Weird Wordsworth

Timothy Morton has his fascinating Romanticism class at Davis available for podcast download here (link will open iTunes). Particularly good are the sessions on Wordsworth. Morton's sense of the poet is pitch perfect, and while he stresses all the essential characteristics, he also makes them interesting--not just by infusing them (or rather, as is the case in his amazing book on Shelley's vegetarianism, revealing them to be infused) with the profound (but really wonderfully levelheaded) ecological concerns for which he is perhaps more widely known (that is, outside literature). No--he also makes these features interesting by doing that great thing you simply have to do with Wordsworth, which is show how unbelievably weird his poems really are. His reading of "Old Man Travelling" (later called merely by its subtitle "Animal Tranquility and Decay," but with some of its most crucial lines cut out) is particularly excellent, since it labors over so many of the pauses and negatives, which are so prevalent that they appear (if they can appear) even in the first (shockingly abrupt) sentence (line 2):

The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought--He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
--I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."

It is a wonderfully ironic, even bitter piece--but it is also just extremely weird (in ways the "Old Cumberland Beggar," say, from which Wordsworth said "Old Man" is merely an "overflowing," isn't). The irony is easy to detect: "insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet," when he is indeed making the "effort" of--precisely--traveling. Then there is--and this is more bitter--the fact that he is "by nature led/ To peace so perfect" (again on the second syllable, preceded by [almost building up a mental inversion even as the stress is regular] a directional indicator [in a poem teeming with prepositions and indeed prepositional oppositions: look at "by whom" and "to whom" in l. 8-9] horribly misapplied or mistaken: the speaker does not really know the way the man is subdued or traveling, what he is is subdued or where he is traveling to), when he is precisely going to meet the result of a "sea-fight": his dying son. All this is there, but then there is just the sheer weirdness that comes from the almost overbalance (to use a Wordsworthian term) of this irony, and which Morton's focus on the speaker's use of negative perception (the birds "regard him not," and he is presented as "a man who does not move with pain") really excellently underscores. In other words, more striking even than the irony is the way the ironic misperception of the speaker is built up so excessively: in the second instance that I noted especially ("To peace," and I should stress that there are many more instances), the irony shades into a bitterness so intense that it is hard not to attribute even a sort of cruelty to Wordsworth--perhaps the single quality that that is most thoroughly un-Wordsworthian (even though Wordsworth could be cold, his poetic voice is constructed so as to make cruelty almost impossible: a sympathy so profound that it is too deep for tears--or perhaps so profound that it seems a thing "of which/ he hath no need," a sympathy that is not even sympathy--pervades his work). So we are left with not just the irony but its weirdness, something precisely like--because this is perhaps most ironic--its "poetic justice." Why? Penetrating to this level of unanswerable questioning (if I can say that) is what reading Wordsworth is all about.

The history of lyric hurts

Among the many, many gems in Stewart's book, looking at it again I'm blown away most perhaps by her initial presentation of the function/innovation of lyric, which is just overflowing with amazing formulations. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous (but still always shocking) statement about the intrinsic connection between meter and the alleviation of pain ("There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose"), Stewart says the following:

In theories of lyric from Vico forward, the enunciation of pain at the origin of lyric must appear before the emergence of a self-conscious sense of one's own subjectivity [...]. To equate pain with subjectivity is to equate the body with subjectivity and so to confuse the most collective with the most individual. Pain has no memory; its expression depends on the intersubjective invention of association and metaphor. The situation of the person resides in the genesis of the memory of action and experience in intersubjective terms--that is, in the articulation and mastery of the originating pain. Coleridge [in Biographia Literaria] explains that in the "frequency of forms and figures of speech," we find "offsprings of passion" who are as well "adopted children of power." Yet the mastery of pain through measures and figures is not merely repressive; it is as well a matter of coming to knowledge and expression. Coleridge's explanation shows a subject coming into activity out of a passive relation to sense experience, memory, and expectation. Here the figures and forms created are those of a subjectivity enunciating itself.

Divergence in lyric is thus not between language and music but between a subject transforming him-or herself from the somatic both toward and against the social. The history of lyric is thereby the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of an imagination posing and composing itself and its audience via the work of time. Lyric conventions of addresser and addressee are the working through on the level of literary genre of the function of linguistic shifters.


[...] First person expression in lyric is related existentially to the context of the poem as a whole; it is the poem that makes first-person expression emerge in its individuality as it engages the reader in the eidetic task of the appearance of the "you." The doubled "I" (authorial intention the expression of first person voice in the text) encounters a doubled "you" (the reader's intention towards reception, the implied addressee in the text).
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 46-7.

For what it's worth, I can only agree with everything here, and not just the importance of "intersubjective inventions," over the fashionably oversimple equation of pain with the body, as she nicely puts it, but the unbelievable displacement of the conflict within lyric from a tired opposition (which Wordsworth himself often uses, lacking--unlike Coleridge--a sophisticated critical language to express the deeper things his poetry is indeed up to) to one that is not only more problematic and fresh but, as you can see from where the discussion goes, much more (again, to echo my last post) intuitive. The line on the lyric genre that summarizes this is just unbelievable.

The body of poetic forms

The following is an excellent bit at the end of an unbelievably rich book, a book that does nothing less than overthrow some of the most tired assumptions that we have when approaching poetry, making the latter seem fresh (a sort of addictive feeling, the feeling one always gets when returning and really significantly reinterpreting a poem, seeing something wholly new about it, or experiencing it from a completely different angle). Or, rather, it is a book that, despite its density and depth, gives us back something entirely simple: something of a sense of poetry (and especially poetic form's) fundamental intuitiveness (or, perhaps more fundamentally, sensuousness). This prompts us to cut through the nostalgia and even the irony and simply take it up again:

Marx had hoped that over time new human senses would develop; he never seemed to have imagined that entire spheres of sense experience might be lost for many first-world people: a tacit knowledge of tools and forms of dancing or of carrying infants, the disappearance of ways of living with animals or cultivating plant life, along with the smell and feel and sounds and even tastes that accompanied such practices; the sound of wind in uninhabited spaces; the weight of ripe things not yet harvested. These experiences are gone, and even their names will soon be gone. The historical body of poetic forms is more and more an archive of lost sensual experiences; by now an aura of nostalgia accrues around the notion of the poetic itself. It was a mistake of humanism to assume that nature exists for us. But it has been just as serious a mistake to have forgotten that the made world, the world of culture, is made by and for us. [...] The entire enduring accomplishment of the history of poetic forms awaits as a vast repertoire for anyone who hopes to enter again into an engagement with the senses.
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 332-3