If we are to read Wordsworth at all it must be in bulk, for the best effects in The Prelude (1805, 9253 lines; 1850, 7878 lines) and The Excursion (1814, 8850 lines) depend upon lengthy preparation. If we want to read about Wordsworth’s life, it is because he wrote some poems which we value, not for the sake of the life alone, which was often unexciting. Stephen Gill, in his admirable William Wordsworth: A Life (1990), understood this: Juliet Barker, in Wordsworth: A Life, does not. Gill curtailed details of Wordsworth’s domestic life in order to focus on how his poems came to be written, revised, printed, and received; Barker cites the poems to provide background to her narrative.
Barker’s book first appeared in the U.K. as long ago as 2000 in a text 275 pages longer than this version—which, in turn, came out in 2001 but only now appears in the U.S. The notes and bibliography have also been cut. The abridgment has been made clumsily in places, leading to an unpleasantly hiccupy feeling, but it was a necessary task, since the original was prolix. I have carried out enough page-by-page comparison to feel confident that little of importance has been lost. The blurb trumpets Barker’s use of unpublished sources; these seem to boil down to travel diaries kept by Wordsworth’s wife Mary in 1820 and by his daughter Dora in 1828, but the revised version makes even less use of them than the original. The same applies to some letters that Wordsworth wrote to Mary in 1810 and 1812. Gill, oddly, ignored them, although they have been in print since 1982, and are important in giving an unexpected glimpse of Wordsworth’s passionate, even erotic, feelings for his wife—quite at odds with his staid image.
Here and there Barker advances new interpretations, notably the speculation that Captain John Wordsworth, the poet’s much-loved brother who went down with his ship in 1805, was in love with Mary before she married William. No letters from her to him survive, and those which survive from him to her “at first glance may not seem like love letters,” as Barker admits, for the good reason that they probably aren’t. Like other biographers, Barker rejects Coleridge’s scurrilous suggestion (the product of drink, drugs, and disappointment in old age) that William and his sister Dorothy were lovers. Even the normally cautious Gill says their relationship was “unquestionably, profoundly sexual,” but without making clear whether he thinks it was also physical. Barker, however, not surprisingly, finds “oddly repellent” the spooky episode in which Dorothy slept wearing her brother’s wedding ring the night before his marriage, and in which he momentarily slipped it onto her finger again when she returned it to him in the morning. Yet, having shown good sense in dismissing the possibility of incest, Barker then, quite unwarrantably, reads a passage from Thomas de Quincey, accusing Dorothy of want of femininity, as implying that she was a lesbian.
Nor has Barker anything fresh to add about Wordsworth’s French mistress in the 1790s, Annette Vallon, and their illegitimate daughter Caroline. Indeed, she misreads, and so mistranslates, part of Annette’s only surviving letter to Wordsworth; this is a small slip (“à Dieu” instead of “adieu”), but it still needs correcting. Wordsworth behaved very honorably about this affair; many of his circle knew of it in his lifetime, and it was only hushed up after his death at his widow’s insistence, not being made public until the early 1920s. It casts an interesting light on the narratives of forsaken women and illegitimate offspring which recur in his poetry, and may have colored the tale of Vaudracour and Julia in Book IX of the 1805 text of The Prelude.
These moments of sexual frisson apart, Barker supplies very much the familiar story: Wordsworth’s untrammelled childhood, his animistic identification with the natural world, his orphan state and prolonged separation from Dorothy (their later obsessive closeness is probably due to this), his disappointment with the pedantries of Cambridge and unease at the dissipation of London, his early welcome of, and swift disillusionment with, the French Revolution, his revelatory meeting with Coleridge and their joint poetic revolution in Lyrical Ballads (1798), the long succession of publications and their almost unvaryingly hostile critical reception, the transformation of young Radical into old Tory, the Laureateship, the final years of fame and adulation from tourists, the death—fittingly on St. George’s Day, the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death—so peaceful that the cuckoo-clock was heard announcing noon as he breathed his last. A reader new to Wordsworth’s life story will learn about everything except what really matters: the poetry.
Barker has a fatal incapacity for literary insight or appreciation. She recycles a list of banal adjectives—“beautiful,” “wonderful,” “exquisite,” “lovely,” “poignant”—virtually interchangeably. Her only comment on the celebrated boat-stealing episode in Book I of The Prelude is, “No doubt the Cooksons would have had much to say about their nephew’s theft of the boat and nocturnal ramblings.” Not a word about why Wordsworth considered this one of the formative experiences of his moral development, or how he makes us feel that in the texture of his writing! “Tintern Abbey” is hailed as “a mission statement by a mature and accomplished poet, confident in and at the height of his powers”; the “Immortality Ode” is, “quite simply, the greatest [ode? poem?] William ever wrote … it is emphatically the philosopher-poet speaking.” None of her responses rises above this level of schoolgirl gush. The contrast with Gill could not be greater.
To be sure, in calling Wordsworth a “philosopher-poet,” Barker raises—only to beg —a major question. “I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing,” Wordsworth declared. Many nowadays choose the latter option, yet well into the twentieth century he was revered as a source of spiritual wisdom. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote Keats, with Wordsworth in mind—Keats, who once attempted to comment on something Wordsworth was saying, only to be told icily by Mary, “Mr. Wordsworth is never interrupted.” Wordsworth had not one, but many, designs, but what do they add up to?
“We shall never do him justice,” Matthew Arnold felt, “until we dismiss his formal philosophy.” Early twentieth-century criticism, led by Empson and Leavis, tended to agree, while Stephen Gill, no half-hearted admirer, justly urges that “Trying to identify a single ‘philosophy’ in Wordsworth’s poetry by tracing its language to an original philosophical source is useless.” Still, if Wordsworth had no philosophy, he undoubtedly had ideas, which he intentionally embodied in his poems and expounded in the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Juliet Barker is disdainful of this document, calling it “extraordinarily dense and obscure,” and, again, “verbose and otiose.” If for nothing else, it would be remarkable for Wordsworth’s diagnosis of why poetry had to fight for a reading public in his day: the expansion of news media gratifying a mindless sensationalism in a populace herded into cities. How much more is this so now!
On other grounds, however, the preface contains some fundamental formulations for understanding Wordsworth, which have become so trite that we have ceased to think about them. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” This is no empty phrase, but a major principle of moral as well as aesthetic judgment. “Mild,” “calm,” “quiet,” “gentle,” and “modest” are key words in the Wordsworthian vocabulary, and are forceful, not bland. Wordsworth’s poetry is vividly aware of the strains and shocks to the human system—hunger, poverty, neglect, illness, age, and bereavement. To survive these with a tranquil mind and an unembittered heart is no mean achievement. In The Excursion, which, during Wordsworth’s lifetime, was the long poem by which he was known (since the revised text of The Prelude appeared after his death in 1850, and the original 1805 text was unpublished until 1926), various aspects of his own character are represented by the Poet, the Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor, as they engage in metaphysical debate. Barker rightly says that the poem “improves out of all proportion to the initial struggle,” and quotes the Wanderer’s answer to the Solitary’s pessimism as a crystallization of Wordsworth’s own outlook:
One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists—one only: an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe’er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power;
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.
This might have been good enough for most people in 1814, but it will hardly satisfy in 2005. It is saved from glibness only by our awareness that Wordsworth had suffered repeated grief, and was to suffer more: the deaths of his children Catherine (aged four) and Thomas (aged six)—both in one year—then of his daughter Dora in 1847 at the age of forty-three, and the virtual death of Dorothy after 1835 through what we know now as Alzheimer’s disease.
Wordsworth’s religion, like his philosophy, remains puzzling, but an important clue lies in his anger at being accused of encouraging Deism in The Excursion. He detested talk of God as “maker,” saying the aim of the poem was “to reduce the calculating understanding to its proper level among the human faculties.” In part this anticipates Dickens’s purposes in Hard Times, but it has wider significance. Wordsworth repeatedly deplored over-analysis of what to him was an organic universe, whether physical or mental. In the 1805 Prelude he had declared that it was impossible to “parcel out” the hu- man mind “by geometric rules” hailing Coleridge (wrongly, with hindsight) as someone who was above “that false secondary power, by which/ In weakness we create distinctions,” being instead one to whom “the unity of all has been revealed.” For Wordsworth, as for Plato, all knowledge is ultimately one: “I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.” In later sections of the poem there are jibes at “analytic industry” whose embodiment is a prematurely aged being walking a path “choked with grammars,” and at Cambridge as the domain of “languages that want the living voice” mistaking “words for things.” By contrast Wordsworth depicts himself as drawn to synthesis,
eager to combine
In one appearance, all the elements
And parts of the same object, else detached
And loath to coalesce.
When a boy, Barker tells us, Wordsworth “could not conceive of external things having a separate existence from himself.” This is no more than literal truth, as Wordsworth confirmed in old age: “Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.” In The Prelude he writes: “To unorganic natures I transferred/ My own enjoyments,” and “To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,/ Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,/ I gave a moral life.” The loss of this visionary sense as he grew older was the loss of membership of the organic universe. Wordsworth did not take easily to the realization that his life was bounded. He was Plato to Coleridge’s Aristotle.
To contemporaries such as Hazlitt or Jeffery, this was Wordsworth’s chief defect, a solipsism bordering upon egomania. Yet it is a condition of his successes. When Coleridge, disappointed by The Excursion, wrote a long explanation of the poem he had hoped Wordsworth would write, the gulf between them was apparent. He envisaged a preliminary exposition of “the faculties of man in the abstract,” then of “the Human Race in the concrete,” a “vast survey of fallen humanity throughout time and space, a grand unity of Philosophy and Religion … , in short [!], the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence […] for the philosophy of mechanism.” Neither Wordsworth, nor Coleridge, nor anyone else, could have written this poem, for no poem could be written on such a plan. Yet the evidence was there, if Coleridge could have seen it, that Wordsworth had made a powerful protest against “the philosophy of mechanism.” He had early on been attracted by the rationalism of William Godwin, but, through the character of Rivers in his pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy The Borderers (1796), had rejected the pride in “independent intellect.” Harking back to this period in Book X of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes his quest for moral certainty, which ended only in “contrarities.” The French Revolution had shown the limits of rationalism; men could convince themselves that the most heinous crimes were logically necessary and morally justified. Philosophical analysis was a dead end. Poetry alone, with its celebration of the one life binding all things together, could save.
In the generations following Wordsworth, this hardened into the belief, expressed, for instance, by Matthew Arnold, that poetry would become a substitute for religion. That was not Wordsworth’s position; it would be truer to say that for him the poetry was the religion, closer to the spirit of religion than dogmatic formularies. The best poems in Lyrical Ballads reflect that position but assume the reader’s prior knowledge of it. The usual practice in school or university is to read this collection before Wordsworth’s longer poems, as I did myself, but that now seems to me the wrong order. The impatience and exasperation one feels when meeting the ballads soften or disappear when the poems’ wider context is understood. The “wise passiveness” of William in “Expostulation and Reply” is born of unease with secondhand experience derived from books; openness to nature’s influences is the key to psychological growth. “We murder to dissect.” Childish or childlike intuition and instinct, as shown in “We are Seven,” “Anecdote for Fathers,” or “The Idiot Boy,” can be superior to adult “wisdom.” At the same time, many of the poems—supremely “Michael”—counterbalance this instinctive wisdom with that nurtured by suffering, or what “Tintern Abbey” calls “the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world.” It is the recollecting adult, not the experiencing child, who is the interpreter. The problem is that if this is not to be pantheism—if Nature is a moral teacher only if, and only because, we have a moral sense—we still have to explain how that sense came into existence.
Juliet Barker’s book contains no such lines of argument, and it would be no defense for her to say she is not writing a literary biography of Wordsworth. There cannot be a non-literary biography of Wordsworth, since it is as a writer that Wordsworth continues to matter—at least to some, for who are the Wordsworthian poets of today? Such very different glimpses of his influence as we can see in Ted Hughes or Geoffrey Hill are hardly matter for rejoicing, while his manifesto against poetic diction has all too often been misread as a justification of banality by people who have no style. Our modern concepts of Nature (rebranded as “the environment”) and religion (sentimentalized into “lifestyle choices”) make it almost impossible for us to bring to him what he rightly said he required if he was to be fully understood: “a heart/ That watches and receives.”
