Probably the theory took form after the poems had been written. So with Wordsworth’s explanation, prefixed to the first edition:
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness; they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers… should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification….
Readers of superior judgement may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed…. It will appear to them that, wishing to avoid the prevalent faults of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of the expressions are too familiar and not of sufficient dignity. It is apprehended that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers,… the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.26
Prose interfered with their poetry: the owner of the Alfoxden house notified the Wordsworths that their lease could not be renewed beyond June 30, 1798. On June 25 William and Dorothy left for Bristol to negotiate with Cottle. On July 10 they took a ferry across the River Severn, and walked ten miles in Wales to Tintern Abbey. Near this “very beautiful ruin,” and on the way back to Bristol, Wordsworth composed the first draft of the poem that was added as the concluding piece of the Lyrical Ballads.
The little book was published on October 4, 1798, nineteen days after the unavowed authors had left for Germany. The title was fitting: Coleridge’s main contributions were lineal descendants of old English ballads—tales in songlike verse; and most of Wordsworth’s contributions were simple lyrics of simple life, in the almost monosyllabic language of the English peasantry. The book opened with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; this occupied fifteen of the 117 pages; it was the longest entry, and perhaps the best, though England came only slowly to realize this, and Wordsworth never.
The Rime has indeed many faults, but we must not stress, among these, the absurdity of the tale; Coleridge had entered a realm of mystery and imagination in which anything could happen, and mighty events might flow from trifling incidents. He had to depend upon imagination, for he had never been to sea,27 and he had to borrow from travel books for maritime terms and moods. Nevertheless he caught the mystic aura of old legends, the marching rhythm of old ballads; and the old mariner carries us with him almost to the end. It is, of course, one of the greatest lyrics in the English language.
Wordsworth’s contributions were mostly examples of his finding wisdom in simple souls. Some of these poems, like “The Idiot Boy” and “Simon Lee,” were hilariously satirized by reviewers; but which of us has not sympathized with a mother’s patient love for her harmlessly feeble-minded child? (One line of that understanding poem tells of “the green grass—you almost hear it growing”;28 was this snatched from Dorothy?) Then, after lingering with his rural types, Wordsworth concluded the book with the meditative “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Here he gave supreme expression to his feeling that nature and God (Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura) are one, speaking not only through the miracles of growth but also through those awesome and (to human short sight) seemingly destructive forces that Turner was then worshiping in paint. To his wanderings in woods and fields, his rowing on placid lakes and scrambling over massive rocks, to a thousand cries or whispers from a thousand forms of life, even from the supposedly inanimate world—
To them I may have owed… that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened…
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.29
And then he rose to his finest profession of faith:
I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and… recognize,
In nature and the language of the sense,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.30
Dorothy too had reached this healing, unifying creed, and found it not inconsistent with her Christian faith. At the close of his hymn Wordsworth added a paean to her as his sister soul, and bade her keep to the end
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee;… and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies…31
Lyrical Ballads was not favorably received. “They are not liked by any,” reported Mrs. Coleridge—a wife forgivably envious of her husband’s Muse. The reviewers were so busy exposing loose joints in The Mariner, and loose sentiment in Wordsworth’s ditties, that none of them seems to have recognized The Mariner as a future fixture in all anthologies, though some noticed the devout pantheism of “Tintern Abbey.” The little book sold five hundred copies in two years, and Coleridge ascribed some of these sales to a sailor who thought, from the Rime, that the volume was a naval songbook. Wordsworth ascribed the tardiness of the sale to the inclusion of The Ancient Mariner.
In 1799, while Coleridge was in Germany, Wordsworth prepared a second edition of the Ballads. On June 24 he wrote to Cottle: “From what I gather it seems that The Ancyent Marinere has upon the whole been an injury to the volume. [This may have been true.]… If the volume should come to a second edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.”32 The Mariner was admitted to the second edition, with a (disarming?) note from Wordsworth admitting its faults but pointing out its excellences.
This edition (January, 1801) contained a new poem by Wordsworth, “Michael”—a tale leisurely told, in blank verse, of an eighty-four-year-old shepherd, loyal in labor, firm in morals, loved in his village, and of his son, who moved to the city and became a dissolute degenerate. A new preface by Wordsworth announced in detail, and in sentences now famous, his theory of poetry: Any object or idea may generate poetry if it is borne on feeling and carries significance; and any style or language can be poetic if it transmits such feeling and significance. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”;33 the artist himself must have controlled his emotion before he can give it form. But such emotions are not confined to the literate or the elite; they can appear in the unlettered peasant as well as in the scholar or the lord; and
perhaps in greater purity and clarity in the simpler soul. Nor does the expression need a special poetic vocabulary or style; the best style is the simplest, the best words are the least discolored with pretense or pomp. Ideally the poet should speak in the language of the common man; but even learned words may be poetic if they convey the feeling and the moral force.
For in the end it is the moral import that counts in every art. Of what use is our own skill with sound or form if it be not to seek readier acceptance of a clarifying, healing, or ennobling thought? “A great poet ought, to a certain degree, to rectify men’s feelings,… to render them more sane, pure, and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature—that is, to eternal nature and the great spirit of things. He ought to travel before men occasionally, as well as at their sides.”34 The ideal poet, or painter, or sculptor is a philosopher clothing wisdom in art, revealing significance through form.
That preface played a part in history, for it helped to put an end to the fancy language, the class prejudices, the classical references, the mythological frills that had often littered the poetry and oratory of the English Augustan Age. It declared the rights of feeling, and—in the most unromantic style—gave another welcome to romance. Wordsworth himself was of classic mold and mood, given to thought and rule; he provided the tranquillity of recollection, while Coleridge brought emotion and imagination. It was an excellent collaboration.
VIII. THE WANDERING SCHOLARS: 1798–99
Not waiting to see their book published, and helped by an additional gift to Coleridge by Josiah Wedgwood, and an advance to Wordsworth by his brother Richard, the two poets and Dorothy sailed on September 15, 1798, from Yarmouth to Hamburg. There, after an uninspiring visit to the aging poet Klopstock, they separated: Coleridge went to study in the University of Göttingen, and Wordsworth and Dorothy took a diligence to the “free Imperial city” of Goslar, at the northern foot of the Harz Mountains. There, contrary to plan but immobilized by the cold, the Wordsworths remained for four months. They tramped the streets, fed the stove, wrote or copied poetry. Warming himself with memories, Wordsworth composed Book 1 of The Prelude, his autobiographical epic. Then, suddenly realizing how much they loved England, they set out on foot, on a cold February 23, 1799, to bid Coleridge goodbye at Göttingen, and then hurry back through the rough North Sea to Yarmouth and on to Sockburn on the Tees, where Mary Hutchinson waited quietly for William to marry her.
Meanwhile Coleridge did his best, at Göttingen, to become a German. He learned the language, and became entangled in German philosophy. Finding no explanation of mind in the psychology of materialism, he abandoned the mechanistic associationism of Hartley, and adopted the idealism of Kant and the theology of Schelling, who presented Nature and Mind as two aspects of God. He heard or read the lectures of August Wilhelm von Schlegel on Shakespeare, and took from them many a notion for his own later lectures on the Elizabethan drama. Drunk with ideas and abstractions, he lost his old flair for feeling and imagery, and abandoned poetry for philosophy. “The poet in me is dead,” he wrote, “I have forgotton how to make a rhyme.”35 He became the bearer of German philosophy to England.
In July, 1799, he left Germany and returned to Nether Stowey. But a year’s absence from his wife had dulled the edge of husbandry; Sara Coleridge was no longer a romance, and both husband and wife were darkened by the recent death of their second child, Berkeley. In October, restless, he went north to see Wordsworth at Sockburn. On that visit he held too long the hand of Sara Hutchinson, Mary’s sister; some mystic current passed from the woman to the man, and Coleridge plunged into his third unhappy love affair. This Sara, mindful of his obligations to the other, gave him affection, but no more. After two years of vain wooing he resigned himself to defeat, and wrote a touching ode, “Dejection,” as almost the last flash of his poetry.
He accompanied Wordsworth on a walking tour of the Lake District, each looking for a home. At Keswick he thought he had found one, but an offer of employment on the Morning Post deflected him to London. Meanwhile Wordsworth had leased a cottage thirteen miles farther south at Grasmere. He returned to Sockburn and won Dorothy’s consent to the move; and on December 17, 1799, brother and sister began their long passage, mostly on foot, from Sockburn to Grasmere, over many miles of winterhardened and rutted roads. On December 21 they made their hearth in what Wordsworth called “Town’s End,” and what came later to be called Dove Cottage. There they lived the hardest and happiest years of their lives.
IX. IDYL IN GRASMERE: 1800–03
From May 14, 1800, to January 16, 1803, Dorothy kept her “Grasmere Journal.” Through those 150 pages we are enabled to see and feel the daily life of brother and sister, and later, briefly, of brother, sister, and wife. The climate of Grasmere was not made for health: rain or snow fell almost every day, and the winter’s cold—even with snow—might reappear in June or July.36 Sunny days were ecstasies, and the occasional emergence of the moon was a transfiguring revelation. The cottage was heated with coal in fireplace and stove, but sometimes, Dorothy noted, “I could not sleep for sheer cold.” They took the weather stoically, grateful for spring and the usual gentleness of the rain; “it rained very mildly and sweetly” occurs repeatedly in the journal. “Sometimes Grasmere looked so beautiful that my heart almost melted away.”37
Many a walk they took, together or apart, sometimes a mile to Ambleside for mail, sometimes half a day’s journey to Keswick after Coleridge had settled there. Wordsworth seemed content with his sister-bride, calling her
The dear companion of my lonely walk,
My hope, my joy, my sister, my friend,
Or something dearer still, if reason knows
A dearer thought, or, in the heart of love,
There is a dearer name.
And as late as 1802 (the year of his marriage) he referred to her as “my love.”38 She was content to call him “Sweet brother.”39
She now had an income of forty pounds, he seventy; this (added to some dribblings from his publications), amounting to some one hundred forty pounds (3,500?), was their yearly income. They had one or two servants, for poverty was so general that many a woman, spouseless, was willing to work for bed and board. Poet and sister dressed simply: Dorothy in garments usually made by herself, even to shoes;40 William in peasant garb, or in cast-off clothing sent him by friends.41 But they kept a vegetable garden, and sometimes caught fish in the lake. Moreover, the journal records, “I made tarts and pies,”42 “bread and pies,”43 “pies and cakes.”44 William was pampered.
But he worked too. Part of each normal day he composed, usually on his solitary walks, from which he returned to dictate lines to Dorothy. Also he chopped wood; dug and planted in the garden; and “William cleared a path to the necessary,”45—i.e., through the snow to the outdoor privy. Add that Dorothy brewed ale,46 and “we borrowed some bottles for bottling rum.”47 Despite the vegetables, William suffered from hemorrhoids,48 and (after 1805) from weakened sight, and insomnia; many an evening Dorothy had to read him to sleep.49
Those Theocritean days were suddenly confused by money and marriage. On May 24, 1802, Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, died, leaving his property and title to his nephew, Sir William Lowther, who arranged to pay the money owed by Sir James to the heirs of John Wordsworth, Sr. Apparently four thousand pounds was divided among the children. Though the shares of William and Dorothy were not paid till 1803, William felt that his reasonable expectations warranted him in at last offering his hand to Mary Hutchinson.
But the memory of Annette Vallon rankled in his conscience. Should he not clear up his relation with her before asking Mary to take him? On July 9, 1802, he and Dorothy left Grasmere by coach and foot for Mary’s present home at Gallow Hill. On July 26 they left Gallow Hill by coach for London. There, awed by the majesty of the city as seen in the early morning from Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth composed one of his many memorable sonnets—”Earth has not anything to show more fair.”50 They went on to Dover, took the pack
et across the Channel, and on July 31 found Annette and her nine-year-old daughter, Caroline, in waiting for them in Calais.
We do not know what agreement they came to; we know only that fourteen years later, when Caroline married, Wordsworth, then prospering, settled upon her an annuity of thirty pounds (750?). The four remained at Calais for four weeks, walking the seashore in apparent accord. Wordsworth spun off another excellent sonnet—”It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, / The holy time is quiet as a Nun / Breathless with adoration,”—ending with a benediction for Caroline. On August 29 Wordsworth and Dorothy left for Dover and London. Apparently he was in no hurry, for not until September 24 did brother and sister get back to Gallow Hill.
On October 4, 1802, William and Mary were married. No presents came to the bride, for her relatives disapproved of Mary’s marrying “a vagabond.”51 Dorothy, who only recently had written of William in her journal as “my Beloved,” could not trust herself to attend the ceremony. “Her feelings were wrought to an almost uncontrollable pitch.”52 She went upstairs and lay “almost insensible” until Sara Hutchinson called to her that “they are coming” back from the church. “This,” she wrote in her journal that afternoon, “forced me from my bed where I lay, and I moved, I knew not how,… faster than my strength could carry me, till I met my beloved William and fell upon his bosom. He and John Hutchinson led me to the house, and there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary.”
That same day, in a chaise, the poet, his wife, and his sister began the long ride to Grasmere. Dorothy gradually adapted herself to the ménage à trois, and soon learned to love Mary as a sister and confidante. Besides, Mary brought to the household her own income of twenty pounds a year. When the Lowther payment finally arrived, it lifted the family to bourgeois comfort. William became an ardent patriot, and enlisted in the Grasmere Volunteers for the domestic defense of England against Napoleon.
To the Grasmere idyl belong some of Wordsworth’s finest lyrics (”To a Butterfly”); the powerful sonnet to Milton; the ode “Resolution and Independence,” chiding his own melancholy; and (between 1803 and 1806) the most famous of all his compositions—”Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Seldom has a philosophic fantasy been so beautifully expressed.