Radical Wordsworth

“Poetry  makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in his poem on the death of fellow poet W. B. Yeats. He was wrong. Sometimes poetry can change the world.

William Wordsworth was not merely the most admired English poet of the 19th century: his poetry made many things happen. Locally, the ecology and economy of the vale of Grasmere, and the wider Lake District, were changed as a result of his canonization. Nationally, he made new claims for the power of poetry that shaped the minds of the most influential thinkers in Victorian Britain. Globally, his influence extended to John Muir’s passion for the preservation of Yosemite.

Auden did not in fact believe that poetry makes nothing happen. Poets often disagree with themselves, which is one of the things that makes them poets. Having said that poetry makes nothing happen, he went on, later in the same poem, to describe poetry as “A way of happening, a mouth.”

Wordsworth’s poetry was a way of happening because of the new way in which he sought, as Keats put it, to “think into the human heart” by means of an unprecedented examination of the development of his own mind and his sense of belonging in the world. He became the mouth of his generation for what Keats called “the true voice of feeling.”

In Victorian England, and simultaneously in the young United States of America, Wordsworth came to be regarded as a central figure in the revolutionary shift in cultural attitudes that would eventually be called the Romantic movement. He and his fellow poets and philosophers changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about the purpose of poetry, and especially about our connection to our surroundings.

Hazlitt believed that Wordsworth and Coleridge embodied the spirit of the age. Their imaginative cross-fertilization made them into, to adapt a phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, a composite “representative man.” Among the “great men” of his own time, Emerson regarded Napoleon as the archetypal “man of the world,” the “representative of the popular external life and aims of the 19th century,” and Goethe as the philosopher of the “multiplicity” of its inner life.

Yet Emerson’s own capacious mind and his vision for American literature were shaped less by Goethe than by the poetry of Wordsworth and the ideas of Coleridge. The composite Wordsworthian–Coleridgean identity began to fracture on that morning of Saturday, December 27th, 1806 when Coleridge saw, or thought he saw, Wordsworth in bed with Sara Hutchinson.

It broke down almost irretrievably after Basil Montagu passed on the gossip about Wordsworth finding Coleridge impossible to live with because of the alcohol and the opium. Though Coleridge would be generous in writing of Wordsworth’s gifts in Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth would mourn Coleridge’s passing in the “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,” it would never be glad confident morning again.

As he settled into fame and a gentleman’s life at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s genius deserted him. Yet as his mortal powers waned, he began to achieve immortality: his spirit lived on by means of his inspiration upon the next generation of readers and writers, then far beyond. To use another phrase of W. H. Auden’s in his elegy on the death of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth became his admirers.

Radical Wordsworth endured through the 19th century in the poetry of Keats and Shelley, John Clare and Felicia Hemans (and, by negative influence, Byron); in the art of Benjamin Robert Haydon and the prose of Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; in the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and George Eliot; in the deeds of Canon Rawnsley, Stopford Brooke and Beatrix Potter; and, across the Atlantic, in the visions of Emerson, Thoreau and John Muir.

Radical Wordsworth survives today whenever a person walks for pleasure and takes spiritual refreshment in the mountains or when a heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky or a tuft of primroses in flower.

Thirty years after Wordsworth’s death, and twenty after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Matthew Arnold recognized which way the wind had blown. Introducing an anthology of The English Poets, he argued, under the deep influence of Wordsworth, that the future spirit of humankind would depend on poetry. Religion had relied on supposed fact; the science of Lyell, Darwin and others had disproved those facts.

The only part of religion to endure would be “its unconscious poetry.” More and more, society would “have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us”: “Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” Even science itself would appear incomplete without it, “For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry ‘the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science’; and what is a countenance without its expression?”

Arnold’s prose then takes off from another phrase in the preface to Lyrical Ballads:

                    Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”; our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge?

The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize “the breath and finer spirit of knowledge” offered to us by poetry . . . the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Out of Wordsworth comes a manifesto for the enduring value of poetry beyond even that of religion, philosophy and science. There was an unprecedented market for biography in the Victorian era. A notably popular series of literary lives, published by Macmillan under the editorship of the prolific journalist- politician-bookman John Morley, was called “English Men of Letters.”

The volume on Wordsworth was published in 1881, the year after Arnold’s essay on the importance of poetry. It made the startling claim that “the maxims of Wordsworth’s form of natural religion were uttered before Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity were uttered before Christ”:

            The essential spirit of the Lines near Tintern Abbey was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men—indifferent, it may be, to literary or poetical effects, as such—he has shown by the subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer,—an opening, if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.

  

Thirty years after his death, the poet from an obscure nook of northern England, who in the first half of his life was mercilessly derided by the critics, was being compared to Jesus Christ.

The author of the book that made this comparison was Frederic William Henry Myers. The son of a Keswick clergyman who knew and revered Wordsworth, Myers was a bisexual ex-don from Cambridge who, like Matthew Arnold, had become an inspector of schools. A few years before writing the biography, he was deeply scarred by the gruesome suicide in the Lake District of his cousin’s wife Annie Marshall, with whom he had fallen in love and was having a (very intense but almost certainly unconsummated) affair.

He had also been deeply affected by the novels of George Eliot, herself another Victorian sage with boundless admiration for Wordsworth. After reading the final instalment of Middlemarch in the late autumn of 1872, Myers wrote Eliot a long fan letter in which he especially singled out the “noble lovemaking” of Ladislaw and Dorothea. The “contact of noble souls,” he suggested, was the only reason to go on living in a world where “there is no longer any God or any hereafter or anything in particular to aim at.”

The following spring, Eliot visited Myers in Cambridge. On a rainy May day, they walked in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity College. She responded to the three negatives in his letter—no God, no hereafter, no earthly goal—in words that seemed to Myers positively oracular: “taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,—the words God, Immortality, Duty,—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law.”

Myers published his account of this conversation in the same year as his biography of Wordsworth. In reflecting on the necessity of Duty and the unbelievability of Immortality, he would inevitably have turned his mind to the two odes that dominated the Poems of 1807. Neither Eliot nor Myers could believe in God: the findings of Lyell in geology, popularized in Robert Chambers’ 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, had cracked centuries of Creationist belief. And then there was Darwin.

Yet Myers could not live without maintaining faith in some kind of spiritual realm. He had to believe in the possibility that he might one day be reconnected with Annie on, to use the words of the “Intimations” ode, the shore of an “immortal sea.” In his study of Wordsworth, he kept returning to those passages which hinted at some “mystic relation” between the visible and the invisible world. That was why he wrote of Wordsworth’s natural religion offering “an opening, if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world.”

In the circumstances, it was almost inevitable that, like many late Victorians grappling with death in an age of uncertainty, Myers became interested in spiritualism. Two years after the publication of his biography of Wordsworth, he became one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research. He began visiting mediums, writing about apparitions, and engaging in research on clairvoyance and transmundane experience.

He spent his later years developing a theory of the “subliminal self” or “subliminal consciousness,” suggesting that paranormal and mystical events were the product of contact between the realm of the deep unconscious and what he called the “metetherial world.” To describe these mysterious forms of contact, he coined a new word: “telepathy.”

Myers invoked Wordsworth as prime evidence for his theory. Turning to The Prelude, he found numerous instances of “subliminal uprush”—those spots of time in which “the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world.” Lines such as “To hold fit converse with the spiritual world” convinced him that there was a “telaesthetic” quality to Wordsworth’s genius.

The poems’ moments of heightened consciousness “bring with them indefinite intimations of what I hold to be the great truth that the human spirit is essentially capable of a deeper than sensorial perception, of a direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialized organ or any planetary view.”

The word “intimations” is a sign that he was thinking of the great ode and its hope that, contrary to the gloomy pronouncement of George Eliot, there was a form of immortality that allowed the human spirit to survive beyond bodily death.

Adapted from Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, by Jonathan Bate, published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2020 Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

On the Radical Afterlives of William Wordsworth :  A Poet Who Inspired a Generation of Naturalists and Artists.  By Jonathan Bate. LitHub , June 10, 2020.

John Keats​ went walking in the Lake District in June 1818. It was the first decent summer since the eruption of an Indonesian volcano three years before had tipped postwar Europe into a crisis of failed harvests, mass hunger and widespread social unrest. In Britain, Lord Liverpool’s government had suspended Habeas Corpus; Luddite organisers, revolutionary Spenceans and radical journalists had been arrested and tried (with mixed results); the Peterloo Massacre and the repressive ‘Six Acts’ lay just ahead. Windermere surpassed Keats’s expectations: ‘Beautiful water – shores and islands green to the marge – mountains all round up to the clouds’. But it wasn’t just the landscape he had come for. He longed to meet Wordsworth, the poet of liberty and humanity, the great philanthropic voice of the rural poor. He made the seven-mile pilgrimage to Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s scenic home near Ambleside, but it was election season in Westmorland, and the sage of Rydal was out canvassing for the Tories.

Not just any Tories. The Lowther family were landed gentry who also had vast coal-mining interests, and aspired to the political domination of the entire North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the large debt he owed Wordsworth’s late father, who had spent many thankless years as his law agent, was finally settled. But the Lowthers continued to operate much as they had before, and the nine seats they controlled in the Commons were at the heart of Lord Liverpool’s Westminster power base. No one had dared stand against them for more than forty years, but this time their opponent was formidable – Henry Brougham, an energetic liberal who promoted all the wrong causes – and the Lowthers weren’t the kind to leave anything to chance. They used every method available to ensure that nothing went awry: rigging land-tax assessments to disenfranchise Whig voters and bussing in hired heavies to police the hustings. Wordsworth was at the fancy end of the operation, and in Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland he serenely explained that free expression was poisoning minds and reformers were corroding social bonds, so that tough

legislation was needed to avert revolution. Thomas Love Peacock’s summary wasn’t unfair: ‘Wordsworth has published an Address to the Freeholders, in which he says they ought not to choose so poor a man as Brougham, riches being the only guarantees of political integrity.’

Wordsworth wasn’t the only backslider among those who had been radicals during the French Revolution era 25 years earlier. The ‘Lakers’ (as Francis Jeffrey mockingly called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as William Hazlitt neatly observed, only in that he was always an extremist and always wrong: then, he had been an ‘Ultra-Jacobin’ and ‘frantic demagogue’ who ‘did not stop short of general anarchy’; now, he was an ‘Ultra-Royalist’ and ‘servile court-tool’ who ‘goes the whole length of despotism’. Then there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom John Thelwall – a 1790s firebrand who did stick to his guns – remembered as being, in the heyday of Robespierre and Saint-Just, ‘a down right zealous leveller & indeed in one of the worst senses of the word ... a Jacobin, a man of blood’. Now, along with high-minded exercises in conservative philosophy and theology like The Statesman’s Manual (1816), Coleridge was writing combat journalism for the Courier, chief propaganda organ of the Liverpool government.

Even so, there was something about Wordsworth’s political turn that stuck in the craw. The Lakers were all ‘violent and intolerant against their old opinions’, Leigh Hunt wrote during his celebrated stint in prison for seditious libel, but Wordsworth was the genius among them, and for that reason his apostasy was the most distressing. It’s hard to imagine Percy Shelley taking the trouble to write a poem to fluent, facile Southey or even brilliant, underachieving Coleridge (Mary Shelley’s claim that ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ is about him is very doubtful). But Wordsworth was the ‘Poet of Nature’, and Shelley’s sonnet, first published in Alastor (1816), laments the loss of a star that had shone in the winter’s midnight; a voice that had consecrated songs to liberty and truth. Wordsworth may still have been thriving, not least thanks to the Lowthers, who a few years earlier had set him up as distributor of stamps for Westmorland (not a sinecure; there was work involved), but to Shelley he was dead, and should be mourned: ‘Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,/Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.’

For Hazlitt, political disappointment was intensified by the affection he still had for Wordsworth. As well as the usual dismay, Hazlitt’s journalism offers vivid glimpses of Wordsworth’s 1790s prime, his eyes aflame ‘as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance’, and, despite his seriousness, ‘a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth’. When the two men first met in Somerset just before the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth was wearing striped pantaloons (a French-inspired piece of radical chic) and demolishing a Cheshire cheese. He spoke with ‘clear, gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine’.

Apostasy’ is a strong term, though it was often used of Wordsworth at the time (he privately complained about critics ‘who have dealt so liberally with the words “Renegado”, “Apostate” etc’), and it’s still routinely used today. The idea of religious betrayal remains central, just as ‘renegade’ connotes treachery and rebellion that go beyond a mere change of allegiance. Yet how much, in practice, does Wordsworth’s apostasy really matter? Hazlitt and Hunt were smart and open-minded enough to see that being a conservative, or becoming one, doesn’t necessarily make you a bad poet. With far more eloquence than the Tory essayists of the Quarterly Review, they upheld Wordsworth’s literary reputation in the period of The Excursion (1814), extolling the poetry even as they deplored the politics, which they saw simply as a biographical circumstance. Byron lost patience with The Excursion, which he thought turgid, but captured the problem with perfect succinctness: ‘Wordsworth – stupendous genius! damned fool!’

The fact remains that Wordsworth wrote most of his best verse in the 1790s, certainly before 1805, and that his creative decline coincided with (who knows if it was caused by) his embrace of Toryism. In real life, he became poet laureate after Southey and died in 1850 at the age of eighty. But at one point in his lively new biography, Jonathan Bate offers an arresting counterfactual: a skating accident of 1807 in which Wordsworth falls fatally through the ice at 36, Byron’s age at his death in Greece. The two-volume Poems of 1807 would have been in press, but there would have been no Ecclesiastical Sketches (102 flatulent sonnets on Church history, published in 1822). As for The Prelude, Wordsworth’s groundbreaking epic of the self, it would have appeared promptly, one assumes, in the enthralling, exploratory version of 1805, ‘instead of Wordsworth spending nearly forty years revising it, almost always for the worse’. The family would have published other important manuscripts from the Lyrical Ballads era (‘The Ruined Cottage’, ‘The Pedlar’, ‘Home at Grasmere’) that appeared in Wordsworth’s lifetime only in The Excursion, cannabalised and attenuated. Not only his individual reputation but the whole course of poetry would have been changed.

It’s an intriguing thought experiment, entertained with just a bit more relish than you’d expect from a biographer. Bate then moves at speed through the later years (the book is avowedly selective, and mirrors Wordsworth’s aesthetic by preferring ‘spots of time’ to dutiful wholes), playing later poems like the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ or the ecclesiastical sonnet on ‘American Episcopacy’ mainly for laughs. These are sitting ducks (‘But thy most dreaded instrument/In working out a pure intent/Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, –/Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!’), but Wordsworth’s muse was always hit and miss. Bate cuts swathes through the canon, and not much survives after ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’, composed in 1807 but not published until 1815 (‘This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume,’ the Edinburgh Review said). A handful of sonnets like the plangent, elegiac ‘Surprised by Joy’ and a few items from the 1820 River Duddon sequence are worth snatching from the flames, Bate thinks, along with the ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’ (which was not extempore at all – it went through nine manuscript versions and four published ones). But, essentially, ‘the second half of Wordsworth’s life was the longest, dullest decline in literary history.’

This narrative of creative atrophy remains the standard view, and Bate restates it with flair and conviction, while adding his own distinctive emphasis on Wordsworth as a proto-environmentalist. He sidesteps recent reassessments of the later verse, including Stephen Gill’s argument in Wordsworth’s Revisitings (2011) that the revised Prelude of 1850 was much more than a damage-limitation job on a heretical original text. Similar arguments animate the richly revised second edition of Gill’s biography (the first appeared in 1990), which refuses the usual trajectory and instead celebrates ‘a multifaceted, highly creative life of eighty years’. Gill’s Wordsworth is not only the 21-year-old visitor for whom revolutionary Paris was the dawn of bliss, but also the 70-year-old who climbed Helvellyn ‘and composed a fine sonnet as he did so’. The radicalism is one part of the story, and not the only valuable part.

It’s​ worth asking just how radical the early Wordsworth was. As a political term, the word came into use in the late 18th century (cognates like ‘radicalism’ followed in the early 19th) with a meaning that tended to stop short of ‘revolutionary’. A ‘radical’ advocated ‘thorough or far-reaching political reforms’ (the OED cites a 1793 instance referring to Charles James Fox); ‘Jacobin’ was the alternative used to describe more extreme positions that rejected reform. It’s hard to apply the latter term to Wordsworth, even if it was occasionally used of him (despite his meticulous Prelude revisions, Thomas Macaulay could still thunder in 1850 that ‘the poem is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed Socialist’). He was one of many English visitors to Paris between the fall of the Bastille and Robespierre’s Terror, and the experience marked him deeply, but in complex ways. Thanks to a letter of introduction from the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, he met and possibly lodged with the hardline revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and is known to have attended a fiery Jacobin Club debate in December 1791. But Brissot broke with the Jacobins a few months later, and Wordsworth’s connections in Paris were chiefly Girondins – like the Jacobins, supporters of revolutionary violence, but a more moderate faction – such as the journalist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, whose execution he may have witnessed in 1793, the same year Brissot was guillotined. During his months in Orléans and Blois Wordsworth fell in with royalists, and indeed fell in love with one of them, Annette Vallon, the mother of his first child, whose counter-revolutionary activities are recorded in surviving police archives. Personal connection isn’t the same as political conviction, but by the time of the September Massacres of 1792, Wordsworth was clearly questioning his early enthusiasm for a revolution that was already collapsing into mass slaughter and would eventually degenerate into imperialism (he especially deplored the invasion of Switzerland) and dictatorship (Napoleon). His experience is similar to that of the Solitary in Book 3 of The Excursion, who is at first inspired by the French Revolution and the ‘emancipation of the world’ it seems to promise, but then recoils from its militarism and despotism in ‘disappointment and disgust’.

One problem is that by far the fullest biographical source for the Girondin Wordsworth of the early 1790s is the 1805 Prelude, a work preoccupied with the unreliability of memory. The autobiographical subject becomes ‘two consciousnesses’, the described self of the past and the describing self in the present – the latter dealing in imaginative projection as much as in neutral recollection. The Prelude, in other words, explicitly acknowledges that in reconstructing earlier states of mind, it ‘cannot say what portion is in truth/The naked recollection of that time,/And what may rather have been called to life/By after-meditation’. Some of the after-meditation is emphatically political, so that even as the poem recalls a state of revolutionary idealism, it recoils from that state, ‘since juvenile errors are my theme’.

 Wordsworth’s Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff is his closest approach to seditious writing, but this unsigned pamphlet, written in 1793, remained unpublished, and politically Wordsworth lay low, even as others in his circle became notorious. He didn’t make it into the most famous conservative satire of the era, James Gillray’s exuberant cartoon New Morality (1798), which places Coleridge and Southey alongside grotesque caricatures of the revolutionary virtues Justice, Philanthropy and Sensibility (Sensibility caresses a dead bird while trampling on a human head). His one action as a revolutionary was a non-event, best known from Coleridge’s comic version in Biographia Literaria (1817), in which a dim-witted Home Office agent called James Walsh overhears the pair discussing ‘Spy Nozy’ (Spinoza) and assumes they’ve found him out. Wordsworth and Coleridge were in Somerset at the time, walking, talking, composing material for Lyrical Ballads and receiving visitors including Thelwall in his trademark white hat (which falls into the same category as Wordsworth’s striped pantaloons). Wordsworth’s eccentricities scared the natives, the Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle recalled: one ‘saw him wander about by night, and look rather strangely at the moon!’; another ‘heard him mutter, as he walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand!’; a third suspected that ‘he carries on a snug business in the smuggling line’; a fourth thought him ‘surely a desperd French jacobin, for he is so silent and dark, that no body ever heard him say one word about politics!’ The Home Office agent suspected that the group were prospecting for an invasion site, then concluded that this was ‘no French affair but a mischiefuous gang of disaffected Englishmen ... a Sett of violent Democrats’. His bosses in London lost interest.

In his poetry, Wordsworth never went as far as Coleridge, whose ‘war eclogue’ of 1794, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, imagines the assassination of the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, with alarming enthusiasm (‘They shall seize him and his brood –/They shall tear him limb from limb!’). In fragments like ‘The Pedlar’ as well as several of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth placed figures of dispossession at the heart of his verse, while frequently implying, and occasionally saying, that their plight demanded political action: ‘’Tis against that/Which we are fighting’, the revolutionary Beaupuy declares in The Prelude, pointing to ‘a hunger-bitten Girl’. It was Wordsworth’s attempt not only to imagine low rustic life but to adopt its language that led Hazlitt to talk of his ‘levelling Muse’. Hazlitt even claimed that ‘Jacobin principles’ gave rise in both Wordsworth and Coleridge to ‘Jacobin poetry ... Their genius, their style, their versification, every thing down to their spelling, was revolutionary.’ But in terms of language at least, Wordsworth could never catch the authentic voice from below as Robert Burns or John Clare did, or deplore the politics of dispossession with anything like their authority. Some of the most interesting (and painful) moments in Lyrical Ballads come when he reflects self-consciously on his remoteness from peasant experience and language – his patrician distance (despite that northern burr) from subalterns who cannot speak. ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’ is a poem about poverty, age and tragic incapacity, from the perspective of an elite passer-by who tries to enter into the predicament of the once powerful hunter. He does so clumsily, and makes it worse. In a passage laden with sly hints of emasculation, old Simon hacks feebly for hours at a root which the speaker casually severs with a single blow. Simon weeps, superficially with thanks, but implicitly with a recognition of his own enfeeblement – his now irretrievable state of being ‘overtasked’ in life. The ballad ends in tones that include self-reproach: ‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds/With coldness still returning./Alas! the gratitude of men/Has oftner left me mourning.’

In 1801, Wordsworth congratulated a reader of Lyrical Ballads for identifying the pathos of the poems as ‘the pathos of humanity’ and not ‘jacobinal pathos’; only ‘bad poets and misguided men’, he wrote, would yoke their verse to a political cause. By the first years of the 19th century his retreat from radicalism was well under way, but perhaps the radicalism was never unqualified. And perhaps it never completely died. The elderly Wordsworth can still surprise us, as he certainly surprised the Chartist Thomas Cooper when, fresh from Stafford jail, Cooper showed up unannounced at Rydal Mount in 1846. Wordsworth welcomed Cooper in and applauded the aims, though not the methods, of the Chartist movement (‘I have no respect for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me,’ he said on another occasion). Cooper left ‘with a more intense feeling of having been in the presence of a good and great intelligence, than I had ever felt in any other moments of my life’.

Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who Changed the World

by Jonathan Bate.

William Collins, 608 pp., £25, April, 978 0 00 816742 4

William Wordsworth: A Life

by Stephen Gill.

Oxford, new edition, 688 pp., £25, April, 978 0 19 881711 6

After-Meditation. By Thomas Keymer. The London Review of Books,  June 18 , 2020

“The second half of William Wordsworth’s life was the longest, dullest decline in literary history.” Jonathan Bate must be Wordsworth’s greatest champion, but such is his considered opinion. The decline was certainly long. Wordsworth was born 250 years ago, in 1770. In his revelatory biography, Bate devotes more than 260 pages to the poet’s first 36 years, a formative and surprisingly political period. A mere 94 pages dispose of the four further decades until his death in 1850. By then Wordsworth had become a “Lake Poet”, growing in fame as he slid into Toryism and ease.

But those early years and his posthumous influence are astonishing. As when a conservator carefully swabs away from an oil painting the crusty accretions and gunk of ages to reveal shining colours and unexpected detail – so Jonathan Bate sets about the youthful Wordsworth, and shows us, page by page, just how world-changing he really was. Gone are the daffodils forced upon resentful school-children. Out steps a master poet of self, memory, loss, revolution and the natural world.

Bate opens his book at a crucial time, not the birth of baby William but a tipping point: Christmas 1806. The poet is spending the holiday at Coleorton in Leicestershire, in the intimate company of his wife Mary, their three children, his sister Dorothy, and sister-in-law Sara. His old friend Samuel Coleridge joins the party, bringing his own son, but Coleridge is bloated by now, in trouble with opium and alcohol. As entertainment for the gathering, Wordsworth begins to read nightly instalments of a long new poem, dedicated to Coleridge. It is an epic, no less.

Until then, epics had been the haunts of gods and heroes. But night by night Wordsworth reads aloud an epic about himself. An autobiography in verse. Extraordinary! It covers his boyhood days in the Lake District, evoking landscapes familiar to everyone assembled. It discloses particular personal memories, those “spots of time”, which Wordsworth, quite sure of himself, called the “hiding places of my power”. It follows his youthful adventures in France and his then enthusiastic support for the principles of the French Revolution. The work remained unpublished in his lifetime; he had meant it to precede an even longer poem, hence its eventual name, “The Prelude”.

Nowadays, epic poetry is banished and bookshelves groan with memoir and nature-autobiographies. It’s hard to imagine a time before their existence. Indeed, we may have come too far with our “I” – in her 2019 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the novelist Olga Tokarczuk said that the sheer success of the first person narrator was “akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all travelling similar routes, drowning one another out”. But in 1806, it was unheard of for a poet to explore his own self-development. This self-creating was quite new. Bate says Wordsworth was the first master poet of memory.

***

Wordsworth needed memory. By the time of that gathering, there had been many losses. William and his siblings had been orphaned when William was 13, their mother having died when he was only eight. His beloved sister Dorothy had been sent away; they were not reunited until he was 24. A brother was lost at sea. These were the personal griefs, and more were to come. He would become “a poet of twilight and mourning”, setting the elegiac tone of English verse.

But before the grief, there had been hope. Principally, the hope of radical political change, as imagined by the French Revolution.

Wordsworth's career as a Cambridge undergraduate was lacklustre. When it was over, jobless but with a developing sense of poetic vocation, he set off for France. He was 22 and those were heady days of revolution and possibility. This was Wordsworth’s second trip to France. Two years previously, in the summer of 1790, he had undertaken a walking tour with his friend Robert Jones. Then, as the pair wandered south to the Alps, they’d found France en fête, celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. On the subsequent trip, begun in 1791, he travelled alone. He was anxious to meet with a woman called Helen Maria Williams who was already resident in Paris. Williams was a poet he admired; she had allied herself enthusiastically with the revolutionary cause and was reporting from the front line. (Bate is rigorous in restoring women to their full role in the times, as poets, novelists, artists and influencers, as well as lovers and helpmeets.) In Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth saw a role model: perhaps he too could become a poet involved with a cause, embedded in France. He attended the National Assembly and Jacobin Club, visited the ruined Bastille, then travelled south to Orléans, and in due course met Annette Vallon.

Vallon, four years his senior, born to a class of “respectable burghers”, met Wordsworth through her brother, a notary’s clerk, whom she was visiting, and became his informal French tutor. When she had to return home to the city of Blois, Wordsworth went too – the couple were in love. In December 1792 their daughter Caroline was born, but William had already left. With no means of support, and with war imminent between England and France, he had had no option but to return home. So his lover and new daughter were also lost to him. (There was no real reunion until Caroline was ten. However, links were maintained and Dorothy had intended to attend Caroline’s wedding in 1814 – again, prevented by politics. Wordsworth gave Caroline a marriage settlement. Annette Vallon was by then a monarchist.)

After the rousing French experience there came political grief and the death of hope, which weighed especially heavy. Whatever France in fervour had represented, when it was “bliss in that dawn to be alive”, it soon collapsed into violence and terror. Wordsworth witnessed the aftermath of the massacre when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace, King Louis XVI’s residence, in Paris on 10 August 1792. Wordsworth supported the moderate republican Girondin faction, but Girondins were being guillotined. However, the original impulse remained dear. The young poet even wrote a pamphlet “by a republican”. It attacked monarchy and nobility, denounced war and poverty and was deemed so seditious, no publisher could touch it.

So it was back to England, alone, to find a future. A cottage was taken where at last, William could send for his sister Dorothy to join him, so fulfilling her dream. Then he met the powerfully minded Coleridge, and as the tripartite relationship intensified, the cottage was exchanged for Alfoxden House in Somerset, close enough to Coleridge for frequent visits, and much nature-walking. So began the annus mirabilis of 1798. Coleridge’s philosophical turn of mind enabled Wordsworth to extend his capacity for strong feeling and landscape. Wordsworth started writing his autobiographical fragments. Dorothy was companion and amanuensis. Visitors were frequent, and the whole menage became so alarming to the government that spies were sent from London to report.

During that year together Wordsworth and Coleridge planned a collaborative book, in a diction they called “natural and simple”: it was published in 1798 as Lyrical Ballads. The last poem Wordsworth squeezed in was “Tintern Abbey”. With wonderful elan, close reading and detective work, Bate blows the chalk-dust away from this poem and presents it anew. It shines with edginess. Its full title is “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” but the “few miles” might have been as many as 15. Dorothy and William were prodigious walkers. Fifteen miles upriver of the abbey, the topography fits the poem’s description, with “steep and lofty cliffs”. It is in this poem that Wordsworth declares himself a worshipper of nature. It doesn’t cause much frisson now, but at the time nature-worshipping was dangerously close to blasphemy. Bate notes that the poem is not about Tintern Abbey at all. Rather, Wordsworth sings the living landscape, well away from the Christian ruins. “Tintern Abbey” is a poem about individual spirit and landscape “in which he was signalling his retreat from radical politics and articulating a radical alternative religion of nature”. Worse, he even implicates his female companion in this dangerous stuff, his “dear, dear Sister”.

It was William Hazlitt, one of the many visitors to Alfoxden, who first sensed that Lyrical Ballads would set a “new style and new spirit” in poetry. Political revolution having failed, he reckoned the two poets were striving to bring about a literary revolution just as radical, whereby, as Bate puts it, “liberty, equality and fraternity should be introduced into the realm of high culture instead”. Reviews were mixed.

The following year, along with the dear sister, Wordsworth was located in Grasmere in the Lake District, the place that will be forever associated with him, and thinking about his next project – a personal, located, grounded epic; a paradise found.

***

Bate’s book is thrilling on Wordsworth’s times and contemporaries. They were calamitous days, exciting and strange. Days somewhat like our own, but also utterly alien. Bate finds radicalism everywhere in Wordsworth. His fellow-feeling, as evinced in poems about vagrants, convicts and beggars, could be construed by the various authorities as overdemocratic and seditious. Radical also is the “normal” language employed, the everyday diction (we are deaf to it now). Even his blank verse is deemed a radical step; it overthrew the mannered couplets of immediate predecessors such as Pope, and delved back to Shakespeare. Bate describes the blank verse Wordsworth mastered as supple, thought-carrying, river-like, individual – we are implored to read it aloud.

But all things come to an end. By 1806 Wordsworth’s relationship with Coleridge was strained. His friend, the intellectual dynamo who had energised Wordsworth, was stepping aside – or being airbrushed out. Wordsworth was pulling ahead; he knew in his bones he was creating the taste by which he would be judged. There would be further griefs, but he was living well in the Lakes, married and the centre of a happy household with three fond women. A sinecure provided an income. Whose energies would not be dissipated?

Bate conducts a rather brutal thought experiment. What if Wordsworth had died then, at 36, as Byron did? What if, during that cold winter of 1806, having already given us the Lyrical Ballads and his “Prelude” with its famous ice-skating “spot of time”, he had strapped on his skates again, but this time had slipped through the ice and been lost? What would have been denied to English poetry? Not much, Bate says, except one sonnet. Wordsworth’s best work was done. He had achieved a massive shift of consciousness, and become a self. He had brought about the English version of the French revolution, substituted nature for a deity. He had insisted on a poetry of common language. But he lived, and Bate’s judgement is pretty damning. “His unremitting later voice... was a counter-spirit which laid waste his powers, subverted his ideals and vitiated his reputation among the creative spirits of the next generation.” In 1843 the seditious pamphleteer became Poet Laureate.

But there is the legacy. After some scathing reviews came his growth in fame and influence. Nowadays, the figure of early Wordsworth stands behind an entire attitude to landscape and to nature. He is behind the National Trust, and the Lake District as we now know and understand it. He is behind the Yosemite National Park, founded by John Muir, who had made a pilgrimage to the poet’s Grasmere grave.

And there’s more. As in his book The Song of the Earth, Bate argues that poetry, only poetry, will save the Earth. Wordsworth foresaw the industrial era and the consequent alienation and environmental damage it would bring. Wordsworth was responsible for the dramatic shift which enabled a poetry that would route us back to a love of fellow creatures, and of nature itself. A radical poetry, not politics or religion, enables us to love the natural world. Wordsworth stands behind that love, says Bate. And what we love we save.

The radical lessons of William Wordsworth. By Kathleen Jamie. New Statesman , April  7, 2020

In 1798, William Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at the cottage of his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Twenty-five years later, William Hazlitt, who was also in residence at the time, still remembered his first sight of the future poet laureate, a tall “Don Quixote-like” figure, quaintly dressed in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was, wrote Hazlitt, “a roll in his gait” and a “fire in his eye”; when he began to talk, he heard in Wordsworth’s voice “a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine”. The poet “instantly began to make havoc” of a Cheshire cheese that was on Coleridge’s table.

The year 1798 was a miraculous one for Coleridge and Wordsworth, their glorious bromance as yet unpolluted by jealousy and opium (Coleridge), pomposity and indiscretion (Wordsworth). There, on the edge of the Quantocks – they were not yet the Lakeland Poets – Wordsworth wrote Tintern Abbey and Coleridge Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Striding out in the countryside, accompanied by Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, they talked of Shakespeare and Spinoza, their brains, like their lungs, expanding with every stride. The atmosphere, all poetry and high-mindedness, was exciting, even febrile. But Britain was also at war with France, and young men of odd appearance and grand ideas were apt to attract attention. Word of their activities having reached the wrong ears, a government spy was dispatched to observe them. What this emissary made of Wordsworth’s striped pantaloons is, alas, not known.

In his marvellous new biography of Wordsworth, it’s as if Jonathan Bate has inhaled the very air these two young men breathed; there is a giddiness here – a passionate enthusiasm – that’s all too rare in books about poets, particularly those who, having failed to die young, grew stodgy in later life. In an exhilarating preface, Bate sets out his stall: his book will be shorter than most biographies of Wordsworth, and rather than aiming for comprehensiveness – not for him the dreary opening chapter in which the writer lingers in a graveyard, spouting ancestors – he will seek to explain “the distinctive qualities of the subject’s imaginative power”. What this means, in effect, is that once Wordsworth’s talent fizzles – a process for which the seeds were sown in 1806, when his relationship with Coleridge first ran into trouble, and continued until his death at the age of 80 in 1850 – he, too, will wind down; only a quarter of Radical Wordsworth’s pages are devoted to Wordsworth’s last decades. But even with the early life, he’s wildly selective. This is a narrative that celebrates the fact that our lives are marked by turning points, not routine: the “spots of time” of which Wordsworth wrote in his masterpiece, The Prelude.

There are a few inconsequential (if delightful) details among the pages of Radical Wordsworth: before his finals at Cambridge, for instance, the poet preferred to read Samuel Richardson’s salacious novel Clarissa than to swot. But in the main, Bate focuses on the major, not the minor. Wordsworth’s was a death-shadowed life – his parents were gone before he was 13 – and perhaps it was this, a heart cracked young, that enabled him to turn relatively easily away from Annette Vallon, the woman he fell in love with in revolutionary France in 1792, and with whom he had a daughter, Anne-Caroline (the war with France hardly explains it, particularly given that she was a royalist who would have been safer in England). Did he see friends guillotined in Paris? Bate speculates that he did – and perhaps this played a part in his later Conservatism (in 1818, John Keats was disappointed to find, on arriving at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s home near Ambleside, that his hero was out campaigning for the Tories). Fanaticism, like bereavement, freezes certain internal organs.

Bate sees Coleridge’s friendship as crucial to the period of Wordsworth’s greatest creativity – this, and his celibacy between the age of 22 (post-Vallon) and 32 (when he married Mary Hutchinson). His reading of Wordsworth’s life is Freudian – the poet’s sexual frustration was surely sublimated into his verse – but he also notes that Wordsworth anticipated Freud by writing the first fully autobiographical poem in English, in the form of The Prelude: a work, published posthumously, that sighs and thrums with what Freud (after Romain Rolland, a professor of music at the Sorbonne) called “oceanic feeling”; a powerful sense of the eternal. For Freud, such spirituality is the attempt of the unconscious to recover that time in our lives – our childhood – when there was no separation between the self and the world: a time when, as Wordsworth put it, all “seemed apparelled in celestial light”.

This notion, for me, has to do with awe, and though the worst of Wordsworth’s poems make one’s jaw drop with scorn rather than wonderment (think of The Thorn, in which the poet helpfully offers, like some half-arsed estate agent, the precise measurements of “a little muddy pond”), this is what The Prelude stirs in the reader: first recognition, and then reverence, a racing sense that the numinous is all around. Wordsworth’s relationship with Dorothy was uncommonly intense, the result of their having been separated as children; on the night before his marriage, she wore Mary’s wedding ring to bed. She was more than his great companion, housekeeper and amanuensis. Her ability so precisely to record the natural world was a gift she willingly gave to him; he’d no need to appropriate.

But to her exactitude her brother adds, at his finest, something that’s almost impossible to describe: a prayerfulness that stops the heart, whether you believe in God or not. In these days of seclusion, when we loiter indoors, grey-skinned and melancholy, The Prelude is just what some of us need – and it’s for this, above all, that I want to thank Bate now. After I finished his inspiriting, fleet-footed book, in which he embroiders together life, poetry and landscape with such dexterity, I pulled down my old university copy from the shelf. It might have been a bag of pasta, so greedily did I fall on it.

• Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate is published by William Collins (£25)

Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate review – fleet-footed and inspiriting. By Rachel Cooke. The Guardian ,  April 14 , 2020

'The sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me', wrote William Hazlitt, recalling the day in 1798 when he heard William Wordsworth reading aloud from Lyrical Ballads, 'It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age'.

Jonathan Bate will explain what Hazlitt meant and why Lyrical Ballads, the product of Wordsworth's intimate friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of the greatest and most influential volumes of poetry ever written.

A lecture by Professor Sir Jonathan Bate CBE FBA, Professor of Rhetoric,  Museum of London, 16 October 2018

Gresham College