From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

  Naturally we all boldly tried our hand at translating Modern Greek poetry in those days—Bernard Spencer, Robin Fedden, and myself. While my own Greek was rudimentary and has unfortunately remained so, I really felt I possessed the essence of these Greek poets because I had worked on them and had had them fed to me by these gifted Athenian friends. Later in the day came other translators who really knew their Greek, like Rex Warner, who captured the choice austerities of Seferis, his great friend, in earlier versions; then Robert Liddell, who did some Cavafy with great distinction. I think Lady Smart also tried her hand at Cavafy. And so on right down the years with each version spreading the deserved celebrity of this great poet.[9]

  I once earned a mild protest from Seferis for running some of my rather idiosyncratic versions of Cavafy into the Alexandria Quartet; he felt I had taken liberties. So I had. But he accepted my defence—namely that Cavafy was not “real.” He was simply a character in a fiction in whose name I had borrowed some poems from a real man.[10] I have had a large number of letters since asking me if the “old poet of the city” really existed or not. I myself arrived in Alexandria eight years after Cavafy’s death, but the town was still full of memories of him, and of course very many friends of his were alive still and happy to speak about him. So I felt my way into the Alexandrian scene through him, in a manner of speaking: I already knew his work well, but here I was able to situate it clearly in its demographic context. It helped me to estimate his greatness.

  During much of this period his excellence was only recognised by the good poets and critics of Greece—not as yet by the poetry-reading public in general, and certainly not by the bien pensants[11] of Athens. In part this was due to his frank love-poems about homosexuality. But these poems were not vulgar or crude; they were the poems of a patrician, full of dignity and eloquence even though the scenario, so to speak, might have been based on a meeting in a brothel. He is the greatest love-poet of our time in my view.

  There was a second factor which played a role—a subtle kind of disharmony of attitude between the Athens temperament and the Alexandrian. In Alexandria one was born into five languages; one was sophisticated; one was rich, inevitably educated in Paris or London or Berlin (often all three): one rather tended to come it over the poor provincial rowdy Greeks of the mainland with their barbarous politics and bustling vulgarity. Athens tended to frown on modernity also and preferred to stick to safe national poets like Palamas.

  Seferis had to work like a dog to argue some sense into the native Athenian headpiece, and only after years of much foreign praise did he himself manage to attain general public recognition for his own fine poems. But he of course was as worldly, sophisticated, and much travelled as Cavafy—he was just like an Alexandrian. So he perfectly understood the position of a poet like Cavafy. The Hellenistic poet of Alexandria was writing for all Europe. Athens did not know it until long afterward. And the city of Alexandria was as much his theme as Dublin was Joyce’s theme; he has left us an incomparable study of its moeurs, its atmospheres, its history, its greatness.[12]

  He has now at last fallen upon translators who can do full justice to his wry melodious poems, glinting with insight as if from veins of mica. He is lucky too to have editors as brilliant as Savidis[13] in Athens whose handsome new editions of his favourite poet have now reached the general public. Indeed we are all indebted to so much fine, scrupulous, and sensitive work. The school deserves a whole holiday.

  Introduction to Wordsworth

  1973

  THE PROBLEM OF WORDSWORTH THE POET has always been bedevilled by the double image of the man—created, one supposes, by himself, though it has been suggested that it was the work of Hartley Coleridge[1] when he observed: “What a mighty genius is the poet Wordsworth! What a dull proser is W.W. Esqre of Rydal Mount, Distributor of Stamps and brother to the Revnd, the Master of Trinity.”[2] At any rate Hartley (who had inherited much of his father’s vivacity of mind and bright insight) was the first to set up the double Wordsworth, and all subsequent critics have accepted the same point of departure easily enough. It finds its way into most critical estimates of the poet’s work, even today. Throughout the twenties and thirties the two Wordsworths were a convenient cockshy for satirists. Was it not Squire?—it was either he or Shanks—who published the following lines in the London Mercury.

  Two voices are there. One is loud and deep,

  And one is of an old half-witted sheep,

  And Wordsworth, both are thine…[3]

  But it can be made into a persuasive case only by those who have not been faced (as the present editor has been) with the sum total of Wordsworth’s work to read at one blow—supplemented by a comprehensive and sensitive biography of the man.[4] This procedure is guaranteed to surprise one, for the case of Wordsworth becomes more intricate and less clear-cut than it would be convenient to believe; he remained the same man, operating on all the different levels, completely undivided. His political principles were as much part of him as his poetic ones or his religious attitudes and beliefs, and the poetry (the best and the worst) overshadows all these activities, by turn lyrical, didactic, elegaic or hortatory. For the first time one realises how all-of-a-piece the work is, and how in the back of the poet’s own mind, all the parts constituted fragments from a single huge work of autobiographical confession[5]—a depiction of the growth of a poet’s mind and sensibility.

  It was a tremendously ambitious undertaking just to be Mr. William Wordsworth, and to be aware of his vocation and his poetic responsibilities towards it; and it is marvellous to see with what fortitude and in what exemplary degree he managed to discharge them over such a long and truthful life—he died at the age of eighty. Studied in this way he cannot help but grow in stature rather than diminish. Everything—even his less successful work—becomes significant and enriching. Every detail adds, once one sees the character of the man with any clearness.

  Wordsworth almost more than any other English poet enjoyed a sense of inner confirmation—the mysterious sense of election to poetry as a whole way of life. He realised too that one cannot condescend to nature—one must work for it like a monk over a missal which he will not live to see finished. He felt he was hunting for what was most itself in nature, the poised and limpid truth of reality. Poetry was his lariat. So that what might, by ignorant or prejudiced critics, be represented as being in some parts the unpolished maunderings of some neurotic sectary, given to introspection, turns out when seen as a whole, as a lifestyle, to which the writing was a mere appendix, a mere illustration—turns out to be one of the most determined, thoughtful, pure, and disinterested attempts by any poet since Milton to purge and mature a human intuition by the practice of poetry, using the direct vision of the natural world as both touchstone and lodestar. The furniture of his universe was nature in all its multiplicity—not a pack of moral attributes or a clique of allegorical figures.

  Wordsworth was a man from the craggy north, a blunt man full of psychic obstinacy. He set himself to see nature as a whole, as something more than the sum of its parts. He was celebrating those mysterious “visitations” of which he speaks—flashes of blinding intuition which gave him glimpses of something like process itself at work.…There was to be no nonsense about this task, to which he had been called by the deepest part of his own nature. He pitched his work beyond the reach of the contemporary “poetical” style and made it low-toned, monochrome in tinge. Though in no way a moralist, he seems to have felt that if one sought and found Truth one would insensibly find goodness there, for they were part of the same animal. And ultimate goodness came from an intuition which had fulfilled itself in its commerce with mother nature: poetry was simply the outward and visible sign of such a search. The originality and magnitude of such a venture for such a man lay in the fact that it carefully side-stepped a dogmatic theology in an age when it was almost impossible to do so comfortably, particularly for a man of his birth and background, and in the circumstances imposed by the society of his
time and place.

  Indeed, when one reflects on his life, one is astonished at the pitfalls he managed to escape; his birth was into a background of parsons, dons, prosperous lawyers, mariners. Minor gentry one might say, which is to suggest a certain level of refinement and culture—at the least the possession of books. Wordsworth’s father gave him the run of a small but choice library—an inestimable gift for an incipient poet. Yet it was also the age of nonconformity, of republicanism, of transcendentalism. Wordsworth when young was a convinced republican, and like every other warm-hearted intelligence welcomed the French Revolution without reserve. But his idealism was bitterly disappointed, almost to the point of trauma, by the excesses he witnessed during his French residence and his subsequent loathing and fear of republicanism seems to date from his return.[6]

  Ironically enough he also fell in love with a French girl (a Royalist in politics) by whom he had an illegitimate daughter.[7] Separated by war for many years, he finally decided against marriage to her, but he never wavered as far as his responsibilities were concerned towards the daughter. He acknowledged his paternity, and later sent her money, and visited her on the most affectionate and friendly basis. But his own real interior poetic life unfolded itself when at last he was free to set up house with his beloved sister Dorothy—a dream they had cherished for a long time, and in which she took her natural place as the poet’s real Muse. Later he married an old family friend, and collected quite a little harem of eager and affectionate copyists for his work—the “family of Love,” as someone called it, impressed by the dignity and harmony of their communal life.

  Naturally the psychoanalysts have made Wordsworth, like so many other creative men, a stalking-horse for their theories. I am personally sympathetic to Freud’s views and believe that Wordsworth himself would have been fascinated by them. But surely it was Freud who once wrote: “Before the mystery of the creative act psychoanalysis lays down its arms”?[8] Yet there is no need for an exaggerated display of clinical tact in this case, if “case” it be, for what is resolved during an analysis of a neurosis is precisely the same sort of tension which is resolved in the act of creation by a major poet. He makes, so to speak, models of his anxieties, and fits them into his life-constellation, submitting himself to the stresses and strains of the business, often risking ill-health or even madness in order to affront and tame them (St. George and the Dragon).

  The poetic work, in interpreting these terrors through art, helps him to surmount them in his life. (“The great masters,” writes Proust, “are those who master themselves.”) Indeed the life-work of a great poet—a Valéry, Rilke, Yeats[9]—should be considered as a long process of triumphantly surmounting his anxieties, his complexes, the wounds which his infantile psyche bears, by the act of exteriorising them, of giving them form. We, his readers, profit vicariously from the transaction of reading and studying such work, for it helps us to do the same with our own stresses. (Each poem is a cry of relief, of victory over the hippogriff). In the case of William Wordsworth, his work might well be likened to the long and horrible self-analysis undertaken by Freud at the beginning of his career as a healer, an operation nobody else was capable of performing for him. “Each original work of art,” cries Wordsworth, “must create the taste by which it is to be judged.” Read and mark![10]

  Of course his beloved sister Dorothy took the place of his dead mother and in the voluptuousness of the transference he was able to feel the comfort and reassurance of his early childhood repeat itself in manhood. Moreover she was no dried-up old maid but a marvellous devoted woman who was the perfect partner in life; in every way sapient enough, intelligent enough, to second his growth. Most of all, it was she who set an exact value on his work, convincing him that it was worth living for and worth starving for. Very well, you may say, it was a surrogate-reassurance to replace what he had lost. But all the more lucky for us that so sensitive and reticent a poet should have such a sister, who demanded nothing of him except love and poetry, and for her part readily supplied the sympathy and the hard work necessary to keep the whole household oriented towards him. It was love all right, but it was a love of a marvellous self-abnegation—the love of Héloïse and Abelard, one might say.[11] So at least says the poet himself in more than one place. It outstripped all thought of real sexuality. (How astonished the brother and sister would be to read this last paragraph!)

  Then it was

  That the belovèd Woman in whose sight

  Those days were pass’d, now speaking in a voice

  Of sudden admonition, like a brook

  That did but cross a lonely road, and now

  Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn,

  Companion never lost through many a league,

  Maintained for me a saving intercourse

  With my true self; for, though impair’d and chang’d

  Much, as it seem’d, I was no further chang’d

  Than as a clouded, not a waning moon:

  She, in the midst of all, preserv’d me still

  A Poet, made me seek beneath that name

  My office upon earth, and nowhere else.[12]

  Looked at from this point of view the famous lines written above Tintern Abbey could be considered one of the great love-poems in the language.[13]

  The traditional portrait of the poet is drawn for the most part from the synoptic view of his life which tells us, for example, that the revolutionary young man spent 1791–92 in France, watched the first excesses of the revolution, fell in love with Annette Vallon who bore him a daughter, and then returned to England with his head hung low and his revolutionary heart broken by what he regarded not simply as an internal French disaster, but as a betrayal of the hopes for the whole human race. He was not the only one—a whole generation of young freethinkers and utopians all over Europe felt the same. A sick disgust, a heart-wrenching disappointment. Moreover this dark experience mingled with his despair about his French lover; he had every intention of marrying her and bringing her back to England—all this to the delight of Dorothy who at once established friendly and indeed loving contact with the girl. But a mixture of circumstances both personal and international intervened and separated them, not least among them the war with Napoleon, and gradually the marriage prospects faded out of the picture.

  Nevertheless, so honest was Wordsworth, that when he fell in love with someone else he insisted on clearing the matter with Annette. In everything we have to deal with a highly collected man and a high-principled one. He was master of his own ship, however much his infantile poet-side quailed before life and drew strength from the women about him. War put the finishing touches to his French love affair, and he turned away towards his English destiny, with perhaps many regrets and certainly some unjustified self-reproach. It is from this point onward that his life seems to become staider, more orthodox, less colourful. He had been disappointed both in love and in his political visions of human justice. There remained his art. It is worth remembering that later on he married an old family friend, and that for a long time, while he lived with his sister, they took joint charge of a small child which belonged to a widower friend in London who could not meet his responsibilities towards the infant. In other words the household structure was a real one, a homelike one in the real sense of the word. It did not lack a domestic shape capable of engendering for the Wordsworths real human contact, warmth, and responsibility.

  Moreover they were all happily devotees of country life, and adept at facing the rigours of climate and the boredom of long winters in the north. To them their native landscape was a Paradise, an Eden, and they never, like other Romantics, hankered for Italy or Greece. Switzerland represented something more real for Wordsworth, not only because it was scenically grandiose but also because it embodied the highest expression of democratic values. When Napoleon invaded it Wordsworth became his implacable enemy, and his sonnets were clarion-calls to rouse the English to their responsibilities towards the rights of man and the freedom of
states—and the defeat of tyrants. As time went on Wordsworth may be represented as shifting his allegiances from republicanism to high toryism; was this the inevitable hardening of the arteries which comes after forty or was it based on a measured view of man and his capacities—his ability to deal rationally and sensibly with freedom? I like to presume the latter, though the evidence goes against me.[14] One wonders where he would stand today amidst so many conflicting issues? One is reminded of a jotting by the indefatigable Crabb Robinson:[15]

  Wordsworth spoke with great feeling of the present state of the country. He considers the combinations among journeymen, and even the Benefit Societies and all associations of men, apparently for the best purposes, as very alarming: he contemplates the renovation of all the horrors of a war between the poor and the rich, a conflict of property with no property. The memories of the French terror, and the reign of Robespierre, had left their mark.[16]

  Young De Quincey has noted somewhere the rate of growth of Wordsworth’s reputation. “Up to 1820,” he writes, “the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.”[17] There is something almost irresistible in the steady deliberate advance of the poet, not simply upon his public, but upon the sentiment of the whole nation. He gradually expanded into a grave public figure, a symbol of the vigour and maturity of English literature. Perhaps even a graven image to some, or a sacred cow. To continue the story, in 1839 Oxford honoured him with a DCL.[18] In 1842 he was accorded a civil list pension which enabled him to resign his sinecure as a Distributor of Stamps which he had held, discharging his duties aptly and faithfully, since 1813. He succeeded, finally, Southey[19] as Poet Laureate in 1843. In 1850, at the ripe age of eighty, Wordsworth died. He was the father of five children, and his wife lived on for another nine years after his death. His renown was nation-wide.