For The Prelude course: March 11 1997
1. Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton UP, 1971).
It seems strange that on the one hand there is the usual and often inordinate reaction to Wordsworth's preoccupation with himself, his self-elaborating egoism, and on the other hand a wish that he had been able to leave a more whole and poetically satisfying account of himself, implying the ability to have been even more perfectly preoccupied. If we are interested in poetic autobiography, the vicissitudes of such a preoccupation with the self, the poet's dissatisfactions with the project and with himself, his inability to finish with satisfaction, or even to finish, become of compelling rather than marginal interest. The Prelude is all we have as a record of a very complex intention, and we tend to ignore the nature of the complexity. When The Prelude has not simply been mined for its richest passages of Wordsworthian poetry, it has served mostly as a repository of quotations about Wordsworth himself for those who retell his story by alternately quoting and paraphrasing him. What I propose in a critical reading of the poem is to open another avenue of inquiry: there is the nature of the attempt to be considered.
In a poetic autobiographical account of the growth of a poet's mind, it would be useful to emphasize the inventive sense along with the recollective sense of the I-speaking character, and remember that the poet is creating a character, is "characterizing" himself, by using both Memory and Imagination. The selective recollection and the evaluation of facts are employed to exemplify what the poet "imagines" himself to have been and asserts that he is; for him, the remembered facts and their imagined and asserted significance are inseparable. He is accounting for the "Growth of a Poet's Mind." The selection, evaluation, and belief in exemplary experiences are simultaneous; they animate the poetry with metaphor, with a causal sense of what "growth" is and what becoming a poet is. Since the poet's skill at making poetry is being used to account for the making of himself in the character of poet, what we ordinarily associate with the imaginative invention of a character in literature is being used as the sustained activity of self-invention. By finding poetic connections between the facts of growth and the causation and development of imaginative powers, the poet invents himself as poet. Wordsworth's mind can account for becoming the poet only by accounting to itself for becoming Wordsworth. It follows, then, that the ability to write poetry is crucial to any sense that that mind has of being what it claims -- to be not only a poet, but Wordsworth. When one compares the heightened self-consciousness of such a claim (and of such activity) with the random, mostly prosaic, and often inarticulate sense that people have of having become themselves, one should say at the outset that if Wordsworth is perhaps compelled to remember and imagine his growth, most people are, in some sense of the word, compelled not to. One should allow that it does not "just" happen that the poet does and most people do not. (pp. 5-7)
[The Simplon Pass episode]
The ideal poet would see clearly the relationships between the objects of the invisible world and the suggestive traces of them in the visible world, between his dimmest memories and his most immediate personal experiences, and express these relationships clearly. Wordsworth, in this instance, is less than ideal, but it is his imaginative recollection of the descent through the Alps that makes these passages much more than a memory. In the Revelation passage [vi.617-640 (1850)], the Poet perceives the mountain as a mind like his own trying to utter something, a Revelation from its depths. Wordsworth knew that poetry had the power to present "objects recognized/ In flashes,'' [V.628-9] even if, as I shall argue, we reconstruct what those objects may be, whereas Wordsworth presents only an urgent sense of something to be realized, which suggests them to us.
In the Imagination passage, the realization that "our being's heart and home/ Is with infinitude and only there" follows immediately, if not exactly clearly from the flash that reveals "the invisible world." I should mention here again the connections already made between the "abyss of idealism," recalled from childhood (here, the same as the "mind's abyss") and "the visible world." Opposed to the pull inwards to the abyss was the attempt to accept the visible world in place of what had been lost, even though such an acceptance is partial: "I was left alone,/ Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why . . ." (II, 29l-293). It was not an acceptance of otherness for its own sake, but an acceptance of a substitute for the mother, upon which many of the dependent needs endangered by her loss could be projected. I have made, too, the connection between the journey- metaphor in "our being's heart and home/ Is with infinitude and only there" and the journey-metaphor in
she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves:
She left us destitute, and as we might
Trooping together . . .
(V, 257-260)
What, however, is "infinitude"?
The sense of eternity in Wordsworth resembles the narcissism of infancy before the differentiation of the "self" and "other" which is the beginning of a life in time. Yet despite the prolonged initial period of dependency in childhood, the gradual differentiation of the self begun in infancy implies an increasing necessity for autonomy, for a wholeness of being which, always completing itself, feels like "something evermore about to be." But when Wordsworth says
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be,
we might mislead ourselves as to the goal of this journey by inferring only its latent Christian meaning. An actual journey expressive of human aspiration in the world had resulted in dejection, but a metaphorical journey modeled on it and interrupted by the flash of Imagination-Revelation has resulted in joy. It is easy to see how "hope that can never die" can sustain effort and expectation and desire; it is easy to imagine how the Christian sense of the continuous access to being -- "something evermore about to be" --comes out of this sense that the soul never dies. In beatitude (at "mystical" moments in life and in salvation after death) the soul reaches its completion by coming to rest in God's order, which is infinitude and "our being's heart and home." By assuming Christian meanings for the soul here we will miss what else this meant to Wordsworth. One could say, for instance, that from such realizations Wordsworth strengthens his awareness of soul: life is the Christian wayfarer's transit to Eternity; and one would expect a consequent pious humility of the kind that the older Wordsworth struggled to attain. Wordsworth had expressed something like that desire for the extinction of self elsewhere:
By such communion I was early taught
That what we see of forms and images
Which float along our minds and what we feel
Of active, or recognizable thought
Prospectiveness, intelligence or will
Not only is not worthy to be deemed
Our being, to be prized as what we are
But is the very littleness of life.
Such consciousnesses seemed but accidents
Relapses from the one interior life
Which is in all things, from that unity
In which all beings live with God, are lost
In God and nature, in one mighty whole . . .
(MS RV 1-16)-- In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in one mighty whole.
(MS 2 of "Peter Bell")
And yet, it is curious that this is the passage that Wordsworth never used in The Prelude. One might suspect instead, then, that in the Imagination passage the self is trying to master the longings of the soul as it discovers them, and to assimilate the soul to the self. Ultimately it was his failure in this attempt that resulted in the development of its latent Christian meaning by the older Wordsworth, but at this earlier time of life, the problem for Wordsworth was still to find in the troubled sense of himself the acceptable form of poetic self-consciousness with which to believe in his ideal self.
In the Imagination passage, what should be remarked, then, is not the intimations of a Christian soul, but the way the poet emphasizes the joy of increase in consciousness. "But to my conscious soul I now can say -- 'I recognize thy glory.'" And "greatness," a personal quality, is seen in the "strength of usurpation" of Imagination in one's own mind. Whatever "soul" is, its claims upon the attention of the self are increased by the self's feeling of dissatisfaction with its activities in the world. For Wordsworth, every response to the visible world and every journey somewhere is relieved of disappointment only by the journey-metaphor, which extends and completes the activity of the self by affording it a poetic access to the deeper feeling of soul. But one should say here, too, that the poetry-making self discovers that the powers released in the mind, if one could master them, are like God's. One can see in this experience of Imagination that the "awful power" of the mind might fuse in poetry facts and feelings that have persisted unrelated and unrealized in Memory. This power from an unconscious source, which can break through the repressions that ordinarily limit the self, can alter consciousness and the sense of personal worth. To understand the possible non-Christian meaning of "infinitude," one must question the moments of increased consciousness. (pp. 147-151)
The metaphorical journey in the Imagination passage, directed towards an "infinitude" that is "our being's heart and home" associated with the mother, is to be further explained by the passage about the public road and by the footnote [XIII.146-51 (1850)]. One can see the crossing of the Alps according to the child's imagination about the road across the "summit of a far off hill." Its meaning and the meaning of "infinitude" are made clearer by the more probable sense of "eternity" that the child had. In this simile "like a guide into eternity/ At least to things unknown and without bound," the road that Wordsworth now associates with "eternity" was really associated with disappearance, "a disappearing line"; and beyond that, with death-as-disappearance: the line that disappears over a summit from here -- home, this vale, Cockermouth -- towards "things unknown and without bound" is associated with not-here, away, gone, absent, distant. What has "disappeared" is missing from the known and the bounded. Death is as sophisticated a notion as eternity and as difficult for a child to comprehend in his feelings, whereas this simpler childish sense of away and absent can deny the absoluteness of "lost." "Dead" would mean unfindable-in-place-or-time. Taking-the-road, with the repression of the traumatic reasons for doing so, is an unconscious attempt to go after and find again what has disappeared. It is an attempt which, on the literal level, becomes restless and dissatisfied searching for the unnameable lost object and a lost condition. There is present in this activity another unconscious attempt to repeat something about the trauma in action: a lifetime of "wandering" and "setting-off" would repeat actively what, in the original disappearance, was experienced passively. But we shall observe presently how Wordsworth came to feel oppressed by his own ideal of the Wanderer and of the lonely traveller as the Poet fixed in his role.
In the passage "Oh! next to one dear state of bliss . . . ," [XII.127-144 (1805)] I find this early and traumatic sense of disappearance. The passage seems not to be recalling an experience of adolescence or of early adulthood but rather a sense of road and traveller from deep in the poet's troubled identity -- that is to say, from childhood. There was a beloved in earliest childhood, and a vale from which it would have been "misery to stir," especially to seek solitude. A traumatic disappearance was the cause of a subsequent melancholy preference for solitude and wandering; it came to seem to him the only alternative "delight." On the metaphorical level, journeying is more noticeably accompanied by the unconscious attempt of the repetition- compulsion to force upon the conscious mind the painful facts necessary to an understanding of the "journey." This is because on the metaphorical level, the conscious attempt to express in poetry the feeling of dissatisfaction with the activities of the self seems to provoke this preconscious phenomenon of "usurpation" in the mind. (pp. 156-7)
2. David S. Miall, "Wordsworth and The Prelude: the Problematics of Feeling," Studies in Romanticism, 31 (1992), 233-253.
[Scripting the Self]
It is the mother's "presence" that, by a type of induction, arouses the feelings of the infant -- a presence communicated by touch as well as sight. Her presence validates the infant's feelings, endowing them with strength and power "in all sentiments of grief, / Of exultation, fear and joy" (II.270-1). This term for the mother, "presence," is also employed to account for the effect of nature: the "presences of Nature, in the sky / Or on the earth" (I.490) that imbue natural scenes with feeling; "the one presence . . . the life / Of the great whole" (III.130-1). It is in a similar vein that Wordsworth speaks figuratively of the "face" of nature: "the earth / And common face of Nature spake to me / Rememberable things" I.614-6); "my mind hath looked / Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven / As her prime teacher" (V.11-13). Again, it is the "face" that authorizes the feelings that Wordsworth develops. In this presence or from this "face" the truths of nature's "speech" (ie., Wordsworth's correspondent feelings) are guaranteed, rather as in ordinary discourse we can be certain of the meaning of a persons' speech only when we are also able to assess facial expression, tone of voice and body language (thus eliminating as far as possible the inherent free play of language). On the other hand, both memory and language (actual language, in contrast to the figurative speech of nature) threaten to place Wordsworth at a remove from the meaning of his feelings. Wordsworth's metaphysic of presence is thus founded on a sense of psychological realities, in which a disjunction of language and feeling always looms.
It is these authenticated feelings that form the self. When the first Presence is removed -- Wordsworth's reference may be to the death of his mother -- "the building stood, as if sustained / By its own spirit" (II.295-6). His continued contact with nature "left a register / Of permanent relations else unknown" (II.311-2), a process of self-formation that took place at times without the participation of the conscious mind: "I made no vows, but vows / Were then made for me: bond unknown to me / Was given" (IV.341-3). Other feelings are invalidated by this internal standard, shown up as trivial or vain (eg., III.332, IV.304-6), but in the larger structure of The Prelude, this authentic self is present, albeit in glimpses, as the implicit standard for judging memory and language. The question then arises as to how the registry of the self is to be elaborated, when memory provides only a partial and perhaps faulty record, and when language itself is continually on the point of betraying Wordsworth's purpose.
The work of compiling The Prelude out of the first fragments of 1798-99, then the move from the two-book to the thirteen-book version of 1805, show Wordsworth's experiments to be motivated by just this problem. His method depends only episodically on a linear, temporally ordered narrative, in the manner of a conventional autobiography (as Wordsworth acknowledges in the opening of Book IX): the larger structure he devises for the poem depends rather on the sequencing of the various episodes, so that their affective implications in forming the self that he has become are allowed to emerge. He is guided in this by the nature of the feelings he is attempting to portray. Certainly, constructing a context for the initial Prelude fragments was a textual problem for Wordsworth, as Paul Magnuson emphasises, but in this case the textual issue is governed by the fundamental psychological problem, that of providing a context in which the prospective role of feeling can find a correspondence in the movement of the poetry. The prototypical technique is the long backward look. At the opening of the poem, having declared the need for a theme, Wordsworth then breaks off to begin again, "Was it for this . . ." Similarly, the Infant Babe passage in Book II, and the relocation of the spots of time episodes from Part II in 1799 to Book XI in 1805, constitute a type of anticipation by retrospection. Another strategy is to place in sequence scenes showing qualitatively different feelings to indicate their moral relativity in forming the self. The various effects of these strategies cannot be traced in detail here, but by looking briefly at two sections of The Prelude, I will sketch out their implications for Wordsworth's understanding of the feelings.
The Blind Beggar scene in Book VII is one of several scenes in The Prelude where language itself is foregrounded and appears as if setting a limit to what we can know. The beggar is "his own living epitaph," as Douglas Kneale puts it, in a discussion informed by deconstructive principles: "The Beggar and his text are almost explicitly epitaphic . . . his state presents an "apt type" of what Wordsworth's poetry is forever moving toward: the epitaph, the "memorial" . . . the frail shrine of language." The Beggar provides a significant instance, says Kneale, of what The Prelude has been enacting: "a figural foregrounding that repeats language's own self-encounter," the "narcissistic" moment of language. Thus The Prelude, concludes Kneale (perhaps predictably), "attempts to narrate the life of an actual person but finds itself instead narrating the semiological problems of that narration."
As far as language is concerned, this is well put. But it is not the main meaning of the scene if taken in its context. The Beggar scene is located between passages in which Wordsworth considers two differing types of understanding: one largely determined by external objects in which the mind is controlled or adrift upon its perceptions; in the other the mind is informed by awareness of the inner meaning of sights and sounds, and absorbs them to its own existing structures. Thus the Beggar occurs as a check to Wordsworth's drifting mind, a state in which nothing was making adequate sense:
the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams,
And all the ballast of familiar life --
The present, and the past, hope, fear, all stays,
All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man --
Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known.
(VII.601-607)
The sight of the Beggar breaks in upon this state: it is a sudden anchor to Wordsworth's drifting perception. As such it is placed within an ironic framework. The label on the Beggar's chest appears an emblem "of the utmost that we know / Both of ourselves and of the universe" (619-20). That this was not Wordsworth's last word on self-knowledge is clear from the continuation, which pointing back by the referent "These" explicitly categorizes experiences such as the Beggar scene as of lesser importance, a type of mental fabrication:
Though reared upon the base of outward things,
These chiefly are such structures as the mind
Builds for itself. Scenes different there are --
Full-formed -- which take, with small internal help,
Possession of the faculties . . .
(624-8)
The context serves to reinforce the point Wordsworth is making here about language, highlighted by Kneale, but serves more particularly to underline the limitations of knowledge confined to a "written paper" or "label." The stance of the Beggar, his immobility, upright with blind eyes, is an apt emblem for the deficiencies of language. The Beggar presents a scene of stasis, in which feeling is absent or suspended. The "scenes different" of the ensuing passage provide more reliable knowledge, based on feelings of solemnity, calm, or beauty. While Wordsworth does not dwell on them, he emphasises that they are "falsely catalogued" (643): in other words, we normally underrate or neglect them for more superficial and striking scenes (he goes on to describe Bartholomew's Fair).
If we take the Beggar scene out of context, then, and make it too exclusively a point about language, the important sequencing of feelings that Wordsworth provides is overlooked. This sequence provides a type of affective script: moving from oppression and reverie as the self becomes adrift, to a sharp turn of astonishment as the Beggar is encountered, to a reconfirmation of the feelings at the foundation of the self's knowledge of itself. In various forms the elements of this script can be found elsewhere in The Prelude, registered shifts or changes in feeling. The self being formed in the poem can be seen as a compound of such scripts. Memory in the poem is able to capture certain key scenes that show the scripts being formed or recapitulated, but memory itself is structured by its affective scripts and is more apt to provide a sense of their significance than their substance:
the soul --
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not -- retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they still
Have something to pursue.
(II.334-341)
In feeling itself, as it is experienced, but more especially in Wordsworth's memories of feeling, the feelings exhibit another fundamental paradox which is a notable property of the Wordsworthian affective script. Feeling is both temporal -- it has an anticipatory dimension, the sense of something "about to be" (VI.542) -- and eternal, through a sense of its co-presence with the one mind.
In this respect the self that is founded on feeling is both in time and transcends time. Wordsworth's most characteristic attempts to resolve this paradox redefine it as a type of cultural critique: what is located in time, contingent on human history, opposed to the process of becoming in which the self participates in the eternal. Thus the Beggar, with his label, "The story of the man," emblematic of the self in history, is contrasted to the a- historical truths of nature that follow.
3. Alan Grob, "Afterword: Wordsworth and the Politics of Consciousness," in Critical Essays on Wordsworth, ed. George H. Gilpin (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 339-356.
For the Wordsworthians of my own generation, any reference to those political matters that in Wordsworth studies have traditionally come under the heading, "The Spirit of the Age," evokes a virtually conditioned reflex. A bell sounds, fragmentary phrases from Hazlitt and Abrams come floating to the surface of memory, and we find ourselves repeating the well-worn proposition that the major poetry of Wordsworth is in some significant sense the French Revolution by other means. As a necessary preliminary, the familiar periodization is almost automatically spelled out: a phase before the major poetry when Wordsworth was an "active partisan" of the French Revolution; long years of apostasy afterwards, with intimations of that apostasy already appearing perhaps as early as the political sonnets of 1802; and often the years roughly between 1797 and 1801 singled out as that portion of the great period when a leveling muse is most in evidence. Admittedly by Wordsworth's own account a "time / of dereliction and dismay" (Prelude, II: 456-57) when even "good men / on every side fall off" (Prelude, II: 451-52), still, these years of deepening repression at home and a cynical Thermidorean and Napoleonic aftermath to "golden hours" in France were also a time when what was, at most, disenchantment had not yet turned into default, and when Wordsworth still professed "A more than Roman confidence, A faith/That fails not" (Prelude, II: 459-60) in what must surely in spirit be something not so very different from the democratic ideals and aims he had openly espoused only five years earlier.
But to utter a proposition that might at an earlier time appear so hackneyed as scarcely to bear reiteration is, at the present moment, a precarious undertaking. The claim that Wordsworth kept faith is currently one often put in question, most vigorously by the new historicism, one of whose leading practitioners describes it as "the trend in Wordsworth criticism today -- and I do mean today" -- so that one risks not only error but imputations of datedness by reiterating such a claim. Concealed behind the interstices, absences, idealizations, and displacements of Wordsworth's poems, the new historicists invariably and predictably find the inexpungeable traces and residues of a self-betraying romantic ideology that the founding theoretician of the movement in romantic studies, Jerome J. McCann, has characterized as "supportive of established power." Under new historicist scrutiny with its unflagging alertness to telltale signs of false consciousness and bad faith, our once crucial distinction between the beleaguered, troubled, but still persevering radicalism of Wordsworth in 1798 -- "a Jacobinism of doubt" E. P. Thompson calls its -- and the emerging conservatism of 1805 finds itself subsumed within the ideological uniformity of what McCann calls the revisionist phase of romanticism. Hence, Peele Castle and Tintern Abbey, McCann writes, "are only separated from each other, ideologically and stylistically, by a difference in emphasis." Much of the energy of the new historicism in Wordsworth studies has, in fact, gone into just this enterprise of dissolving chronological distinctions and rolling back the date when an antirevolutionary conservatism sets in. So in an argument of the most consummate intricacy, James K. Chandler finds Wordsworth by 1798 already in ideological proximity to Burke and in a work of literary detection that long before publication obviously served as an audacious model for new historicist theory and practice, Marjorie Levinson discerns from the clue of the missing abbey the will of the poet of Tintern Abbey to accommodate himself to "dominant social structures," an act of ideological tampering with ''the picture of the mind," allegedly as revealing in its own way as, let us say, the excision of the purged comrade from the widely reprinted group photo of the party leadership in Prague with which Milan Kundera begins The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. But the general suspicion that guides new historicist investigation of Wordsworth derives from yet more basic grounds for a presumption of ideological guilt: his participation in the beginnings of an almost by definition socially derelict turn to the subject, his key role in the founding of what McGann dismissively labels "the Consciousness Industry."
Of course, with the hindsight acquired after almost two centuries of familiarity with the products of this industry, we are prone to believe that any turn to the subject is a kind of ideological malfeasance, a tacit acquiescence in the established social order that is almost tantamount to complicity with it. But I would submit that read historically, that is, from within the broad spectrum of feasible choices reasonably available to Wordsworth in the turbulent closing decade of the eighteenth century, the turn to consciousness in 1798 by this industry pioneer is not prima facie evidence of dereliction but merely another form of adherence to that revolutionary faith in social betterment to which he even then held fast. Still attached to deeply uniformitarian and necessitarian beliefs, facets of a socially committed empiricism, Wordsworth at this time advanced a concept of consciousness that came to him already incorporated into that discourse of virtue by which proponents of radical political and social change on both sides of the channel gave expression to their political ideas, expectations, and values. Self-representation, as Wordsworth then engaged in it, was an activity empirically grounded, outwardly directed, implicitly progressive, and, at moments, clearly utopian. In MS. 1 of the "Prospectus" to The Recluse Wordsworth in a key passage proposes in just these terms the clearest possible rationale for his subjective practice, for his having mingled "humbler matter," descriptions of "the mind and man / Contemplating" (lines 64-66) with the visionary social matter of his great argument. He has written so much about ''the little realties of life" (lines 68) of one who is "In part a fellow citizen, in part / An outlaw, and a borderer of his age" (lines 69-70). Wordsworth explains, in hopes that his life may "Express the image of a better time / Desires more wise and simpler manners" (lines 74-75). The turn to consciousness then is not to be taken as a displacement and hence neglect of social responsibilities, covertly undermining the avowedly revolutionary aim of the "Prospectus" of making "Paradise, and Groves / Elysian" (lines 35-36), long held to be only ''A history, or but a dream" (line 38), into a lived reality -- indeed, "the growth of common day'' (line 40) -- at some not very distant time. In his moral history, Wordsworth tells us, he is to be regarded as a forerunner, a harbinger of the general human betterment that awaits us, no doubt hoping that by rendering those "better times" through the life that prefigures them he shall hasten their realization. Framed in the image of one who still deemed himself "in part / An outlaw and a borderer of his age," the social arrangements of that future we would imagine are not just to be amelioratively better but radically different from those of the present, arrangements we can only infer that Wordsworth assumed would be condemned as lawlessness in postrevolutionary Britain -- the imaginings of "An outlaw" -- because they too closely resemble those first promised by the "golden hours'' of a republican France as yet untarnished by an aftermath of Jacobin excess, Thermidorean compromise, and Napoleonic betrayal.
Document created March 7, 1997