The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘That inward eye/ that is the bliss of solitude’
Wordsworth’s gracious straightforwardness revolutionised English verse, says poet Fiona Sampson
On April 7 it will be 250 years since William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumbria. In usual times we’d probably already be surfeited by anniversary celebrations, for the land agent’s son who grew up to become Poet Laureate has long been a fixture in the poetry canon. Popular consciousness has press-ganged “I wandered lonely as a cloud” into cliché, and there’s still a sense at the back of the collective mind of his poetry as cosy pastoral, a “national treasure”.
In fact, he is the most contemporary of truth tellers.
Too matter of fact – perhaps too much the northerner? – to claim that poetry is prophecy, as successors like Percy Bysshe Shelley did, Wordsworth was nevertheless a true radical. A leader, both on and off the page, of the first generation of British romantic poets, he changed the way verse in English speaks, and what it speaks about. Bringing it closer to the way language is used all around it, and showing that ordinary lives and personal experience – our relationship with the world – are fit topics for literature, he reclaimed poetry from the groves of self-referential classical allusion – and dull impersonality. His social reframing of “high art” influenced social thinkers from John Ruskin and his successors right up to Britain’s post-war arts education movement. The pioneering psychological insights that generated it, including ideas about overwhelming “oceanic feeling” and the transformative work of memory, would even be explored by Sigmund Freud.
So celebrations are called for, and have already included Jonathan Bate’s rich, layered BBC Radio 4 miniseries In Wordsworth’s Footsteps, with poems read by Simon Russell Beale, available online. Since January the British Library, currently closed, has been showcasing its holdings, particularly manuscripts and letters, in William Wordsworth, an exhibition which was due to run through May. The Child is Father of the Man, artefacts from William and Dorothy’s childhoods, was briefly unveiled in mid-March by the National Trust’s Wordsworth House and Garden in Cockermouth, Cumbria and, scheduled until November, will likely be accessible at some point.
Most substantially, the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere is in the middle of Reimagining Wordsworth, several years and £6.2million in the making, which was to see the reopening of Dove Cottage – with a new learning centre, walks, and a reconstruction of the poet’s writing “moss hut” – on April 7 itself; and, at the heart of a programme of commissions, the summer reopening of the Trust’s museum, with new galleries, and exhibitions from its extraordinary archive. This is a huge piece of public-facing curatorial work and it’s not yet clear how access will be managed: one lesson of the times we’re living in is that we have to support such centres of excellence so they can continue.
Another lesson, of course, is the renewed pleasure of reading. The best editions of the poet are Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton), edited by Nicholas Halmi, or Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth Selected Poems (Penguin Classics). Wordsworth is at his best as an everyman companion, writing with a kind of gracious straightforwardness that allows him to say complex things, as when “The Excursion” describes how little separates us from what absorbs us, especially when that’s the natural world:
…sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him. They
swallowed up
His animal being: in them did
he live
Wordsworth reminds us that countryside is a great consolatory resource, one we can turn to with “that inward eye/That is the bliss of solitude” in times as fearfully novel as our own. But also that it is workplace and home to ordinary people: even at their most inspiring, the landscapes of this inveterate walker and explorer are inhabited. These two strands of environmental thinking come together like a manifesto in the subtitle of The Prelude: Book 8: “Love of Nature leading to Love of Mankind”.
So the publication in April of not one but two biographies is a great excuse to stop doom-surfing and settle to a story that, while taking the mind off the here and now, also speaks directly to our lives today. Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (William Collins, £25) addresses what the poet achieved: on, and then through, the page. The life story illuminates this achievement. Instead of a lengthy march from cradle to grave, Bate concentrates on its key moments. He cites Wordsworth’s own notion of “spots of time”, those depth-charge moments of sharp awareness and self-awareness, to license this approach, which works admirably. Radical Wordsworth is a bold and bracing account, masterful with its material, patiently brilliant in reading the poems, and gloriously convincing about its subject’s social significance.
The great puzzle is “how the first half of Wordsworth’s life was such an extraordinary adventure and the second half so dull” and, still more pertinently, “why the poetry of the first half is so memorable, that of the second so forgettable”. When he died at 80 in 1850, loaded with official honours yet almost completely blocked as a writer, the poet’s enduring work and the famous relationships that framed it were far behind him. He had survived the contempt of the second generation of romantic poets – Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley mocked him even as they absorbed his use of personal feeling, modern forms and revolutionary ideas – to become a Victorian literary monument. He had also outlived the friendship communities of his young manhood, making the shift to conventional marriage and family life.
Bate gives us a finely authoritative reading, rather than simple record, of Wordsworth’s life, showing how the start was as idealistic as the end was conventional. Young William, who lost his mother at seven and his father at 13, spent his childhood largely as a boarder at school and with distant relatives: so learning both the potency of “retrospect”,
His ideas of ‘oceanic feeling’ and memory’s transformative power impressed Freud
and how to build a community of peers. The closely-linked working life he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge established from 1797, variously including his own “sister-wife” Dorothy and Coleridge’s family, gave us the first, 1798 edition of their Lyrical Ballads which opened the era of English romantic poetry, and 1805’s “Poem to Coleridge”, later The Prelude, the secret masterpiece with which Wordsworth continued to tinker all his life. Robert Southey, Coleridge’s first co-author, was another intimate colleague; in 1799 the Wordsworths followed him home to the Lakes. But the original of all these partnerships was a Cambridge friendship. In 1790 Wordsworth went on an Alpine walking tour with Robert Jones (later he would discover Tintern and the Wye Valley en route to visit Jones in Wales) which inspired his return to France in 1791-92. Then he witnessed history in the bloody making, fell in love, and fathered a child.
Even without such first-hand experience, this was the heyday of British radicalism, led by philosophers like William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Clearsighted romanticism stirringly linked daily life and idealism: “We see into the life of things.” So it’s no surprise that Jonathan Bate ends by brilliantly corralling the legacies of his subject’s recognition that “the pristine earth [is] man’s only dwelling”: including the National Trust and US National Parks. What Wordsworth thought changed the way we think.
Reading parallel versions of a life underlines just how much biography is an interpretive art. While Radical Wordsworth is the distillation of a lifetime’s expertise by a leading scholar and biographer, Andrew Wordsworth’s Well-Kept Secrets: The Story of William Wordsworth (£24.95; see bit.ly/WordsworthDT to order for £19.95 plus £3 p&p) is written by the poet’s great-great-great nephew, an artist. Nevertheless it too is the outcome of a lifetime of intimate obsession. Full of creative insights, it smartly sexualises the young poet’s surrounding conceptual world. Of the illegitimate daughter in Revolutionary France, Andrew Wordsworth comments, “The ‘overflow’ of spirits among the new citoyens […] was matched by the ejaculation […] which marked Caroline’s conception.” At the other end of his subject’s life, he observes how Dorothy in her dementia became “someone who made a mockery of the principle of continuity through memory”. Though the female domestic labour that enabled it gets subsumed by William Wordsworth’s life-story, Secrets is particularly good on the daughters: French Caroline, beloved companion Dora – and little Catherine, who died at three and a half.
The portrait that emerges from this smart and thoughtful book is of a poet who loved movement and silence. And we must remember to balance the private with the public man. For as Bate reminds us, Wordsworth’s “great argument is that it is our task, our duty, to understand our dependence on the environment. If we so do, we will learn to love each other.” Or as the poet himself so topically put it:
The world is too much with us;
late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours; […] For this, for every thing, we
are out of tune.
Fiona Sampson’s Come Down (Corsair) is out this spring