Wordsworth's Secret Life

...Rather, his suppressed youth "as poet, lover, rebel, spy was the source of the emotions Wordsworth needed the rest of his life to recollect in tranquillity"—and to make sense of the Romantic and revolutionary age he came to define...

...Adult poems, too, pick up this theme, we are reminded: abandoned Margaret in "The Ruined Cottage," mysterious Lucy Grey who "dwelt among untrodden ways," "The Solitary Reaper" in the Highlands singing of "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,/That has been, and may be again...

...Back in France, he had encountered propagandistic verses setting forth revolutionary principles in the form of conversations between peasants and an educated questioner...

...The group consisted of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Mary and Sara Hutchinson, the poet's brothers, and of course Dorothy herself...

...Of greater interest is Johnston's observation, based on The Prelude, that Wordsworth's autobiographical reminiscences of females encountered early in life mostly "concentrate on women in jeopardy, in pain or dead...

...Johnston traces the indiscretions that the middle-aged Wordsworth did his best to expunge from the record...

...By combining painstaking study of late 18th-century undergraduate life with hints among the poet's juvenilia, Johnston reconstructs possible contacts with prostitutes in Cambridge and London, and putative affairs with peasant girls...

...Johnston's stunning book enables the reader to explore a much more fascinating, complex and believable William Wordsworth than previously suspected, who was truly representative of a tumultuous era of transition not unlike our own day...

...Extensive research in government archives in Britain and on the Continent has turned up intriguing suggestions of a tumultuous and subversive career...

...On Poetry WORDSWORTH'S SECRET LIFE By Phoebe Pettingell CENTRAL to the ethos of the 19th century was a belief in geniuses who transformed the world—men like Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Napoleon...

...Think of The Prelude, that poem about his youth started in 1798, read aloud to Coleridge in 1807, then revised and finally published in 1850...

...In the last third of the book, however, the mobs of characters give way to a tiny circle of intimates, and Wordsworth emerges from the shadow to assert his own vision...

...Now, at the tum of the millennium, a new narrative mode is taking over, one that concentrates on how an individual's work was molded by the ideas and events of his time...

...Nevertheless, Johnston thinks he has finally unearthed a more conflicted, impetuous and human Wordsworth beneath the layers of evasive self-description...

...It's like the difference between a portrait in which the subject is painted as the focal point against a vague background, and one of Hogarth's engravings where the principal figure is absorbed in a scene teeming with other people and activities...

...If the significance of his relationships made their way into the poems, their traces are so encrypted that critics can only speculate about their existence...

...Adapting this to literary ends, Wordsworth created his famous "dialogue poems...

...The biographical facts, once they gradually began to trickle out, told a somewhat different story...

...Its first and least important aspect—albeit one de rigueur for a contemporary biography—is sex, justifying the "lover" of the subtitle...

...With the passage of the years, he followed many youthful liberals before him, and grew into a conservative...

...But in Johnston's retelling, a multitude of famous, infamous and practically unknown figures—ranging from statesmen such as William Pitt and Jean-Paul Marat to those beggars and manual workers frequently encountered in Wordsworth poems—crowd the stage, so that occasionally the reader loses sight of the subject for pages...

...Among Johnston's revelations, the most fascinating one is that the poet, strapped for funds, may have served as a spy for the Foreign Office when he visited Germany in 1798...

...Kenneth R. Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (Norton, 947 pp., $45.00) is an example of this new breed of books...

...There was also the mysterious triangle involving Coleridge, Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson, his sister-in-law, to sort out...

...More illuminating is the reconstruction of the youthful "rebel...

...He neither looks nor behaves like the romantic hero or antihero of his day...

...His hidden and conflicted nature often allowed him to write tranquil lyrics while deeply disturbed...

...We tend to think of Wordsworth as an observer of natural scenery, yet as the biographer notes, "the unseen vista was always a more powerful stimulant to his creative imagination...

...Like Sir Walter Scott, he pictured himself as "the last minstrel," recording an ail-but-vanished rural life as rivers were harnessed to power mills that would employ the beggars and gleaners of the countryside, and the clear air would fog with smoke, blotting out the mountains he loved...

...At slightly under 1,000 pages the volume only brings the reader to 1807—the year Wordsworth completed the first version of his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, but 43 years short of his death...

...For it is likely that if he was in the pay of his government, he was reporting on his own best friend, the mercurial but trusting Coleridge, whose later paranoid suspicions of betrayal may not have been so crazy after all...

...The book portrays some wonderfully comic and shady espionage agents encountered by the Wordsworths and Coleridge in their travels, many reminiscent of Patrick ?'Brian's Stephen Maturin...

...One finishes the book horrified by his treatment of Coleridge, who by 1807 came to feel undermined as a poet when his onetime protege eliminated his new work from their Lyrical Ballads, and as a man when Wordsworth stole the woman Coleridge loved, Sara Hutchinson...

...Whether or not he slept with a woman before Annette Vallon seems trivial...

...As rebel and spy, Johnston's subject remains at the edge of the stage—a watcher, affected by the currents of his time and by the philosophies of those who attract him...

...In "We Are Seven" and "Resolution and Independence," for example, conversations with "the folk" hearten the writer and give him courage to expound what he believes...

...The biographer has matched quotations from Wordsworth poems to these, to make the point that the poet was indeed a man of his rowdy age, not the proper Victorian he has sometimes been mistaken for...

...Wordsworth has always been portrayed as "the heart of a circle of friends," in his sister Dorothy's words...

...Elsewhere, in Johnston's perceptive phrase, he expresses "the depths of his joy by exploring its opposite...

...As a result, biographers of that period emphasized their subjects' uniqueness, just as many 20th-century life studies have emphasized psychology...

...Coleridge and De Quincy had their addictions, Shelley and Byron burned with rebellious fervor, Keats suffered a hapless love and fatal illness, Blake saw visions...

...As Johnston admits, Wordsworth is "not an immediately attractive man...

...Suddenly, all those influences begin showing up in his work...

...By age 36, when The Hidden Wordsworth ends, the poet had begun to reshape the facts of his early life to fit the contemplative picture he wanted to portray...

...In sharp contrast, Wordsworth described a quiet life, with his rambles through picturesque scenery often seeming to provide the main action...

...Others who loved him— for example, Annette and Mary, his wife—found themselves just as baffled by his need to keep those closest to him at arm's length...

...From it, we are meant to deduce that the young writer principally consorted with Nature and his own thoughts, that even his sojourn in France during the early days of the Revolution was a completely apolitical experience...

...Johnston never explicitly says so, but the Wordsworth he depicts emerges as a succubus who drains those around him to feed his genius...

...This section recreates the ferment of the early Revolution, the excitement of radical salons presided over by independent women and philosophers whose appeal to the provincial youth is easy to understand...

...In addition, the book is sprinkled with satirical cartoons by Thomas Rowlandson that are full of bawdy, roisterous throngs...

...In 1933, Wordsworth's descendants revealed that during the French trip he had an affair with one Annette Vallon, and fathered an illegitimate daughter named Caroline...

...He was convinced she had become her brother-in-law's mistress, and, while that is unlikely, Sara did join her sister and Dorothy to form a household of handmaids to Wordsworth...

...His perspective on the other sex helps explain the young Englishman's attraction to Vallon, whose resistance to the Revolution put her in a precarious position, and his later guilt at having to leave her a pregnant grass widow because he could neither support her nor take her out of a country hostile to his own...

...Once this evidence of a secret life came to light, scholars started scrambling for more—clues to possible incest with Dorothy, or signs of rivalry with brother John when both were courting Mary Hutchinson, whom the poet ultimately won...

...Yet despite all this probing, Wordsworth's interior life has remained opaque...

...Suppressed early poems pointed to Jacobin sympathies, but Johnston's research pins down how deep these were, and shows convincingly that his subject was more involved in subversive circles—both in London and France—than has been previously known...

...Certainly some of the effusive apprentice poems written in Wordsworth's teens evince strong erotic undercurrents, although they are usually in the context of descriptions of landscapes...

...There is something faintly creepy about the idea of Wordsworth as spook...

...But, as Johnston concludes, this sage persona could never have written the powerful verse we know...

...It takes so long to describe less than half of his life because the book has more characters than a Russian novel (some never encountered by its hero) and immerses us in the intellectual climates of England, France and Germany during the latter part of the 18th century...