Introduction.
It was recognised by Wordsworth's major contemporaries that he, whatever objections they might have to some of his opinions and achievements, was “the greatest, most inaugurative, and most representative poet of his time”; and that, as Leigh Hunt put it in 1814, Wordsworth “is the head of a great new age in poetry”. As early as 1800 Coleridge acclaimed Wordsworth as “a greater poet than any since Milton”.
Wordsworth makes the attempt to reconstruct his past self the focal point of his perhaps most important poetical work, The Prelude. Not the faithfulness of this reconstruction, but the re-enactment of the process of recollection and poetic creation are what Wordsworth wants to draw the reader's attention to.
In The Prelude, the imaginative process of becoming conscious of oneself means becoming conscious of what had previously been unconscious, which is the reason why nature and human nature play an important role in all of his poetry.
This paper is intended to show that although most critics call Wordsworth's poetry autobiographical, the term personal poetry is much more suitable. Furthermore, it is its task to depict the main constituents of the concept underlying his poetic work and the relevance of one of his main motifs, nature.
It will be the aim of this paper to show the development of his deeply felt love for nature and his changing attitude towards it with examples taken mainly from The Prelude.
Autobiographical vs. Personal Poetry.
The overwhelming majority of critics call Wordsworth's poetry, especially The Prelude, an autobiographical work, such as Standop and Mertner as well as Seeber. The latter describes The Prelude as self-portrayal and says that the poet himself is placed in the centre of attention as source of truth and as authentical person. Davies says in his biography of Wordsworth:
“This vast autobiographical poem, which was later called The Prelude, is the account of a man and his mind growing up. It is mainly about his schooldays and early manhood, and in it he recalls in great detail and with great emotion his early experiences and impressions.”
But for many reasons it seems necessary to distinguish autobiographical poetry from what may be called personal poetry and although Wordsworth himself called The Prelude an “autobiographical poem”, it is much more a testimony to the “growth of a poet's mind” as its subtitle suggests.
Gillies describes The Prelude as a very special autobiographical project that is “rivalled in complexity only by such famous fictional or nonfictional autobiographical ventures as Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries, Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy or Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.” In The Prelude, the narrator's consciousness and not the story of his life is the ultimate arena and guarantor of what is narrated.
If Wordsworth had constructed this poem as an autobiography, he would have included factual information about himself as a historical person in the first place. There are
many hints to what he experienced in the course of his life, but by no means do they constitute the main object of his great work of poetry. In fact, what the reader gets to know about Wordsworth life can only be called fragmentary.
Concerning this, it is a rather striking fact that nine out of fourteen books of The Prelude contain explicit references to either places or events that can be associated with his biography. Therefore, a reader might think that he only has to read these books in order to get sufficient information about the poet's personal background, but he'll realise soon that this is not the case. For instance, the first 280 lines of the poem “Childhood and School-time” (Book I) actually refer to the time between 1795 and 1798, namely his settling down at Racedown and the decision to compose The Prelude. Only after this introduction, Wordsworth turns to his childhood and some incidents of his school-time, which is continued in Book II. But there are passages referring to his childhood in most of the other books as well, e.g. he tells us in Book IV (lines 104-130) about a dog that used to be his companion when he was still a boy and Book V informs us about his early reading. Finally, the reader must turn to Book XIV to learn that he was taught endurance and independence in his school-days.
The strongest argument against a purely autobiographical reading of The Prelude is the choice of persons. If Wordsworth had intended to write this poem as a description of his life and circumstances, one would expect him to have included lots of information about his parents, brothers and sisters, friends and teachers, which is, indeed, not the case. Nothing satisfactory, in this respect, is to be found in The Prelude: he doesn't mention his father even once in the more than 7000 lines, his mother only once in Book V (lines 256-293), his sister and muse Dorothy three times ( Book VI lines 199-203, Book XI lines 335-357 and Book XIV lines 232-267), his wife once in Book XIV lines (266-275) and completely ignores his French mistress, Mlle Annette Vallon, who after all bore him a child and although he devotes three books to his residence in France. By contrast, he very often addresses his fellow-poet and personal friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom the poem is dedicated. On the other hand, Wordsworth describes in great detail some chance-acquaintances such as the maid of Buttermere (Book VII, lines 286-329), a mother and child he met at London (Book VIII, lines 333-399), the solitary soldier (Book IV, lines 387-469 and the boy of Winander (Book V, lines 364-392).
As for the events related in The Prelude, neither their choice nor their treatment meets the requirements of an autobiography. Quite a lot of the incidents he describes are not essential to his biography, whereas much more important events in his life are totally ignored. For instance, he dwells extensively on his first year at Cambridge (Book III), whereas he provides very little information about the years that followed.
So what functions do the autobiographical elements fulfil after all? Friederike and Erwin Reiner suggest that Wordsworth introduced autobiographical bits into the poem
“not for their own sake but with the intention of making them a vehicle for poetic ideas as well as in order to discuss what he thinks to have been the main stages (not of his earthly existence, but only) of the development of his mind.”
Wordsworth never attempted to present the whole of his personality at a certain period of his life, but tried to describe his poetic development in the different books of The Prelude. In order to achieve this, the chronology of the events is sacrificed to their arrangement according to their psychological impact, which serves as an explanation for minor information about his youth being scattered all over the poem.
What the author concentrated on in his perhaps most important poem were not personal data but the inner development of his poetic genius. It is this emphasis on intellectual and emotional realities that make it a highly personal work. The poet himself insists on the distinction between outward and inner realities with emphasis on the latter and he certainly intended The Prelude to be much more a work of personal poetry than a purely autobiographical poem which can be seen in the following statement:
“Of genius, power,
Creation and divinity itself
Have I been speaking, for my theme has been
What passed within me. Not of outward things
Done visibly for other minds, words, signs,
Symbols or actions, but of my own heart
Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind.”
(The Prelude III, ll.170-176)
Moreover, Wordsworth himself described his poetry in the preface to The Excursion as
“the history of the Author's mind” and not that of physical existence.
This inevitably leads to the question which function the “I” has in Wordsworth's poetry. It would be misleading to attribute the quality of personal poetry to all of his poems in which the first person singular appears. Only in a limited number of these poems does the “I” really unveil aspects of his personality, such as The Prelude, Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, and Nutting.
In the other poems, the pronoun might be described as aesthetical giving the poem a certain cohesion and personal centre. This is certainly true of The Excursion, in which the three protagonists, a wanderer, a solitary and a pastor, seem to represent different aspects of Wordsworth's own personality. Additionally, the aesthetic “I” is used to heighten the poem's “true-life appeal”:
“(...) if in The Thorn the poet represents himself as having seen the thornbush and as having heard its mournful complaints personally, the reader will be more inclined to believe the strange happenings related than if the legend were told in an objective and impersonal way.”
Wordsworth's Conception of Poetic Creation.
Wordsworth made very detailed statements about the function and the essence of poetry, which can mainly be found in three prose texts, namely the preface to the 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, in An Essay, Supplementary to the Preface and in the preface to the edition of Wordsworth's collected poems.
The Personality of the Poet and the Concept underlying Poetic Production.
Wordsworth states in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1802 that the poet is first of all “a man speaking to man” and he owns “nothing different in kind from men, only in degree”. The difference between the poet and ordinary man is explained when the former is characterised as being “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness”, and as having “a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind”. The poet's function is to express “the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men”. Wordsworth is thoroughly convinced that the poet's work is of great importance to society and mankind in general when he says
“He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love...; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time.”
This undoubtedly leads to the conviction that the poet has great responsibility for both individuals and society: he must support and give strength to the individual to preserve his personal identity and his dignity as a human being and to help these individuals to form a stable society.
The two friends Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't share the same opinion about poetic activity. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge states the differences between Wordsworth's plans concerning the underlying concept of the Lyrical Ballads they were about to produce together and his own:
“The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural;... For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life;... it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic;... Mr. Wordsworth,..., was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogues to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”
As can be seen from this statement, Wordsworth shall add a somewhat mystic and sublime element in every-day objects, whereas Coleridge wanted to give the fantastic an ordinary and real appearance. But these concepts, as different as they may seem, do indeed share their very basis: the romantic opinion that both the natural and the supernatural are part of one whole. What these two ambitious poets wanted to accomplish was the elevation of the natural world to a state of sublimity and to find the “Glanz des Immerwährenden im Gegenwärtigen” as well as presenting the inherent universal order within things. Thus, Wordsworth sees himself as teacher to his readers as he says in a letter to Sir George Beaumont:
“Every great poet is a teacher. I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing”,
and he furthermore says that
“The appropriate business of poetry... her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions.”
b.) The Gifts Necessary for the Creation of Poetry.
During all his career, Wordsworth wondered if he was altogether fit to be a poet, which can be seen in the following statement taken from The Prelude (Book I, lines 149-157):
“... I neither seem
To lack that first great gift, the vital soul,
Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort
Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers,
Subordinate helpers of the living mind:
Nor am I naked of external things,
Forms, images, nor numerous other aids
Of less regard, though won perhaps with toil
And needful for to build a Poet's praise.”
The “vital soul” is supposedly identical with what he calls “creative soul” or “creative sensibilities” in other passages of the text, “general truths” seem to stand for facts and ideas suitable to be the object of poetry, and the “external things” obviously stand for a poet's “technical tools”, such as rhythm, rhyme, imagery and so forth.
According to Wordsworth, six qualities are needed to produce poetry; qualities which might be regarded as different faculties of the “vital soul” and which he defined in the preface to the 1815 edition of The Prelude:
Observation and Description:
“...i.e. the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer, whether the things depicted be actually present to the senses, or have a place only in the memory.”
Sensibility:
“...the more exquisite it is, the wider will be the range of a poet's perceptions; and the more will he be incited to observe objects, both as they exist in themselves and as re-acted upon by his own mind.”
Reflection:
“...which makes the poet acquainted with the value of actions, images, thoughts, and feelings; and assists the sensibility in perceiving their connection with each other.”
Imagination and Fancy:
“...to modify, to create, and to associate.”
Invention:
“... by which characters are composed out of materials supplied by observation; (...) and such incidents and situations produced are most impressive to the imagination, and most fitted to do justice to the characters, sentiments, and passions, which the Poet undertakes to illustrate.”
Judgement:
“...to decide how and where, and in what degree, each of these faculties ought to be exerted.”
The Difficulties of Poetic Creation.
Wordsworth shows in his poetry the working of creative imagination with its insight and vision. This imagination was for him a potential gift to all human life, the task of poetry being to retain and strengthen it. He knew well that the production of poetry is a hard technical labour requiring many gifts that ordinary people do not have, as well as the imagination which is potential in all. King states that the reader is not aware of the labour but “only of the inevitability and the effortless power of the completed poem to deal imaginatively with its theme”. Being an optimist, Wordsworth was quite certain that he could fulfil the challenge of being a poet but from time to time he must admit in his work that poetic creation is a difficult task, e.g. in The Prelude I, lines 135-139:
“The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts.”
It is a matter of fact that a human mind cannot produce poetry at its best at all times, and this also includes a genius such as Wordsworth. There are many hints at his problems in writing, e.g. he suffered from “the toil of verse” (IV, 111), which meant to him “much pains and little progress” (IV, 112) and there where times when “imagination slept” (III, 257). In The Prelude I, lines 257-269 he describes the life of a poet as follows:
“Baffled and plagued by a mind that every hour
Turns recreant to her task; takes heart again,
Then feels immediately some hollow thought
Hang like an interdict upon her hopes.
This is my lot; for either still I find
Some imperfection in the chosen theme,
Or see of absolute accomplishment
Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself,
That I recoil and droop, and seek repose
In listlessness from plain perplexity,
Unprofitably travelling toward the grave,
Like a false steward who hath much received
And renders nothing back.”
The choice of subject-matter is also a great difficulty. Many a project is not carried out because it would throw too much of an “awful burden” (I, line 234) on the poet.
The history of his own self which Wordsworth tries to reconstruct transcends normal states of consciousness, but it also transcends his ability to fully reconstruct it through the double medium of memory of poetic fiction.
d.) The Object of Poetry.
So what is in fact worthy to be an object of poetry? The most “valuable object of writing”, Wordsworth says, is
“the great and universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature before me”.
Indeed, the two most important themes of his poetry are man and nature. But by no means did he want to limit the field of poetic work:
“The object of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find one atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.”
In another passage, he introduces a further argument :
“[The] object [of poetry] is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion.”
It is necessary to remember that Wordsworth put a poet's work on a new basis. As Altieri states in Enlarging the Temple, Romanticism changed the status of poetics. “Before Wordsworth and Coleridge”, he writes, “poetics was either a descriptive or normative procedure for dealing with practical aesthetic questions”, but they “insisted that poetics depends on philosophy”.
According to what Seeber says had the findings of Newton and Descartes the effect that the world became demystified because they interpreted it as a big “machine”. Therefore, myths and analogies could no longer serve as sources of knowledge, and thus Wordsworth tried to make the every-day knowledge in the hearts of ordinary people a starting-point of his poetry. Thus, poetics as he sees it, is the “organ” of an elementary knowledge in regard to man as feeling being:
“To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally directs his attention. [...] Poetry is the first and the last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”
And he furthermore says
“The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.”
Wordsworth understands himself as a prophet of truth, and this self-imposed moral imperative forbids him to produce any poetry that is of only local or temporary relevance. In this regard, Wordsworth agrees with Aristotle that every good poem must have a worthy purpose.
The poet himself becomes the centre as source of truth and as authentic person:
“Erkenntnis über sich selbst und andere bezieht das Ich aus dem Herzen, nicht aus der Vernunft. [...] In der expressiven Ausdruckskunst der Romantik verschiebt sich der Schwerpunkt des Interesses von der Machart des Werkes auf die Person des Dichters, dessen Sprache Menschen verbinden und der sich abzeichnenden Professionalisierung und Zersplitterung der Kultur entgegenwirken soll.”
e.) Wordsworth's Ideal Reader.
The process of reading is as important as the process of writing itself; even the best seed is obsolete if there is no fertile soil it can be planted into. It will rot, fade away and soon be forgotten as well as a poem that is not read in a way that could unfold the full impact of the objects it describes. It can be assumed that in Wordsworth's opinion the interchange between text and reader justified the author's existence. This would furthermore explain why he constantly revised and corrected his poetical work, e.g. he started to add and change passages of The Prelude right after its appearance in 1793.
The poem A Poet's Epitaph, first published in 1799, is about the reception of poetry. It is not enough if the poet carefully chooses the words in a poem but an attentive reader with an open mind is required to give life to the poet's speculations. A poetic text remains static and inanimate if the reader doesn't actively participate and those, who don't have a refined perceptive quality, only find the poet's contempt. The inability to love (“first learn to love one living thing”, l.3) and the analytic mind (“the keenness of that practised eye”, l.7) serve as examples for qualities that make it impossible for people to fully comprehend the impact of the objects being discussed in literary activity.
In the poem he names people who will not understand his way of thinking, namely doctors, physicians, moralists and intellectuals, whose souls ”can cling nor form, nor feeling, great or small” (ll. 29/30) and whose views “sleep in [...] intellectual crust” (l.34).
The ideal reader will, through his “quiet eye” (l.51) himself visualise the objects being described in poetry through the process of reading and find “random truths” (l.50) in “common things that round us lie” (l.49). Uta Reinicke says about the ideal reader:
“Wordsworths idealisierter Leser begegnet einem poetischen Text nicht mit der gelangweilten Schwerfälligkeit des Gelehrten [...], der lediglich die Bequemlichkeit sucht, [...] sondern scheint die in der Natur wirkende Harmonie im eigenen Erleben sogar noch zu übertreffen [...]. Die vermeintliche Schwäche eines solchen Lesers, dessen poetisches Gemüt ihn sensibel und aufnahmebereit für geheime Offenbarungen der Natur macht, erhebt ihn zum adäquaten Leser von Wordsworths Dichtung.”
If the reader is a “vital soul” (The Prelude I, l.161) like the poet himself, he can get a notion of the underlying structure of the world in all its facets and gain insight into the divine universality in which he finds comfort and reassurance.
Wordsworth's aim is to be a poet that can be understood by even the simplest human beings which is mirrored in the choice of persons in his poems, as well as in his use of language, as already been hinted at in the previous chapter.
In a comment on The Thorn in the 1800 edition of his Poetical Works he says about words and their function:
“Words, a Poet's words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling [...]. For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings.”
Only if the poet manages to touch people's hearts and make them see what he saw himself just as if they had been in his company when he observed the natural objects described in his poems, can the poet be a creator of “the faculties by a process of smoothness and delight” (The Prelude I, l.330).
The Motif of Nature in Wordsworth's Personal Poetry.
The Development of Wordsworth's Love for Nature.
Wordsworth's love for nature can be felt in practically all his poetical work: the first two books of The Prelude are almost totally devoted to the genesis of this love, and shorter remarks can be found in almost every other book of this epic as well as in many other poems.
The author distinguishes different stages of this development: already his childhood was spent in close contact with nature which becomes obvious in the following passage from The Prelude (I, ll.270-274), where he refers full of pride to the river Derwent in Cumberland where he was born:
“That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams...”
An interesting facet of his experience of the outdoors in those early years of his life was the feeling that nature was watching him and that invisible beings threatened to punish him when he did some boyish mischief. Thus, when stealing a bird that had been caught in a snare, he had the impression of steps pursuing him:
“I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathing coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.”
(The Prelude I, ll.322-325)
As he grew older, a change of attitude towards nature took place:
“[...] the adolescent Wordsworth felt that nature was a living presence pervading everything, and his originally rather superficial love of individual natural objects gradually gave way to deeper feelings.”
The poet himself describes this change as follows:
“Those incidental charms which first attached
My heart to rural objects, day by day
Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell
How nature, intervenient till this time
And secondary, now at length was sought
For her own sake”
(The Prelude I, ll. 447-452)
More and more, Wordsworth experienced an almost mystic communion with nature as such, whose individual phenomena and beauties only deepened his understanding and veneration of it. Too much company, however, made the poet long for solitude and it is very important to note that the “I” describing the objects in his poems, such as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, is alone.
Seeber writes in this respect:
“Bei Wordsworth [ist] der Augenblick des Glücks des mit sich selbst und der Natur übereinstimmenden Ichs die Wirkung eines Naturerlebnisses in der Einsamkeit einer gesellschaftsfernen Situation.[...] Das Gemüt des Dichters fühlt sich wie bei einer Bekehrung bereichert. [...] Die Einsamkeit des Beschauers [ist] die Voraussetzung der Offenheit und Empfänglichkeit des Herzens. Und schließlich: [...] In [...] poetischen Naturtexten [beansprucht] weniger die Natur als vielmehr das Erleben des Subjekts, der private Mensch, das ganze Interesse. Naturdichtung handelt nicht von der Natur, sondern von der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Natur.”
By and by, nature began to fulfil still another function in Wordsworth's life, that of solacing him and of providing to him a refuge from the loud and often unpoetical world around him. During his troubled Cambridge years, when he became fully conscious of his vocation for poetry, Wordsworth's aversion to social life and his need for solitary enjoyment and veneration of the wonders of nature grew even more pronounced, but it already showed in his school-days. Recalling how he used to go skating with his friends, he remarks in The Prelude I, ll. 447-449:
“Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng.”
Wordsworth emphasises natural laws and stresses the creative mind. Consequently, the poets are forced outside the society to find their models for authentic experience. Apart from being a haven to withdraw to from human society, nature was Wordsworth's elixir that enabled him to overcome many personal sorrows and disappointments. Thus, when England declared war on France and when he learned that the French had in turn
“... changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for”
(The Prelude XI, ll.207-209),
Wordsworth was so shocked that he almost lost belief in justice and reason and suffered from an intellectual and emotional breakdown, but, after his recovery, he undertook to establish on new principles the grounds of hope in high human possibilities. It was, in fact, apart from the care of his sister, the influence of nature that helped him out of this deep inner crisis as he tells the reader in The Prelude XI, ll. 350-357:
“... Nature's self,
By all varieties of human love
Assisted, led me back through opening day
To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught with peace,
Which, through the later sinkings of this cause,
Hath still upheld me, and upholds me now
In the catastrophe...”
The French Revolution, which he had known at first hand during two sojourns in France in 1790 and 1791-1792, played a very important role in Wordsworth's life. He saw the events in France through the perspective of biblical prophecy, and in The Prelude he records his early boundless hopes for France, his disillusion, dismay and horror. According to Jonathan Wordsworth, the purpose of The Prelude was to re-establish for himself and his readers hope, courage and a revised basis for civilised values in an age of profound cultural demoralisation.
Wordsworth as a Pupil of Nature.
When at a very early age, he began to love nature more or less unconsciously, it was above all on account of its beauty. Many years later, remembering what he experienced at the age of ten, the poet writes:
“I held unconscious intercourse with beauty
Old as creation, drinking in a pure
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters coloured by impending clouds”
(The Prelude I, ll. 562-566)
As an adult, when he had become more conscious of his feelings, he adored nature above all as his great teacher - “the fostering power that taught him how to read in the book of the universe.”
As already mentioned above, the young Wordsworth had the feeling that nature constantly observed and might even punish him for any misdeeds. But luckily, he refers to many more joyful events than fearful ones as the boat-stealing scene (The Prelude I, ll. 357-400, see below), e.g. in the following verses he praises nature for the reassurance and shelter it gave him:
“[...] oh, then, the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream!
Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus
Daily the common range of visible things
Grew dear to me.”
(The Prelude II, ll.170-177)
He actually turned to nature for advice and consolation and placed all his hope in earth and sky: “I called on both to teach me what they might” (The Prelude III, l.112).
Especially in the first three books of The Prelude, Wordsworth very often refers to nature as his teacher, and the lessons he is grateful for are not only aesthetic but also moral ones. In fact he ascribes to nature all his virtues, purity of heart, modesty of tastes, confidence in others etc., as can be seen in the following passage:
“If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours.”
(The Prelude II, ll.427-432)
Wordsworth's Animism of Nature.
Wordsworth conceived of nature as some personal power that had a favourable influence on his life. The idea that nature, as a living cosmic power, made him suffer intentionally for his misdeeds, is one aspect of his belief in nature's direct and personal interference with his life. One of the most remarkable scenes described in The Prelude has to do with such a punishing intervention: In the famous boat-stealing scene (The Prelude I, l.357-400), the reader is told how the poet as a young boy tried to cross a lake with a boat he had stolen on the shore. Suddenly, a huge peak appeared right in front of him and almost frightened him to death:
“And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.”
(The Prelude I, ll.381-385)
This frightful experience had a lasting effect on him. After having brought the boat back to where he had taken it from, all the pleasant images of nature disappeared from his mind and were replaced by dreadful visions that haunted him even in his dreams as described a few lines onwards:
“No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.”
(The Prelude I, ll.395-400)
This experience made the young poet believe that even those parts in nature which are usually considered inanimate, had a mysterious life of their own. He speaks of mysterious “Presences of Nature in the Sky/ And on the earth” (The Prelude I, ll. 464/ 465) and of the “Souls of lonely places” (I, l. 466). He was utterly convinced that everything in nature was animated. Life is everywhere, even in still and silent nature. Charles Lamb, who knew Wordsworth personally, remarked in a review on The Excursion in Quarterly Review in 1814: “In his poetry nothing in Nature is dead. Nature is synonymous with life”, and Wordsworth himself says about his poetic conception:
“To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
(The Prelude III, ll.127-132).
The boat-stealing scene already mentioned above is immediately followed by these famous lines where he speaks about the “Spirit of the universe”:
“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul.”
(The Prelude I, ll.401-407).
It is very likely that this spirit he refers to is the same as what he calls the “Soul of Nature” in The Prelude XII, l.93. Whenever Wordsworth mentions this cosmic power, he does this with great thankfulness for the influence it had on him during all his life. Unfortunately, he doesn't give the reader more information about this but Friederike and Erwin Reiner conclude that these terms might have had some religious value for the poet. Thus, his fundamental religious attitude would be that of pantheism but even in his most personal poetry not enough statements can be found to speculate on his religious faith.
The poet's fancy becomes even more whimsical when he attributes to inanimate objects or phenomena human or animal characteristics and even character traits which makes the reader protest against such a “travesty” as Barstow calls it.
Wordsworth's Mystic Experience of Nature.
But what Wordsworth does believe in is this all-embodying, universal power, that
Melvin Rader calls “the organic interrelatedness of things”, and this concept finds a
parallel in the tradition of mystic experience.
The experience of gaining insight into this power allows the poet to speculate on a great being that combines all elements of nature to a harmonic whole:
“Eine annähernde Beschreibung einer solchen ahnungsvoll erspürten Gegenwart jener unsichtbaren Macht wird allein durch eine Benennung von Naturphänomenen möglich, die das Unnennbare [...] zu beherbergen scheinen und zugleich davon belebt wird. [...] Eine Annäherung an das Unsagbare geschieht im Naturerleben des Menschen. Bezeichnend ist, daß der Mensch gleichsam wie ein Naturphänomen [...] aufgefaßt wird. Er ist als ein Teil eines Ganzen in einen unbegreiflichen Gesamtzusammenhang eingegliedert. Zum Mittler für eine derartige Wahrnehmung wird die besondere Gestimmtheit des Gemüts.”
Thus, it can be said that an element of mysticism is an essential ingredient of Wordsworth's relationship to nature. As it was a highly personal experience of the poet, the mystic union into which he was able to enter with the soul of nature cannot be explained, neither in abstract nor in realistic terms. But the most impressive expression of this kind is found in Tintern Abbey, where Wordsworth describes the “strange mood of unearthly happiness” into which the remembrance of the banks of the Wye transported him:
“that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all his unintelligible world,
Is lightened: - that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
(Tintern Abbey, ll.37-49).
This passage describes an extraordinary state of body and mind: vital bodily functions such as breathing and blood-circulation almost come to a standstill, while feeling and insight are heightened. The poet reaches spiritual regions that seem to be inaccessible to ordinary people in an intention that almost leads to a loss of consciousness. Only if the poet's whole personality becomes a “vital soul” (The Prelude I, l.161), can he enter that visionary state of mind which leads to a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which then allows him, as already quoted above, to “see into the life of things”.
It becomes quite clear in the following passage, describing an incident wandering around a lake, that the senses played almost no part in the kind of ecstasy which overcame the poet but that it was in fact a matter of feeling and spiritual movement,
“Of that external scene which round me lay,
Little, in this abstraction, did I see;
Remembered less; but I had inward hopes
And swellings of the spirit, was rapt and soothed,
Conversed with promises, had glimmering views
How life pervades the undecaying mind.
(The Prelude IV, ll.160-165),
and some further lines about the same incident describe the phenomenon that the poet's mystic union with nature was accompanied by a momentary enormous increase in vital energy that leads to infinite well-being:
“... a comfort seemed to touch
A heart that had not been disconsolate;
Strength came where weakness was not known to be,
At least not felt; and restoration came
Like an intruder knocking at the door
Of unacknowledged weariness.”
(The Prelude IV, ll.153-158)
Conclusion.
What this paper has tried to show is how personal most of Wordsworth's poetry is and that although he himself called The Prelude an “autobiographical poem”, the term personal poetry seems to be more suitable. The poems discussed have permitted to trace the different stages of the development of his mind as poet; his happy childhood spent in close contact with nature, his time at Cambridge, where he became fully conscious of his vocation, the serious moral crisis he suffered from the failure of the French Revolution in which he put all his hopes and finally the poets recovery due to the help and positive influence of both his sister and muse Dorothy as well as nature itself.
All these stages of the growth and development of his poetic genius are reflected in his literary work and most prominently in The Prelude, in which, as the author himself said:
“...the discipline
And consummation of a Poet's mind,
In everything that stood most prominent,
Have faithfully been pictured...”
(The Prelude XIV, ll. 303-306).
It was Wordsworth's aim as poet to seek for beauty in nature in all its shapes, and to interpret this beauty in spiritual terms. It is fascinating for the modern reader how close his contact to nature was and that he even went so far as to attribute human characteristics to supposedly inanimate objects.
It has been shown that Wordsworth wanted to re-establish for himself and for his readers hope, courage and a revised basis for a society in times of horror and dismay when he decided to compose The Prelude. It is this intention and his picture of himself as a teacher of mankind that makes his poetic work so appealing and interesting to readers even in our times. We too live in such times of catastrophe and social decay, naming the destruction of the ozone layer and pollution in general, the extinction of animal wildlife, mass unemployment, violation of human rights in dictatorships all over the world, the spreading of lethal epidemics like AIDS and cholera, famines in the third world regions and the dangerous potential in the former Soviet Union as just a few examples.
Bibliography.
Altieri, Charles, Enlarging the Temple, London: The Athlone Press, 1979.
Davies, Hunter, William Wordsworth. A Biography. Guernsey: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1997.
de Selincourt, Ernest (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Oxford: UP, 1937, vol. 1.
de Selincourt, Ernest, (ed.), Wordsworth, William. The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind, Oxford: UP, 1933, rev. 1985.
Engell, James and W.J. Bate (ed.), Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, Princeton: UP, 1983,. In: Erzgräber, Willi und Paul Goetsch (ed.), Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 63, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1994.
Gillies, Stephen Thomas, Poetic Discourse and Self-enactment. A Study of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's New Mode of Poetic Discourse. Microreproduktion e.Ms., 255 Bl., Konstanz: Univ., Diss., 1989.
Hutchinson, Thomas (ed.), Wordsworth. Poetical Works. With Introduction and Notes. A New Edition, revised by Ernest de Selincourt, Oxford: UP, 1946.
Knight, William (ed.), Wordswortiana, London: Macmillan, 1889.
Maxwell, J.C. (ed.), William Wordsworth. The Prelude. A Parallel Text. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1971.
Rader, Melvin, Wordsworth. A Philosophical Approach, Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.
Reiner, Friederike und Erwin, Wordsworth's Personal Poetry. In: Schriftenreihe der Zeitschrift Moderne Sprachen des Verbandes der österreichischen Neuphilologen. Heft 43. Wien: TVÖ 1995.
Reinicke, Uta, The Vital Soul. Naturerleben als kreative Weltbegegnung bei William Wordsworth. In: Erzgräber, Willi und Paul Goetsch, (ed.), Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 62, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1994.
Seeber, Hans-Ulrich (ed.), Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 21993.
Standop, Ewald and Edgar Mertner, Englische Literaturgeschichte. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 21971.
Wordsworth, Jonathan, Michael C. Jaye and Robert Woof (ed.), Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers, 1987.
Cf. M.H. Abrams in: Wordsworth, Jonathan et. al. (ed.), Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers, 1987, p. VII.
Ibid, p. VII.
Ibid, p. VII.
Standop, Ewald and Edgar Mertner, Englische Literaturgeschichte. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 21971, p. 408.
Seeber, Hans Ulrich (ed.), Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 21993, p. 228.
Davies,Hunter, William Wordsworth. A Biography. Guernsey: Sutton Publishing Ltd. 1997, p. 1.
Gillies, Stephen Thomas, Poetic Discourse and Self-enactment. Microreprod., Konstanz: Univ.1989, p.86/87.
See Reiner, Friederike und Erwin, Wordsworth's Personal Poetry. Schriftenreihe der Zeitschrift Moderne Sprachen des Verbandes der österreichischen Neuphilologen. Heft 43. Wien:TVÖ 1995, p.13.
Ibid, p. 14.
It is noteworthy in this regard that the phenomenon of love between man and woman is practically absent from his work. Very little information concerning the poet's attitude towards love can be found in the Lucy-poems. It is possible that he thought that the problem of love was too intimate and exclusively personal, so that he was reserved about them out of discretion.
Ibid, p. 16.
Ibid, p. 26.
This collection of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge was first published in 1798. Wordsworth's famous “Preface” appeared in the second edition (1800) and was considerably revised for the third edition (1802).
All quotations in this section, unless otherwise stated, are taken from the edition of 1802, see previous footnote.
Engell, James and W.J. Bate (ed.), Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, Princeton UP: 1983, chapter XIV, p. 6f in: Coburn, Kathleen and Bart Winer (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Princeton UP: 1971, vol. VII.
Reinicke, Uta, The Vital Soul. Naturerleben als kreative Weltbegegnung bei William Wordsworth. In: Erzgräber, Willi und Paul Goetsch (ed.), Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 63, Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1994, S.263.
de Selincourt, Ernest (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Oxford: UP, 1937, vol. 1, p. 170.
Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815), in: Hutchinson, Thomas (ed.), Wordsworth. Poetical Works. With Introductions and Notes. Oxford, 1904, p. 743.
For “creative soul” see Book XII, line 207 and for “creative sensibilities” Book II, line 360.
See Reiner, p. 10.
King, Alec, Wordsworth and the Artist's Vision. An Essay in Interpretation. London: The Athlone Press, 1966, p. 10.
See Gillies, p. 86.
Cf. footnote 14.
Altieri, Charles, Enlarging the Temple. London: Associated University Presses, p. 30.
Seeber, p. 236-267
Cf. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
Hutchinson, Thomas (ed.), Wordsworth. Poetical Works. With Introductions and Notes. Oxford: 1904, p. 734.
Seeber, p. 228.
Reinicke, p. 285/286.
Reiner, p.30.
Seeber, p. 229.
Cf. The Prelude IV, ll. 333-338.
Cf. The Prelude III, ll. 90-111.
Cf. Altieri, p. 39.
Cf. Wordsworth, Jonathan et al., p. X.
Reiner, p.44.
Knight, William (ed.), Wordsworthiana, London: Macmillan, 1889, p.246.
Reiner, p.37.
See http://www.ph-erfurt.de/~neumann/intro/rhetor2.html
See Barstow, Marjorie Latta, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction, Oxford: UP, 1917, p. 101.
Rader, Melvin, Wordsworth. A Philosophical Approach, Oxford: Clarendon, 1967, p.189.
See entry on mysticism in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Havens, vol. 1, p.178.
Reinicke, p.203.
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