Man Seeing

Abstract

The title of Kenneth Johnston’s biography, The Hidden Wordsworth, might seem an odd choice for the poet whom Keats immortalized as the creator of the “egotistical sublime.” But the title does point out something interesting about the poet. For although William Wordsworth’s poetry does usually concern the self, the self that we see in Wordsworth’s poetry is always partially hidden. We usually find Wordsworth’s narrator outside the main current of the action, hanging back, observing. There has rarely been a poet whose greatest moments have so exclusively concerned the act of looking— “Once again / Do I behold” (“Tintern Abbey” 4–5); “Half an hour I watched” (1799 Prelude 1.270);¹ “all at once I saw” (“I Wandered Lonely” 3); “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject” (1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads); “The eye it cannot chuse but see” (“Expostulation and Reply” 17); “Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed” (1805 Prelude 7.599); “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (“Ode” 9). And rarely has there been a poet who so compulsively emphasizes his distance from his objects: “I wandered lonely as a Cloud / That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills” (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” 1–2); “I again repose / Here, under this dark sycamore, and view” (“Tintern Abbey” 9–10); “Will no one tell me what she sings?”