The Poet of Meaning

...For example, to consider one more very great poem, "Resolution and Independence" (1802): The poet, a sensitive man, experiences a fear he cannot name, an unconscious dread, that somehow has to do with poetic genius...

...Does such a fate await this poet...

...As Arnold saw, this moment remains instructive...

...That heareth not the loud winds when they call...

...His outward life was not marked by any sort of remarkable behavior...

...And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain-springs...

...That is Wordsworth's doctrine...

...Arnold rightly called this a great moment in the history of thought, pushing a correct analysis of society into an awareness of necessary change...

...He dutifully contributed to the support of the child...

...Wordsworth, indeed, used the word "being" in this doctrinal passage: 'Tis Nature's law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked...

...But the dawn turned dark...

...Wordsworth has come through the experiments of his Lucy poems, the nursery-rhyme simplicity...

...Still...

...He first recognizes his affinity with Burke in the later "Prelude...

...Burke, reflecting deeply on an actual English society, arrived at an analytical understanding that institutions constitute the unconscious mind, that is, the habits, of society...

...He loves young Lucy, but, as he rides along, the moon drops beneath her cottage roof: What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a lover's head— "O Mercy...

...I have never met an engineer or an architect who had much interest in actuality as a gift, as Being, which, as a gift, stands over against nothingness, and raises immediately the question of why there is something rather than nothing...

...Of course, he could not complete his epic-length poem "The Prelude," about the history of his mind...

...The French Revolution was the first modern revolution, driven intellectually by the Rights of Man, that is, by theory...

...In a disarming moment recounted by Juliet Barker, one of Wordsworth's dons, mentioning his own lectures, advised Wordsworth not to bother attending them, they weren't worth much...

...Or "always" sad...

...She takes account, as she must, of the central event of his life, indeed of the life of Europe in his time: the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the revolution that followed...

...Natural piety" has to do with early affections that become part of the self through the unconscious...

...The river is important, also the fact that he is revisiting the site he has known, mixing past and present: Five years have passed, five summers, with the length Of five long winters...

...It came from his reaction against republican abstractions, a rejection that focused his mind on the individual and on the concrete particulars of experience...

...That "motionless" cloud...

...We notice something about his verse here...

...Wordsworth knows, moreover, that his characteristic resonant lines have to do with his relationship to his unconscious mind, as in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood...

...Juliet Barker possesses to an admirable degree the abilities of the historian, and brings before us Wordsworth in detail over his long life and important career, perhaps supplanting the very good 1989 biography by Stephen Gill...

...That last line goes beyond the ordinary world to a moment of aural epiphany...

...Wordsworth turned from the abstractions of the philosophes to the particular individuals and inward to the experiences of the individual mind...

...He keeps making discoveries, has Prous-tian "spots of time...

...Juliet Barker follows Wordsworth through his early life to his beginnings as an experimental poet, making the Lake District his imaginative property as William Faulkner would Yokna-patawpha County...

...Immensely important for his mind, however, was his early humanitarian enthusiasm for the Revolution and the events he observed in France...

...He manifestly experiences nature as a gift, not man-made as is a city...

...Every fear, every hope will forward it . . . they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the designs of men...

...Or both simultaneously...

...Does that mean "silent...

...Years ago, it must have been spring 1952 in his course on the Romantics at Columbia, Lionel Trilling began meditating on that cloud, wondering about it, and seeming unable to define his interest...

...Why did Wordsworth compare the old leech-gatherer to the cloud...

...Every element there is important...

...No, I think he was proto-Christian...

...Burke, wrote Wordsworth, "forewarns, denounces, launches forth, / Against all systems built on abstract rights," and who "the majesty proclaims / Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time...

...Naturally arranged according to the laws of metre [it] does not differ from that of prose...

...He also has become capable of such a line as "the still sad music of humanity...

...As Burke wrote: If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it...

...Robert Burns also died young...

...Wordsworth apparently took his advice and had a mediocre record at Cambridge...

...That is the point of its strange, its metaphoric, immobility...

...His poems, indeed, often were populated by rural figures in many ways like those of Faulkner: eccentrics, peasants, storytellers, even an idiot boy...

...Clearly she was drawn to Wordsworth because he Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: The National Review and Its Times...

...For example, in "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," the man's emotions have no rational basis...

...I now think the cloud represented to Wordsworth (and that Trilling sensed something like this) the actuality of Being that in Wordsworth pervades all things—humans, animals, plants...

...As Juliet Barker shows, this reaction led to an internal revolution in Wordsworth's mind, a major revolution, its reverberations still with us...

...Wordsworth had made a revolution of his own...

...Penguin has published a good parallel text of "The Prelude," his unfinishable poem about the activity of his mind, which, after all, was the most important thing about him, and to us all...

...The poetry embodies the experience and the proof...

...Watch out when Wordsworth hears that sound of waters...

...Do not get the impression that Wordsworth was some version of Byron or D'Annunzio, or even Shelley...

...Language seems to dissolve...

...It pushes language, resists analysis...

...Samuel Johnson had appealed to it in his criticism of John Milton's deviation, and Ezra Pound later used it against the Victorians...

...The rain came heavily and fell in floods...

...He chose every word of that title carefully, "intimations," "recollections," "early" —and remember those sounding Wordsworthian waters...

...Thus, Paul Tillich defined God as "the ground of Being...

...He seems then to gain access to his unconscious mind, exploring it as the poem proceeds, and at length experiencing an epiphany in the form of profound sympathy: For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity...

...And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety...

...A connection exists between Wordsworth's discovery of the unconscious, or the precon-scious, mind and his valuing the humblest things, animals, flowers, lowly yet enduring human beings...

...The sixth line violates form and enacts the surge of irrational fear...

...I sat there increasingly irritated...

...There the relationship among the ideas is other than rational, and though conventional reviewers such as the brutal Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh Review mocked such poems as doggerel, the Age of Reason was over...

...For the perception of Being in our own time, turn to Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead (2004) and a prose adequate to the perceptions...

...He began writing it in 1798, published an edition in 1805, another in 1850...

...Hazlitt, an acquaintance of Wordsworth and Coleridge, was precisely wrong, misled by his own radical politics, in thinking Wordsworth's best poetry came from his revolutionary humanitarian sympathies...

...If John Stuart Mill and other Victorians found Wordsworth to be a religious poet, they were correct to do so, and he was a "nature poet" only in a special sense...

...the general opinions and feelings will draw that way...

...has retained the language of speech...

...To myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead...

...This old man gives the highly civilized poet relief from his anxieties: Motionless as a Cloud the old man stood...

...I know of nothing in poetry resembling that line, that moment...

...More water, more unconscious mind...

...Trilling marveled on— to no point that I could see...

...Keats's unheard melodies are "sweeter...

...In that it was new...

...It is about the early mind before, or a bit later than, birth that he writes...

...Very few descriptions of nature exist in his poetry, but there are, rather, reactions to nature, often scenes he remembers—from childhood?— that set up associations in his mind...

...The term "pantheist" has been applied to Wordsworth, as if he were a follower of Spinoza...

...His imagination seized upon particulars, possessed them as his own, not only people but rivers, mountains, animals, even an overlooked flower: To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do too often lie too deep for tears...

...In his Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), however, in a remarkable passage singled out by Matthew Arnold in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Burke, without at all taking back his critique of abstract rights, turned his analysis of social structure into a perception of inevitable social process...

...Juliet Barker skillfully conducts us through his long careers from experimental poet to sage of Rydal Mount, which became a pilgrimage shrine, and at length to national icon named poet laureate by Queen Victoria...

...The Poet of Meaning How Wordsworth changed the language by JEFFREY HART Literary biography, especially the biography of a great poet, is one of the most demanding of forms, demanding at the same time the very different capabilities of the historian and of the literary critic...

...Proceeding from the simpler Lucy poems, Wordsworth built on his insights about the mind...

...For his new poetry Wordsworth undertook a revolution in language, as set forth in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1800): My purpose was to imitate, and so far as possible, to adapt, the very language of men . . . to bring language nearer to the language of men...

...In his experimental "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth used that norm of language for his new subject matter, the vagrant associations of the unconscious mind...

...Oh Him who walked with glory and in joy Behind his plough, upon the mountain side: We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness...

...Both Burke, "alarmed into reflection," as he said, and Wordsworth saw that political abstractions (we would say ideologies) are lethal abbreviations of thought...

...indeed, it is Wordsworthian in its empiricism and in its analytical hostility to abstractions...

...And moveth altogether, if it moveth at all...

...Powerful and converging forces doomed the ancien régime: Burke's analysis of society was analogous to Wordsworth's analysis of mind...

...He probably was still making discoveries about his mind when he died at 80 in April 1850...

...She recounts Wordsworth's two trips to Europe in 1791 and 1792, his love affair with Annette Vallon, resulting in a daughter, Caroline...

...She weaves into her narrative passages from Wordsworth's poetry, often "The Prelude," and most often from the earlier 1805 version...

...In such verse as this, the exceptional moment comes with an increase in sonority, with Milton perhaps nearby...

...and has also done something new with iambic pentameter, repossessing it from Shakespeare and the very different verse of Milton, making it over into his own conversational form...

...Not incidentally, we are present at the invention of the idea of childhood, as in the epigraph to this poem: The Child is Father of the Man...

...Renewed assurance comes from the unlikeliest source, an old man gathering medicinal leeches in a marsh, a man bent double, almost inanimate...

...Wordsworth was appalled by the increasing violence and fanaticism, the fear, the rivers of blood, and then the inevitable young military officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, taking charge to restore order...

...The Monologion and Proslogion of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) were certainly not included in the curriculum of Wordsworth's Cambridge...

...The sound of waters signals Wordsworth's moment of access to his own childhood mind— really, as he believes, to his pre-infant mind...

...Wordsworth knew nothing about the philosophy of Being, ontology...

...We know that something major is in the offing: "There was a roaring in the wind all night...

...Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive," he remembers in "The Prelude," "But to be young was very heaven...

...She makes good use of that great poem about the development of the poet's mind...

...Wordsworth rejected the humanitarian abstractions that led to the guillotine and to the war that engulfed Europe...

...That "meanest flower" possesses metaphysical importance, and we will return to it in a moment...

...The epiphany in the poem comes here: Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore...

...was a poet, yet she does not get close enough to the poetry itself, to precisely why it matters—that is, to the justification for her large and, as biography, valuable enterprise...

...But now it is the Shakespearean storm of disorder, not the reconnection with the sources of reassurance but the flooding of his mind with dread: I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride...

...In 1798 he visited Tintern Abbey, and notice the precision of his title: "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798...

...Evidently not much had changed since Edward Gibbon's vacuous Oxford...

...The "still" sad music of humanity must possess vast depths of sadness...

...If that bliss and that dawn sound familiar as regards more recent revolutions, well they might...

...Thomas Chatterton legendarily died at 17, a suicide...

...It was this shift in Wordsworth's mind that led ultimately to his famous praise of Burke in the 1850 "Prelude...

...The language of poetry is periodically rejuvenated by such a return to the norm of the English language...

...Gibbon and Wordsworth did well anyway...