & was permitted. Jehovah dropped a tear & follow’d him by his Spirit into the Abstract Void; it is called the Divine Mercy. To marry Pharaoh’s daughter is to marry Nature, the Goddess of the Heathen Mythology, and indeed Wordsworth will go on to speak of a marriage between the Mind of Man and the goodly universe of Nature. Wordsworth is permitted his effrontery, as Solomon the Wise was before him, and, like Solomon, Wordsworth wanders into the Ulro or Abstract Void of general reasoning from Nature, pursued by the ambiguous pity of the Divine Mercy. But this (though powerful) is a dark view to take of Wordsworth’s reciprocal dealings with Nature. Courageously but calmly Wordsworth puts himself forward as a renovated spirit, a new Adam upon whom fear and awe fall as he looks into his own Mind, the Mind of Man. As befits a new Adam, a new world with a greater beauty waits upon his steps. The most defiant humanism in Wordsworth salutes the immediate possibility of this earthly paradise naturalizing itself in the here and now: Introduction 3 Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. No words are more honorific for Wordsworth than “simple” and “common.” The marriage metaphor here has the same Hebraic sources as Blake had for his Beulah, or “married land.” The true Eden is the child of the common day, when that day dawns upon the great consummation of the reciprocal passion of Man and Nature.