Abstract
In the spring of 1798, when Coleridge read aloud to him a few of the poems that Wordsworth had just written and that would shortly appear in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, the 20-year-old William Hazlitt felt the birth of something truly original. As he recalled twenty-five years later, ‘the sense of a new style and a new spirit came over me. It had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring.’1 In time, these vernal tropes gave way to even grander claims for Wordsworth’s genius, which seemed to Hazlitt nothing less than ’a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’ — so much so that in any other period he would have been wholly ignored.2 For Hazlitt, Wordsworth’s poetry embodies the spirit of the French Revolution:
It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age; the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot explain its character at all) is a leveling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard.
(‘Mr. Wordsworth’, NA, 441)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), in British Literature 1780–1830, ed Anne K. Mellor and Richard Matlak (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 41 — hereafter cited as BrL.
Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798), in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 116
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 96.
To Joseph Cottle, who had printed (though not published) the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote in June 1799: ‘From what I can gather it seems that the Ancyent Marinere has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on.’ The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt; The Early Years, 1787–1805, rev. by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 264
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: the Middle Years, Part II, 1812–20, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) LW 2:248
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), vol. 1, p. 412
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 150 — hereafter cited as Gill.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I: 184
Burton Pollin, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’ , Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), p. 81
Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’ in The Coleridge Connection, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London: Macmillan 1990), p. 62
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), hereafter cited as CW, Vol. 1, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 59
CL, 1:397-8. He also observed that ‘a man’s character follows him long after he has ceased to deserve it’ (CL, 1:397). But less than two months earlier he had anonymously published in The Morning Post two articles that could readily be called seditious. ‘Ireland and La Vendee’ (17 January) argues that Britain was treating the Irish far more harshly than the French Republican army was treating the Vendee rebels, and ‘Pitt and Buonaparte’ (18 January) purports to quote — without objection — a French periodical writer on the two men: ‘What point of contact is there between the two? The one is the horror of the world by his politics, the other is the hope of mankind by his victories.’ Collected Works, vol. 3Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 14–15.
See The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Oxford UP, 1967 1912), hereafter cited as CPW, pp. 237–40
Morton D. Paley, ‘Coleridge and the Apocalyptic Grotesque’ in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 16–19.
NEW MORALITY; — or — The promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the THEOPHILANTHROPES, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite. Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist (London: Phaidon, 1965), plate 74 — hereafter cited as Hill.
Nicholas Roe observes that his ‘bookshop was a well-known meeting-place for London radicals throughout the 1790s’ and he was himself a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, six of whose members were arrested and charged with high treason in May 1794. Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 28.
For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–9), 2nd edn of vol. 2, rev. by H. Darbishire (1952), 2: 517 — hereafter cited as WPW.
Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 29–31.
See Levinson, p. 22, and Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979)
‘The Female Vagrant’ was the first published version of stanzas 23–50 in what later appeared as Guilt and Sorrow: or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain (1842); only the full-length version presents the woman’s story as told to a traveller on the Plain. In the manuscript version of his Advertisement to Guilt and Sorrow, Wordsworth wrote that his trip across the Plain stirred him ‘to compare what we know or guess of those remote times, with certain aspects of modern society, particularly in what concerns the afflictions & calamities to which the poor are subject’. See William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 216.
Constable first saw and copied this painting at the London house of Sir George Beaumont some time before the summer of 1802, and according to C. R. Leslie, he ‘looked back on the first sight of this exquisite work as an important epoch in his life’. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Phaidon, 1951), p. 5.
As Kenneth Johnston observes, ‘the beggars are there,... and... this necessary political element opens up the poem to further appreciation if we press appropriately on the language Wordsworth himself provides, aided by information outside the poem.’ ‘The Politics of Tintern Abbey’, The Wordsworth Circle, 14 (Winter 1983), p. 12.
See Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life (Seacaucus, NJ: Poplar Books, 1979), p. 307.
Though the service of God was beyond all question the prime object of monastic life, yet the more closely that life is examined the more clearly does it exhibit the element of associated labour.’ Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, vol. 2 (London: John Hodges, 1889), p. 495
J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1950), p. 152.
On Wordsworth’s response to the vogue of the picturesque — the habit of viewing and describing scenery as if it were a picture — see Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 17–25
Biographia Literaria, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and James Engell, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 5. When Hazlitt visited Wordsworth and Coleridge in the spring of 1798, he noted Wordsworth looking out of a window and remarking ‘How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!’ Hazlitt writes: ‘I thought within myself, “with what eyes these poets see nature!” and ever after, when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects facing it, conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Wordsworth for having made one for me!’ (‘My First Acquaintance with the Poets,’ NA, 437).
Fragment from the Alfoxden notebook quoted in William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 15.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heffernan, J.A.W. (1998). Wordsworth’s ‘Leveling’ Muse in 1798. In: Cronin, R. (eds) 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26690-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26690-6_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-26692-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26690-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)