Radical Poet

...The poems trace, with fine penetration, the mind's erratic growth For this burrowing into the deepest recesses of the mind, this reflection on the relation of self to nature, Wordsworth wanted a style direct and flexible and unadorned...

...But he cannot permanently abandon nature, because his development as a poet compels him to "adhere, apparently against nature, to natural fact...

...The child in his buoyant, unaware intimacy with nature was shielded from these contractions of self...

...His poetry, like his nature, is deficient in picturesque charm and Keatsean opulence and variety...

...The process of humanizing the imagination is apocalyptic insofar as its thrust is to separate the poet from nature and force him to confront God unmediated...

...as a literalist of the imagination who writes profoundly of man's primary feelings: the influxes of joy and power, the anguished burdens of emptiness and uncertainty...

...Obsessively, and this is the theme of the major poems, memory returns to the past, to early experiences and impressions, in quest of the causes of things and sorts out losses and gains in hope of liberating, in the present, the "soul's excursive powers...

...But poetry, like the world, can only house an imagination which is a borderer, which will not disdain earthly things...

...Sensing a waning of powers, the poet is permeated by a dread of the extinction of all feeling...

...Poetic complexity is shifted from diction to syntax and rhythm...

...a landscape awesome rather than colorful, and like the poems, edifying and full of severe delights...

...As Hartman writes, "In its purity the imagination is 'unfathered'— a self-begotten, potentially apocalyptic force...

...Was he not, after all, at different stages and often together, a worshiper of a benign nature, a confused, hesitant Pantheist, and a transcendentalist...

...Whatever the imagination's source, its end as poetry is the nature all recognize, and still a nature that leads beyond itself...

...The poems were spoiled by a garrulous sublimity unrelieved by image, wit, melody or sensuous robustness...

...We gain a fresh view of poems that have gone stale on us from repeated readings, like "The Solitary Reaper" and the Lucy poems...

...The typical Wordsworth poem thus hinges on a crisis of feeling...

...It is nature paradoxically that guides him beyond itself to this amplitude of the self-reliant, sympathetic imagination...

...And Professor Hartman's commentary on Wordsworth extends suggestively into all corners of Romantic style and poetic method...

...As Professor Hartman says, "the voice we hear is full of haltings, of inner falls," as if in secular prayer...

...The mind's eye, looking into the self and out to the world, carefully assesses its own perplexed workings and reactions...

...Snowdon, the clouds of unknowing...

...Wordsworth's verse, so the criticism ran, was banal, pedantic and, as Tennyson complained, "thick-ankled...

...Wordsworth's greatness, then, is as a psychological poet nakedly rendering the mind's continuities and disjunctions...

...His poetry, more than that of the other Romantics, marks the turning in of the mind upon itself, and the making of poetry (and the poet) out of self-consciousness and the attempted exit from self-consciousness...

...Reviewed by HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Department of English Columbia University In an age whose taste until recently rather despotically demanded a poetry of irony, paradox and indirection, a poetry of statement, such as Wordsworth's, was bound to suffer neglect or misunderstanding...

...Ultimately, the poet receives from nature the feeling for the human community that fortifies him and sanctifies life, which is the Romantic covenant of grace...

...and it is full of the passionate music of discursive thought that with "dark inscrutable workmanship", "reconciles discordant elements...

...The poet waits for those "spots of time"—those uniquely Wordsworthian restrained ecstasies and floodings of the mind with the light of self-awareness— restoring him to precarious self-sufficiency and imaginative vigor...

...Nature is generally mountainous or bare, stony or insensate...

...His book is an example of American scholarship at its best, scrupulously written, elegant in design, subtle in reasoning, allusive and far-reaching...

...That is why the image of light presides over The Prelude, stabbing through the darkness of consciousness, intensifying the shadows, and lifting, as in the vision on Mt...

...The poems are elegaic examinations of the uneasy compensations of growth, lyric meditations on the fortitude required to sustain the self in its dark moods and vacancies...

...the self's history, so melancholy and moving and implacably inward, of divided allegiances, little deaths, enlightenment and self-renewal...

...It is the "vexed redundancies" of the syntax and the Biblical cadences of the verse that convey the turnings and bafflings of the inner man, the motions of a ruminating mind as it defines feeling by removal of what is not felt, what is no longer available Wordsworth fashioned an idiom of self-communing that could celebrate "the life in common things...

...Professor Hartman dispels these critical myths and recovers Wordsworth for us as a radical poet...

...Since Wordsworth seemed to mistrust the poet's artifices as somehow distorting the honest report of feeling, the verbal surfaces of his poems were blemished by a tedious, drab abstractness...

...Nature's role is crucial...

...The Prelude, for all its stiff-gaited poetry and structural lapses, eloquently records the terrors of sentience, and the long, tortuous exfoliation of the imagination toward autonomy and liberty...

...Wordsworth emerges as peculiarly relevant to the modern condition...

...The poet can decipher the emblematic "Characters of the Apocalypse...

...but the mature man must make do with the dwindlings of imaginative energies...

...The drama unfolding in Wordsworth's mind and poetry, Professor Hartman remarks, is the "unresolved opposition of Imagination and Nature," which involves him in an ambivalent relationship to apocalypse...

...Moreover, despite the labors of a devoted band of exegetes to explain Wordsworth's philosophical system and doctrine of nature, Wordsworth was dismissed as a poet of obvious ideas...

...The poetry is sparse in metaphor and verbal play, hewn out of the rock of reality: a lyrical Stonehenge...