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University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright By This dissertation has been, microfihned exactly as received 67rll,476 MCGHEE, Richard Dennis, 1940- CONVERSANT WITH INFINITY: A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH'S LATER POETRY. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D,, 1967 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by RICHARD DENNIS MCGHEE 1967 THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA (BADUATE COLLEGE CONVERSANT WITH INFINITY: A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH'S LATER POETRY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO IHE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY RICHARD DENNIS MCGHEE Norman, Oklahoma 1967 Conversant w i t h i n f i n i t y : a study of WORDSWORTH'S LATER POETRY APPROVED JBY, —T --- DISSERTATION COMMITTEE For DENNIS BUSH7HEAD MCGHEE and JOHN SAMHEL CATES TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter • Tage I. INTRODUCTION............................... I II. LAODAKLA: POEM OF SACR I F I C E ................................ 29 III. VERNAL ODE: POEM OF APOCALYPSE ............................ 74 IV. THE RIVER DUDDON: POEM OF PILGRIMAGE................ 122 V. CONCLUSION....................................................223 NOTES ............................................................. 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................... 262 111 CONVERSANT WITH INFINITY; A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH'S LATER POETRY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Towards a More Generous Criticism If there is any poetry in English literature which has suffered at the hands of critics, without at the same time having been closely examined or perhaps even read, it is the "later" poetry of William Wordsworth. It may be that one's evaluation of its merits will not be substantially changed after examining Wordsworth's later poetry, but it is certain that one's understanding of the reasons for his evaluation will be greatly improved— "greatly," because any understanding is infinitely different from no under­ standing. Most of the commentators on Wordsworth's poetry have marked a "falling off" or "decline" in his poetic career (although they may vary as to the time when it occurred), and most of them have deplored that decline; however, there are two qualifications to this statement which need to be made: few, if any, of the critics who dismiss Wordsworth's later poetry as of little value or merit are either explicit about the particular de­ merits of the poetry (although they are loud and voluble in pointing out the demerits of Wordsworth's physiological condition, domestic habits, poli­ tical and religious affiliations) or about the particular qualities of in­ dividual poems ; yet, there have been a few courageous readers of Wordsworth's later poetry who have (sometimes surprisingly to themselves) discovered valuable qualities in particular poems written during his "universally acknowledged" period of decline. 1 2 We may find in Matthew Arnold's essay on Wordsworth in 1879 the note which will be repeatedly sounded by critics and readers who follow him: Wordsworth composed verses during a space of some sixty years; and it is no exaggeration to say that within one single decade of those years, between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first-rate work was produced. A mass of inferior work remains, work done before and after this golden prime, imbed­ ding the first-rate work and clogging it, obstructing our ap­ proach to it, chilling, not unfrequently, the high-wrought mood with which we leave it. To be recognized far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him. Arnold set out to relieve Wordsworth "of a great deal of the poetical bag­ gage" which seemed to him to clog his approach to Wordsworth's "really first- rate work." Arnold did his job so well that readers now find themselves unable to get beyond Arnold's choices and discover for themselves what Arnold thought was second-rate poetry. By looking briefly at the comments of several influential critics who have passed judgment on Wordsworth's poetry, we may discover how widespread is the conviction that there was not only a change in Wordsworth's poetic career but that there was in fact a decline or even decay. In such influen­ tial works as literary histories ("influential" in the sense that they are very often the sources for students looking for guides to taste), we find such comments as this by George Sampson: The long remaining years of his career (1814-1850) added little to his best verse. The days of full, spontaneous creation were over.2 Or we find Samuel C. Chew devoting only one paragraph out of a thirteen page essay to what he calls Wordsworth's "Last Phase." This paragraph covers all the poetry Wordsworth composed or published between 1820 to the end of his life.^ 3 Basil Willey, making every effort to find something worthwhile in Wordsworth's later career, comments that "Men cannot live by gleams alone, and though Wordsworth may have been a worse poet as he grew older, it has been argued (by a Dean, it is true) that he was a better 'man.' And, turning from an historian of ideas who tries to be sympathetic to a "new critic" who finds it very hard to be sympathetic to much of the poetry he finds in any of Wordsworth's career, we read in F.R. Leavis's "revaluation" of Wordsworth's achievement that as early as 1805, with the "Ode to Duty," Wordsworth's earlier powers of "fine and sensitive organization" had ceased to inform and control his pen.^ If we go to a long study which has some claims to being a kind of guide for students of Wordsworth's poetry, we will find that there is hardly any mention of his career after 1814; Carl Woodring tells us in his book on Wordsworth that "common agreement makes 'Laodamia,' composed at Rydal Mount in 1814, Wordsworth's last major poem."^ Now, even though Woodring allows the adjectival "major" in his description, he does not allow much mention of the poetry which follows. The conclusion which will be drawn by students who follow Woodring's guide is that there is no need to go any further in their examination of Wordsworth's poetry, since it is only minor in rela­ tion to his earlier poetry; yet these same students will read the verse of Samuel Daniel, Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley, John Pomfret, Matthew Prior, and so forth. If such a detailed study as Woodring's, which focuses only on Wordsworth, can relegate to the shades the later poetry of Wordsworth, we may imagine what a general study of nineteenth-century English and European culture will do with it; Morse Peckham, usually sympathetic to Wordsworth's achievement, dismisses his later poetry with the old cliches: ......... The high tide of his vision receded after 1805 and he regressed to embracing more commonplace orientative drives, became Christian and timid. 7 Nearly all of the cOTmentators whom I have mentioned thus far have merely assumed a kind of decline in Wordsworth's poetic career. There are others who not only assume a decline but also attempt to find reasons for that decline and castigate the poet for what seem to them to be various kinds of "betrayals," of nature or art or humanity or^ self or whatever, depending upon their particular prejudices. We may begin with that idol- breaker, Aldous Huxley, and his notorious essay on "Wordsworth in the Tropics," In this essay we find Huxley using Wordsworth as his whipping- boy for criticizing contemporary society's "soft" and "unreal" attitude toward nature: . Less openly, Wordsworth asks us to make the same falsi­ fication of immediate experience. It is only very occasionally that he admits the existence in the world around him of those "unknown modes of being" of which our immediate intuitions of things make us so disquietingly aware. Normally what he does is to pump the dangerous Unknown out of Nature and refill the emptied forms of hills and woods, flowers and waters, with something more reassuringly familiar— with humanity, with Anglicanism. 8 Huxley thus seems to be condemning all of Wordsworth's poetry in terms of what he determines to be a false notion of reality, especially prominent in Wordsworth's religious beliefs in his later career. But it is very'diffi­ cult to take seriously Huxley's criticism of Wordsworth (although, of course, we may take seriously the main point of his essay--that there are vast Unknowns in man's environment), especially when we notice such charged language as "less openly," "falsification," "admits," "pump" and "refill," and the purring irony of such phrases as "with humanity, with Anglicanism." It is this kind of criticism which not only contributes to a general 5 disregard of Wordsworth but which encourages a widespread deracination and withering of our cultural roots. Herbert Read, unlike Huxley, finds much of Wordsworth's poetry interest­ ing and important. But he feels it necessary to apologize for much other of Wordsworth's poetry by means of a psychological formula that makes Wordsworth into something of a schizoid: By way of baldly announcing my theme, I might say that these two Wordsworths were Man and Mask~not Youth and Age, not Energy and Decay, but rather Reality and Myth.^ In his efforts to explain Wordsworth* s uneven achievement in poetry. Read resorts to his theory that there is "an horizontal rift in character"; how­ ever, he assumes as obvious that there was a "vertical division in time" between Wordsworth's earlier and later career: . In the obvious sense there was the Wordsworth of the poems published in 1807; there was the Wordsworth who lived for another forty-three years, forty-three years devoid of poetic vitality, but filled with another activity which is that of the mind seeking compensations for its defunct emo­ tions.
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