For ali his extravagance and seeming mooniness, Blake must be seen as essentially a moralist, of the prophetic rather than the reflective order. His defense of imagination and instinct is religious in tone. Whether he writes about children or spirits, his concern is "to cleanse the doors of perception." His thought can be merely odd or ill-balanced: Blake shows that uncertain sense of proportion often possessed by self- educated geniuses. But just as frequently it goes straight to the heart of what is wrong with an industrial society disfigured by its "dark, Satanic mills." Yet there is no do-goodism in Blake. He is a hard-core rebel, like Shaw [99], and, like Shaw, a dan- gerous man.
Of his verse I suggest you read Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Everlasting Gospel and the Preface to Milton. To get some notion of the principies by which Blake lived his quietly rebellious life, see The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Ali Religions Are One, and There Is No Natural Religion. His ideas on art may be understood through his divertingly ill-tempered Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses.
C.F.
64
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770-1850
The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800)
In a famous parody of one of Wordsworth^ sonnets, the English humorist J. K Stephen wrote:
Two Voices are there: one is of the deep;. . . And one is of an old halfwitted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony. . . And, Wordsworth, both are thine. . . .
My Wordsworth contains 937 closely printed pages. Of these, possibly 200 are in the voice of the deep. The remainder are bleatings. Wordsworth, who never understood how to cut things short, persisted to his eightieth year. Of these years only the first half were, from posterity^ viewpoint, worth living. The last forty were of great interest to Wordsworth; of considerable interest to the three female acolytes who took care of him; and of some interest to literary scholars attracted by the problem of the decay of genius.
The main influence on Wordsworth was Wordsworth. I know of no major literary figure who was so continuously and so favorably impressed by himself. This highly successful love affair dried up in him the springs of self-criticism; and as he had no humor to start with, four-fifths of his work turned out to be a crashing bore.
Of the non-William-Wordsworthian influences, the most important was the English countryside, which he may almost be said to have invented. It touched something in him deep, pure, and unselfish, releasing some of his finest verse. The sec- ond influence was the superior intelligence of Coleridge [65]. Their friendship produced the epochal collaboration of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the no less epochal Preface to the edition of 1800. The third influence was Wordsworth^ sister, Dorothy, a remarkable neurotic whose eyes and ears were far better than her brothers and whose alertness to the face of nature provided him with many insights for which he is usually given full credit. At this late date it would be prissy to deny that the relation between Dorothy and William was uncon- sciously incestuous, at least on Dorothy^ part. This has no bearing whatsoever on the value of his work.
Minor influences were the French Revolution and Annette Vallon, a Frenchwoman who seems to have stimulated Wordsworth to something mildly approaching passion. At first the eager young poet was a partisan of the Revolution. Its excesses, plus his own deep quietistic bias, plus what seems to have been plain caution (compare Milton [45]) combined to change Wordsworth into a dull reactionary. The connection with Annette Vallon, resulting in an illegitimate daughter, he did his best to hide from posterity. His whole conduct in the affair (compare Fielding [55]) is unmanly, even callous. This again has nothing to do with the value of his work.
The odd thing is that, though Wordsworth^ poetry and
manifestos really did help to liberate our emotions (see Mill [72]), his own emotions were limited in number and even in depth. He wrote beautifully about nature, children, the poor, common people. Our attitudes toward ali these differ today from the attitudes of the neoclassic eighteenth century against which Wordsworth courageously rebelled; and this change we owe in part to a poet most of us do not read. Yet he himself never observed nature with the particularity of a Thoreau [80]. He does not seem to have understood children—the sonnet "On the Beach at Calais" is supremely lovely, but there is no real child involved (even though he is writing about his own daughter), merely an abstract, Wordsworthian idea of child- hood. For ali his influential theories about using "the real lan- guage of men," he does not seem to have had much idea of how humble folk really talked. And, except perhaps for the Annette Vallon affair, in which he conducted himself like a poltroon, he was incapable of a strong, passionate love for a woman.
And now that I have said ali this, an open confession of my dislike of Wordsworth, I must make two obvious statements far more to the point. The first is that he wrote some great verse, though I think virtually ali of it is contained in his long poetical autobiography, The Prelude, plus "Tintem Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "Michael," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode to Duty," and a scattering of superb son- nets and shorter lyrics.
The second statement is that he opened the eyes of poets and ordinary human beings to the possibilities of a fresh approach to nature, to the life of feeling, and to the English language. With Coleridge, he diverted the course of English and American poetry. He helped to release it from conven- tionality, stock epithets, city-pent emotions. His famous defi- nition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" arising from "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is limited and partial. But as a corrective to the petrifactions of the eighteenth century it was badly needed. For ali its excesses, the romantic protest has proved valuable to the Western tradition.
It is probable that Wordsworth will become more impor- tant as a historical event than as a poet. But he is great enough in both categories to warrant some acquaintance. After ali, this humorless, mentally and emotionally straitened egomaniac in a few short years did write verse that helped to "cleanse the doors of perception."
C.F.
65
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
1772-1834
The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
In a moment of self-forgetfulness Wordsworth called Coleridge "the most wonderful man" he had ever known. Shelley hailed him as this "hooded eagle among blinking owls." His good friend the essayist Charles Lamb spoke of him as "an Archangel a little damaged" and of his "hunger for eternity." The scholar George Saintsbury ranked Coleridge, as literary critic, with Aristotle [13] and Longinus. Mill [72] remarked, "The class of thinkers has scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged," and many thoughtful students feel the statement, made over a century ago, still stands. Such judgments could be multiplied by the score.
They were made about the greatest might-have-been in English literature. For the fact is that Coleridge^ reputation and influence are both far more imposing than his work. His mind, a Tuscarora for depth, a Pacific for vastness, was never quite able to pull itself together. Though the Biographia Literaria comes nearest to it, he wrote no single, complete prose masterpiece. Like Wordsworth^, much of his verse, though more intensely felt, is balderdash. Of the three poems
by which as a poet he will live, only The Ancient Mariner is a finished whole. Often ranked as the finest Shakespearean critic who ever wrote, he never imposed order on his mass of essays, lectures, notes, and conversational remarks.