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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770-1850
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
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.
