We still tend to think of Wordsworth as a poet who took his inspiration from experiences of nature recollected in tranquillity and spontaneously expressed in oral performance. Since the 1990s, Jonathan Bate’s ecological turn in Romantic studies has been successful in liberating this predominant Wordsworthian self-fashioning from the poststructuralist prison-house of New Historicism and deconstruction. It was a self-fashioning Wordsworth performed most persuasively in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads when he defined the poet as “a man speaking to men” (Brett & Jones, 255) and poetry as paradoxically both “emotion recollected in tranquillity” and “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Brett & Jones, 246). He supported this self-fashioning when he described e.g. the composition of “Tintern Abbey” in the 1843 Fenwick Note: “I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after” (Brett & Jones, 297). To nuance this self-fashioning, the basic question this essay addresses is: what difference does a poem’s written and published nature make? Why does Wordsworth even bother to mention the fact that the poem was written and published? What difference does it make? I ask this question not with reference to “Tintern Abbey”
(see Bennett, 42-58), but with reference to a corpus of Wordsworthian poems more obviously written in and inspired by books; poems prompted by the empty or full pages of Wordsworth’s own and others’ books.
Our unease with the topic of Wordsworth and ‘books’ and ‘bookishness’ finds ample support in Wordsworth’s poetic work. In “The Tables Turned”, from Lyrical Ballads, the speaker accosts a friend: “Up! Up! My Friend, and quit your books; / Or surely you’ll grow double”. The ‘danger’ of reading is that the reader’s self is somehow split, divided from itself through the reading act that transports the reader out of himself and into other worlds. The speaker continues:
Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music is! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it.
We are to use our ear to hear nature’s own living poetry (music), rather than our eye to read. The poem ends on an iconic, Wordsworthian and Romantic biblioclastic note:
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.
Rather than stay inside with the “barren leaves” of the book, we should go out into nature and experience living leaves that teach “more of man” “Than all the sages can”. And it is serious matter: “on my life”, the poet says. In Wordsworth’s imagination, books tend to call up the ‘dead letter’ of writing and to be associated with coffins – containers of high value, but whose content is dead, as in the “shrines so frail” of Book Five, the book on “Books” in The Prelude. Or as in this passage from The Prelude, Book Eight, the Cave of Yordas:
The curious traveller, who, from open day, Hath passed with torches into some huge cave, The Grotto of Antiparos, or the Den
In old time haunted by that Danish Witch, Yordas; he looks around and sees the vault Widening on all sides; sees, or thinks he sees, Erelong, the massy roof above his head, That instantly unsettles and recedes,—
Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all Commingled, making up a canopy
Of shapes and forms and tendencies to shape That shift and vanish, change and interchange
Like spectres,—ferment silent and sublime!
That after a short space works less and less, Till, every effort, every motion gone,
The scene before him stands in perfect view
Exposed, and lifeless as a written book! (1850, VIII, 560-576)
Inside the cave the Wordsworthian ‘halted traveller’ (as singled out by Geoffrey Hartman) has a sublime vision of paradoxical and counterlogical movement, changes of light giving the impression of silent, ghostly (“spectre”) life. This vision, however, is momentary and ends with the sight of the “lifeless” vault of the cave likened to a
“written book” and in turn likened to the halted traveller who stands transfixed like the scene, which is also said metaphorically to stand “before him … in perfect view”.
The book is shaping, is imprinting itself on the man in a ghostly fashion in this passage.
Andrew Piper has recently investigated what he calls the Romantic
‘bibliographic imagination’. As Piper puts it in Dreaming in Books, the Romantics were writers “for whom the book would become a vital source of creative energy and literary innovation…. Their writing can be read as a philosophy of bibliographic communication” (13). Inverting Shelley’s notion in the Defence of Poesy that “when composition sets in, inspiration is on the decline”, Piper writes that for authors such
as Goethe, Scott, Hoffmann, Irving, Mereau, Poe, Balzac, Stendahl: “composition was inspiration” (13). Wordsworth, it would seem, does not belong in this bibliophile company of authors for whom “the book played an essential role in the larger aesthetic aims of their work” (13). Indeed, Piper only references Wordsworth as the author of the idea that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (12) and neglects to investigate the extent to which Wordsworth’s feelings often emerged from the books they also ended up in and were meant to suit. Piper’s Wordsworth is close to the well-known Wordsworth whom Jonathan Bate recovered, the Victorian Wordsworth who, as Bate puts it: “sought to enable his readers better to enjoy or endure life … by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world”
(4).
Yet, Wordsworth was as bibliophilic and as aware of enlisting the meaning-making bibliographic codes of the book into his work as any of the authors put forward by Piper. As Wordsworth puts it in one of the sonnets published as “Personal Talk” (1807):
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastimes and our happiness will grow.
Nature is here a metaphor for the growth of our happiness out of the world of dreams and books. A rather different image and understanding of the book here emerges to complicate the dominant interpretation of Wordsworth’s imagination as bibliophobic.
Indeed, the Cave of Yordas passage from The Prelude quoted above continues by imagining the kind of dream-life that books increasingly gave access to in the age of Romanticism:
But let him pause awhile, and look again, And a new quickening shall succeed, at first Beginning timidly, then creeping fast,
Till the whole cave, so late a senseless mass, Busies the eye with images and forms
Boldly assembled,—here is shadowed forth From the projections, wrinkles, cavities, A variegated landscape,—there the shape Of some gigantic warrior clad in mail, The ghostly semblance of a hooded monk, Veiled nun, or pilgrim resting on his staff:
Strange congregation! yet not slow to meet
Eyes that perceive through minds that can inspire.
(1850, VIII, 577-589)
When the mind begins to do its work on the “senseless mass” of the lifeless book of the cave, a new world (“strange congregation”) suddenly begins to emerge as the dead letter of stone is invigorated through imaginative interpretation, that is, through reading-as-dreaming. Composed for The Prelude in 1804 along with material about the Crossing of the Alps that went into the central Book Six, the Cave of Yordas rhymes with the presentation of the ancient trope of the book of nature written by God, which Wordsworth reworks in Book Six. In reference to Mont Blanc and the Vale of Chamouny, Wordsworth says: “With such a book / Before our eyes, we could not choose but read / Lessons of genuine brotherhood” (1850, VI, 543-6). The lesson of the French Revolution is embodied in the landscape, which Wordsworth a little onwards refers to as containing “Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end” (1850, VI, 638-40). Surely, books in this sense of nature as a book that gives life in the shape of brotherhood and eternity may be frightening and overwhelming, but they are not necessarily dangerous and to be shunned; rather, they are key to understanding Wordsworth’s bibliographic imagination.
In what follows I wish to contribute to a more complex understanding of Wordsworth and by implication Romanticism by considering some of his poems whose gestation is due to the book understood as a very concrete, material object rather than as the vehicle of a metaphor: poems made in order to match a book of poems; poems written to suit a given book’s page. Poems, in short, which take their origin and envision their destiny in the written codex book not in mind-splitting, deadly/lifeless terms, but in terms of creativity, life, and potentiality. This is a special kind of ‘occasional’ Wordsworthian verse that has been neglected along with occasional art as such. For a poet whose inspiration is understood to derive from within (“Eyes that perceive through minds that can inspire”), we find it hard to accept that sometimes it comes from without, and from something as seemingly unrelated to his poetics as a material book. There is something peculiarly unWordsworthian and perhaps even unRomantic about such an inspirational and compositional scenario, even as it is deeply familiar as part of Wordsworth and Romanticism.
The poetic subgenre we are looking into includes e.g. lines left in someone’s album. To have an album where visitors and friends would leave reminders in verse was a practice that was becoming increasingly popular during the Romantic age and was linked to the rise in literacy, proliferation of books and new forms of social intercourse. Wordsworth published a couple of such poems, the short quatrain, “To a Child. Written in Her Album” (1835), and the longer and more interesting, “Lines written in the Album of the Countess of Lonsdale, Nov. 5, 1834” (1835). This poem opens by elaborating on his reluctance to write in this particular kind of book:
LADY! a Pen (perhaps with thy regard, Among the Favoured, favoured not the least) Left, 'mid the Records of this Book inscribed,
Deliberate traces, registers of thought And feeling, suited to the place and time
That gave them birth:—months passed, and still this hand, That had not been too timid to imprint
Words which the virtues of thy Lord inspired, Was yet not bold enough to write of Thee.
And why that scrupulous reserve? (1-10)
The poem is largely about the difficulties of writing it, that is: of responding to the occasion. These difficulties have several names, one of them being the difficulty of finding words and conventions by which to praise Lady Lonsdale in her old age (born in 1761 she was 73 years old in 1834):
Then let the Book receive in these prompt lines A just memorial; and thine eyes consent
To read that they, who mark thy course, behold A life declining with the golden light Of summer, in the season of sere leaves; (ll. 57-61)
Wordsworth is playing with the notion of “prompt” here to suggest both lines that are prompted by the very book they are written in (and the occasion of writing them) and lines that are prompt as in ready and quick to act when an occasion is at hand. The occasion for writing offers itself as occasional subject matter for a difficult poem Wordsworth felt compelled to write. These leaves are “sere”, not “barren”.
The subgenre of bookish Wordsworthian poems also includes poems about reading his own books. When in 1842 he sent off for the publisher one of his last books, Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years, he prefaced it with “Prelude. Prefixed to the Volume Entitled ‘Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years’” (1842). The poem opens with Wordsworth describing the typical Romantic scene of inspiration (in nature, listening to the thrush and the wind) and composition (in tune with bird’s song and wind):
IN desultory walk through orchard grounds, Or some deep chestnut grove, oft have I paused The while a Thrush, urged rather than restrained By gusts of vernal storm, attuned his song
To his own genial instincts; and was heard
(Though not without some plaintive tones between) To utter, above showers of blossom swept
From tossing boughs, the promise of a calm, Which the unsheltered traveller might receive With thankful spirit. The descant, and the wind
That seemed to play with it in love or scorn, Encouraged and endeared the strain of words That haply flowed from me, by fits of silence Impelled to livelier pace.
This scene of in situ inspiration and overflow recalls the ‘glad preamble’ of the autobiographical poem only entitled The Prelude after the poet’s death in 1850. In the 1842 “Prelude” the scene leads Wordsworth to reflect on the book he is prefacing:
But now, my Book!
Charged with those lays, and others of like mood, Or loftier pitch if higher rose the theme,
Go, single—yet aspiring to be joined
With thy Forerunners that through many a year Have faithfully prepared each other's way—
Go forth upon a mission best fulfilled When and wherever, in this changeful world,
Power hath been given to please for higher ends Than pleasure only;
In this poem, Wordsworth reveals his awareness of the life’s work, the oeuvre, as a poetic figure that produces meaning in and of itself. The pages are “charged” with poetic voice and the assembly of books means something. The rest of the poem goes on to articulate various ways in which his poetry can work upon the world by virtue of being bookishly bound:
… some strain of thine, my Book!
Caught at propitious intervals, may win Listeners who not unwillingly admit Kindly emotion tending to console
And reconcile;
To realize this poetic “mission”, as Wordsworth calls it, size and quantity matter.
Consider also the poem Wordsworth addressed to Queen Victoria in January 1846, “Written upon a fly leaf in the Copy of the Author’s Poems which was sent to her Majesty the Queen Victoria” (one of many dedication poems that are also poems inspired by the books or collections they are part of and yet also critically apart from insofar as they offer these books to their privileged first reader). The poem opens:
Deign, Sovereign Mistress! to accept a lay, No Laureate offering of elaborate art;
But salutation taking its glad way From deep recesses of a loyal heart.
Wordsworth was the official poet laureate since Southey’s death in 1843, but under no obligation to write laureate verses. Hence, he gives the Queen a poem about how to read what he has already written, punning on the opening “lay” (meaning song) and the act of presenting the book, “I lay this Book” (the sexual pun certainly unintended):
And now, by duty urged, I lay this Book Before thy Majesty, in humble trust That on its simplest pages Thou wilt look With a benign indulgence more than just.
Nor wilt Thou blame an aged Poet's prayer, That issuing hence may steal into thy mind Some solace under weight of royal care, Or grief—the inheritance of humankind.
For know we not that from celestial spheres, When Time was young, an inspiration came (Oh, were it mine!) to hallow saddest tears, And help life onward in its noblest aim?
The poet whose career opened with a radical republican ambition to revolutionize poetry by approximating it to the language of “real men” and “low and common life”
ends that career presenting these “simplest pages” to the sovereign ruler whose sovereignty he accepts and salutes. We witness at once a glorious triumph (of addressing and reaching everyone, high and low) and a compromised defeat (of egalitarian ideals) that is a typical sign of Wordsworth’s complexity. However embarrassing this may be it shows us rather clearly that Wordsworth was not solely interested in teaching the Victorians – nor us for that matter – “to look at and dwell in the natural world”, as Jonathan Bate puts it in a phrase already quoted (4).
Wordsworth wanted to teach us to look at his work, to handle his books, and to live and dream in his words.
Wordsworth’s bookishness can also be studied in poems he wrote supposedly in others’ books, literally – we are to imagine – on their “barren leaves” thus lending them new life (e.g. “Stanzas Written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson’s ‘Castle of Indolence’”1802/1815, “Written Upon a Blank Leaf in ‘The Complete Angler’”
1819, “Written in a Blank Leaf of Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’” 1824/1827). The attention to bookish detail of format (“pocket-copy”) reveals a keen interest in the subject.
About Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) he says:
Fairer than life itself, in this sweet Book, The cowslip-bank and shady willow-tree;
And the fresh meads—where flowed, from every nook Of his full bosom, gladsome Piety!
Walton’s book is “Fairer than life itself” and is seen to capture and reflect the piety Walton is said to have received from nature in the first place. Such poems usurp the space of another’s writing and enter into dialogue with a precursor author in a very literal manner. They are a kind of indirect gloss on a prior text by means of which it is appropriated to Wordsworth’s work, used to interpret his experience, to carry his words. With Walton, Wordsworth may be engrafting his own feeling of rural retirement from politics on to Walton’s book (the royalist Walton moved into the country after the defeat at Marston Moor in 1644).
One of the significant ways in which Wordsworth’s bookish imagination worked in its bibliographic measures can be seen in his near-obsessive concern with the arrangement of his poems in greater wholes. This is key both in sequences and sections in individual volumes and in the ever-growing and shiftingly arranged, categorized, revised and reimagined Collected Works. First published as such in two volumes in 1815 and at the end of Wordsworth’s career by Edward Moxon in six volumes, the Collected Works were imagined as on a “mission” that culminated with the gift to Queen Victorian in 1846. The act of publication and republication was always both a commercial and an artistic venture for Wordsworth. His revisions were both felt to refine and perfect the work and can also be seen as factors motivating repurchase of already purchased work (Erickson, 49-70). In an 1826 letter Wordsworth stated what seems to be his basic principle: “Miscellaneous poems ought not to be jumbled together at random—were this done with mine the passage from one to another would often be insupportably offensive; but in my judgment the only thing of much importance in arrangement is that one poem should shade off happily into another—and the contrasts where they occur be clear of all harshness and
One of the significant ways in which Wordsworth’s bookish imagination worked in its bibliographic measures can be seen in his near-obsessive concern with the arrangement of his poems in greater wholes. This is key both in sequences and sections in individual volumes and in the ever-growing and shiftingly arranged, categorized, revised and reimagined Collected Works. First published as such in two volumes in 1815 and at the end of Wordsworth’s career by Edward Moxon in six volumes, the Collected Works were imagined as on a “mission” that culminated with the gift to Queen Victorian in 1846. The act of publication and republication was always both a commercial and an artistic venture for Wordsworth. His revisions were both felt to refine and perfect the work and can also be seen as factors motivating repurchase of already purchased work (Erickson, 49-70). In an 1826 letter Wordsworth stated what seems to be his basic principle: “Miscellaneous poems ought not to be jumbled together at random—were this done with mine the passage from one to another would often be insupportably offensive; but in my judgment the only thing of much importance in arrangement is that one poem should shade off happily into another—and the contrasts where they occur be clear of all harshness and