Abstract
In his Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth declared that valuable poetry of any range had never been produced except by a man who ‘being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply’; he spoke of the poet as a ‘man speaking to men’, but went on to assert that the poet is, all the same, a man who is ‘endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.’1
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Notes
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1789–91), ii, 29.
Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination ii, 103–20 (1744. pp. 51–2).
Ibid., ii 158–65 (pp. 54–5).
See Enid Welsford’s Salisbury Plain: A Study in the Development of Wordsworth’s Mind and Art (Oxford, 1966).
D. H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, ed. V. de Sola Pinto and W. Roberts, (1964), I, p. 36.
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Ch. iv (1913), pp. 60–1.
See D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, esp. Ch. xiii, and contrast Helen Corke, Neutral Ground (1933), pp. 221–3. Cf also The Prelude (1805 x 291–307; 1850 x 315–30), and PW I 307 on the sunset cannon at the Isle of Wight in 1793.
Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, c.31 Jan. 1915. Letters, ed. H. T. Moore (1962), I, pp. 309–10.
The parallels continue in the decisions of both writers to live in seclusion in the west of England during the upheaval of war, followed in both cases by the suspicions of the local inhabitants and by Government investigations. Wordsworth and Coleridge, planning their poem ‘The Brook’, were thought of as French spies and their question whether the local river was ‘navigable to the sea’ was immediately seized on as evidence of subversive intent (CBL I, 126–9 and A. J. Eagleston, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Spy’ (1908), reprinted in Coleridge: Studies by several hands …, ed. E. Blunden and E. L. Griggs (1934), pp. 71–88).
In the same way Frieda Lawrence’s Hebridean songs were mistaken for German by the local inhabitants and the wreck of a vessel off the coast was put down to their activities (see H. T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (Harmondsworth, Middx., 1960), pp. 295–6). By the time that we think of Wordsworth in the Lakes and Lawrence in Mexico the contrasts have become almost overwhelming. Only the instinct to move away from the great centres of modern civilisation and the impulse to build a secluded community unite the two men — and even there Lawrence’s community relies on a strenuous balancing polarity between individuals, whereas Wordsworth builds on the more conventional foundations of the family and domestic affection.
W. Gilpin, Observations on theRiver Wye, Etc. (1792), p. 46.
Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, iii, 599–608, (1744, p. 124).
Roger Sharrock, ‘The Borderers: Wordsworth on the moral frontier’, Durham University Journal (1964), LVI, 170–83.
Donald E Hayden, ‘Toward an Understanding of Wordsworth’s The Borderers’, MLN (1951), LXVI, 1–6, citing ll. 1529–30 (PW I 188).
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© 1978 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1978). Towards a Pure Composure. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_2
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