Romantic Poets and Gothic Culture

Abstract

On November 26, 1814, William Wordsworth wrote to his younger brother Christopher to express his relief on hearing that his “intentions” in sending him a copy of The Excursion had been “fulfilled” (MY II, 170–171). The poem was the only section of The Recluse— the “philosophical poem” against postrevolutionary despair planned with Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1798 (CLSTC I, 527)—that Wordsworth had been able both to complete and to publish. But like its long-suppressed autobiographical precursor, The Prelude, described by the Eclectic Review as a “large fossil relic… newly dug up” in November 1850 (551), The Excursion had i n some ways already missed its moment when it appeared in July 1814. The poem’s tone of stoic optimism was perhaps better suited to the earlier, darker days of the war against Napoleon, and its materials were—as with the first book’s story of “The Ruined Cottage”—in some places almost two decades old. In the event The Excursion fell, as William Hazlitt put it, “still-born from the press” (Cook ed. 1999, 353). The expensive first edition (in quarto, priced at £2 2s) still loaded the shelves at Longman’s into the 1830s (St Clair 2004, 201; Gill 1998, 17). But with the abdication of Napoleon and the restoration in France and across Europe of what Edmund Burke had called the old Gothic order (Burke 1796, 110), Wordsworth clearly cherished high hopes of the poem, likened in its preface to the “body” of a “gothic Church” (1814, ix), catching the zeitgeist.