Two Cheers for Romanticism

...Wilson vividly traces Dorothy's efforts to perfect her own writing too...

...Similarly, she wrote "Dear Jane" missives to his former French mistress, Annette Vallon, the mother of his first child...

...Hence the romantic focuses on the connection between a poet's current state and his early experiences...

...For someone unacquainted with the outline of the Wordsworth siblings’ childhood—how they were separated at an early age after their mother's death and hardly saw each other again until adulthood—or with the chronology of their later lives and travels, this approach might prove confusing...

...Wilson wonders...

...In addition, Dorothy recorded the poignant or guileful stories of beggars who came to her door or spoke to her on her walks...

...Predictably, the ship's motion causes him to nick his chin repeatedly...

...Sitting there in public, A failure at the simple tasks, my vanity on display, I might have already realizedwe use the first part Of our lives to render the rest of it miserable...

...Coleridge was cruelly banished while his beloved Sara Hutchinson joined Mary and Dorothy as part of William's harem of doting handmaidens...

...In every age, our jaded sophistication is revealed as the suppressed hopefulness of the adolescent: both eager and afraid to seize life at its fullest and most tuneful...

...Wilson compares the siblings' relationship to the romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and suggests that Emily Brontë may have been influenced by what she knew of the Wordsworths...

...When William was courting Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy wrote his love letters to her...

...Two of the sonnets end with a rhymed "tanka" instead of the conventional couplet, a delicate oriental touch for this mini-opera...

...All these themes are part of a complex tapestry in ID...

...Wilson’s biography is less the narrative of a life than a meditation on Dorothy’s character...

...Poets like J.D...

...While the others admire New York Harbor, he attempts a first shave in his cabin...

...It is spoken by a blind man whose sight Jesus has just restored...

...Now that the dust has settled would we really imagine Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot to be sounderrealists than Coleridge or Shelley...

...Feelings are believed by Romantics to be a source of creativity...

...Each chapter concentrates on a particular theme: the role her headaches play in her psychic history, the incest question, her quasi-religious devotion to nature...

...All McClatchy's poems ultimately return to refracted versions of his own life...

...Although these poems lament the smarts and humiliations attendant on love and loss, they provoke the kind of wonder and joy we experience when the curtain comes down on a dazzling performance...

...Gluttony" begins: When just one apple was too much, The flesh would feast upon its fall, And sated senators succumb In perfumed vomitoriums...

...InDorothy'sjournals, her sense of her own personality collapses under William's aspirations...

...Nonetheless, Woolf is correct: We keep repeating accounts of their doings because different generations have seen reflections of themselves in their romantic idealism, not to mention their sexual experimentation, alcohol abuse, drug taking, and radical politics...

...Was her life one of self-sacrifice or self-realization...

...Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life (Farrar Straus Giroux, 316 pp., $30.00) is only the second full-scale biography of its subject, though she has always been considered a major figure by those who knew her and by biographers of her brother and Coleridge...

...The couplet concluding the sonnet on "Lust" avers: Who can't be stopped or satisfied knows well The little death whose legacy is hell...

...McClatchy knows how to make an ingenious metaphor sound so right you wish it had occurred to you first...

...Though light verse, the cycle makes a number of telling points...

...She abruptly stopped keeping journals and ultimately lapsed into a dementialike illness...

...The second controversy stems from the 1980 life of Wordsworth by Hunter Davies, who characterized Dorothy as an unnaturally possessive, unstable shrew...

...At the same time, their literary philosophies continue to influence our poetry...

...They boasted that in the future artists would look "reality" in the eye...

...Torment need not result in God's damnation...

...Wilson poses the central questions that have puzzled all who have tried to sum up her subject: "Do Dorothy's journals describe her joy or dejection...

...This fleet stanza dashes from the Garden of Eden's forbidden but irresistible fruit to noble Romans' repulsive practice of gagging themselves at feasts in order to consume more than their bodies could otherwise hold...

...Instead of appearing suave and grownup at dinner, he arrives with scraps of tissue staunching the blood coming from his face...

...Yes, it was common in the 19th century for unmarried sisters to make a home for their bachelor brothers, yet the obvious intensity between the Wordsworths seemed odd even to other sibling couples living in similar circumstances...

...One of my favorite lyrics inhis newest book, "Trees, Walking," refers to a mysterious line in Mark's gospel...

...Does Dorothy cast herself as the heroine of a tragedy or a comedy...

...then her health mysteriously improved...

...ROMANTICISM is typically concerned with nature, both our own natures and the environment that surrounds us...

...This is not the kind of romantic sentiment we associate with the Wordsworths, but Coleridge was a master of verse that exposed the shame of his failings...

...Did she consider William her creation, so that once he was launched into full adulthood and poetic maturity her life's work was completed...

...She sought not only to nurture him and to ensure that he could devote himself to poetry without taking a more remunerative job, but also to make herself indispensable so that they would never again have to be separated...

...The poet's sister canbe considered a victim, but Wilson's nuanced study suggests she may just as well have been the creator of this monster, a manipulator of all who knew him but nevertheless a sublime poet...

...It prizes creative impulses over mere rationality, attempting to marry emotion and thought...

...But his scarcely remembered birth mother continues to haunt his imagination, and he has fallen in love with a 20-year old JapaneseAmerican woman, now interned with her parents in Wyoming after Pearl Harbor...

...A finger down the throat will stall Satiety's tenacious clutch...

...Davies went so far as to maintain that only Dorothy’s premature descent into senility permitted the poet to achieve his potential both as a writer and a husband...

...We all wince at memories of ouryouthful pretensions and with chagrin, recognize them still lurking in present behavior...

...In spite of this technique, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth brings her into sharper focus than everbefore...

...McClatchy is a virtuoso of seemingly effortless formalism...

...Her journals and letters do sound unnaturally passionate and intense when describing “dear, dear William,” with much stress laid on ambiguous acts of physical and emotional intimacy...

...McClatchy's sixth collection of poems, Mercury Dressing (Knopf, 96 pp., $25.00...

...Sorrow in 1944" consists of 10 elegant Shakespearean sonnets on the imagined life of Madame Butterfly's son—whose name is Benj amin Franklin Pinkerton, but who is called Sorrow by his Japanese mother...

...As female mystics once trained their entire attention on the deity, she schooled herself to be ever more receptive to natural beauty in her own being—to "feel" it as the Romantic philosophers recommended as if she were a photographic plate recording what she saw...

...The parallels are present in the novel, whose characters knew one another in childhood became separated then reunited as adults...

...Yet despite the considerable paper trail, she has remained an elusive personality whose motives are subject to diverse interpretations...

...Finally, as Wordsworth proclaimed "The Child is Father of the Man...

...With a true Romantic's ability to blend precise description with philosophical observation, the poet describes his eyesight now: TV's talking heads on mute all look the same, Bobbing owlets on the barn's rafter...

...Are her reflections, observations and impressions a metaphor for her interior life, or is she simply documenting what she sees...

...Wilson recounts certain episodes again and again, occasionally from varied perspectives, while others are mentioned only in passing...

...This reference sets the poet off on a stream of associations about how aging affects our vision and the myopia allows us to continue to make the same mistake over and over...

...In his 1998 essay collection, Twenty Questions, McClatchy averred that a poem "needs secrets...

...The separate parts of "Three Overtures," eachbearingthe title of a familiar piece of Romantic music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn and Franz von Suppé, respectively, recount episodes from his maturation that are at once amusing, touching and humiliating...

...Mercury Dressing scintillates with such startling yet apt descriptions...

...using others for self-gratification brings its own punishment in a brief spasm, followed by a frantic compulsion to repeat the act...

...Taking in the news hour with a martini, I watch each day's car bomb explosion Through the bleared perspective history provides, The sense that people will keep fighting Over the same wooden idol or acre Of nowhere because once as children They had been grabbed and told to look their fathers Right in the eye...

...It persisted for decades, until her brother's death...

...Dorothy accompanied William and his wife on their honeymoon, recording their adventures, then returned home to live with them...

...As Wilson points out, Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship is not really based on sexual attraction: Their bond lies in their conviction that they are two halves of one being, incomplete without each other...

...The first, originally aired by some of the Wordsworths’ contemporaries, was that before William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson he and Dorothy had committed incest...

...The two women, however, remained in touch long after William shut Annette and his daughter out of his life...

...from retelling myths or the stories of opera to relating the heart's sorrows, the burden of aging, and the core of what constitutes poetry...

...The publication of her journals in 1889 immediately revealed that she was a significant talent in her own right...

...The power of the Grasmere journals lies in their detailed evocation of skies, lakes, trees, plants, and birds, unadorned by the fancy metaphors or philosophical observations that weaken so much nature writing...

...Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" tells of the 15-year-old traveling to Europe on Cunard's Queen Mary in a group of teenagers...

...A fresh look uncovers multitudes of missed details, adding to our appreciation...

...None of these conundrums canbe conclusively answered but Wilson's efforts help us delve more deeply than ever before...

...On Poetry Two Cheers for Romanticism By Phoebe Pettingell For English majors of the Woodstock generation two groups of writers were particularly resonant: the Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont ménage, and the Lake District “circle of friends” whose core consisted of siblings William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Hutchinson sisters—Mary (who married Wordsworth) and Sara (Coleridge’s unattainable beloved...

...Robert Gittings and Jo Manton’s 1985 biography is oddly colorless, intent on protecting Dorothy from two controversial charges...

...The Modernists saw in the Romantic attitude high-minded and scorned descriptions of nature and doomed passions...

...Actually, scholarship of the last four decades has added a great deal to our knowledge of these people— details either suppressed during more prudish eras or hidden in archives few scholars could access...

...Another series of poems, "The Seven Deadly Sins," cleverly delineates each one with a different prosodie form...

...His lines can often be traced to her prose descriptions...

...The descriptions were to provide fodder for her brother's verse, in whichshetookaproprietary interest...

...Mercurial indeed McClatchy's melodies change rapidly from major to minor keys and back again, modulating from the details of a plant or bird to narratives from his own life...

...McClatchy prove that the Romantic Movement is alive and well...

...On the night before Wordsworth was married, for instance, she describes wearing the wedding ring purchased for his bride and relinquishing it only as he set off for the church, at which point she swooned...

...In a 1960 edition of the journals, Home at Grasmere, Colette Clark called Dorothy “one of those sweet characters whose only life lies in their complete dedication to a man of genius...

...The poet imagines this character in late middle age, his Asian heritage unrecognizable because he is, as Puccini described him, blond with blue eyes...

...Several recent biographies have underlined the way Wordsworth ultimately forced those around him to acknowledge him as the center of their existence or be exiled from his friendship...

...McClatchy, himself a librettist of 13 operas, interweaves Japanese legends with this account of trying to connect fragments of memory...

...In the opera's final scene, the audience sees him as a three-year-old blindfolded and holding an American flag while his mother commits hara-kiri and his fickle father appears with a new Caucasian wife to take the boy to the United States...

...Wordsworth called her the person who made it possible for him to be a poet...

...He argues that William’s muse was actually Mary Hutchinson, who allowed his work to mature, unconstrained by the unhealthy influence of his hysterical sister...

...McClatchy doubles back to the notion that the Child is Father of the Man, muses on the genetic flaws passed on through families, and finally considers the emotional void left by the death of a parent...

...Bronte's star-crossed couple identify themselves so fully with the wild landscape surroundingthemthattheiremotions, the wind-swept heath and stormy weather come to seem of a piece...

...It thrives on the tension between what is said and what is not said...

...Is her love for her brother that of arejected mistress, or sisterly devotionof the kind that is hard for a contemporary reader to understand...

...Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth demonstrates that the best writers are always more complex, more "secret" than our arrogance assumes...

...Virginia Woolf shrewdly remarked about these two constellations of poets and their muses, “There are some stories which have to be retold by every generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them that makes them . . . our own...