Abstract
One writer above all taught Margaret Fuller and other elite radicals about the ways of feeling about nature and class most suited to a natural aristocracy, William Wordsworth. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, his books had sold slowly in the United States. An 1824 reviewer, F.WP. Greenwood, of the first American edition of the poems had been able to write:
If we have unworthily neglected this original and admirable poet, we have but followed the example of our countrymen. … With the exception of the Lyrical Ballads, which were printed many years ago, if we remember rightly at Philadelphia … not a single work of Wordsworth has been republished in this country. We have republished … Byron to his last scrap. Hogg, Rogers, Brown, Milman, Montgomery, Bernard Barton, Barry Cornwall, Leigh Hunt, and a host of more minors, have … been spread abroad throughout our land; but he, who has done more than any living writer to restore to poetry the language of feeling, nature, and truth, remains unread, unsought for, and almost unknown.
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. … In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
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Notes
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 53–54.
F.W.P. Greenwood, “The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth,” North American Review, 18 (April 1824): 356. Joel Pace, Letter to the Author, April 1, 2002. Karen Karbiener presented the results of her ongoing research on the American Lakers at the 2003 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at Fordham University in New York City. See also Joel Pace, “ ‘Gems of a soft and permanent lustre’: The Reception and Influence of the Lyrical Ballads in America,” Romanticism On the Net 9 (February 1998): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/americanLB.html>;
and Joel Pace, “Wordsworth, the Lyrical Ballads, and Literary and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Marcy L. Tanter, ed., “ The Honourable Characteristic of Poetry”: Two Hundred Years of Lyrical Ballads, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/lyrical/pace/wordsworth.html>. Pace’s forthcoming book promises to finally replace the only existing substantial study of Wordsworth’s reception and influence in the United States: Annabel Newton, Wordsworth in Early American Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).
Charles Mayo Ellis, Transcendentalism (Boston, 1842; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), 65.
James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography (Boston, 1891) quoted in
Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950),
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody quoted in Mark Reed, “Contacts with America,” in Nesta Clutterbuck, ed., William Wordsworth, 1770–1970: Essays of General Interest on Wordsworth and His Time (Westmorland: Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1970), 32–33. For a narrative of Thoreau’s exposure to Anglo-European philosophy during his years at Harvard and after graduation,
see Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–53. The best recent synthesis of New England Transcendentalism’s importation of European ideas is Barbara Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” in Bercovitch, Cambridge History, vol. 2, 331–375.
See also Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Henry Reed, ed., (Philadelphia: James Kay, 1837). Henry Reed, Review of The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, North American Review, 4 (January 1839):
J. Walker, “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth,” Christian Examiner, 22 (March 1837): 132.
Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” 150. Christopher Pearse Cranch, “Wordsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, 45 (February 1880): 241–252.
Walter Harding, Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967), 305–306. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Gilman et al., eds., vol. 5 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 60, 163, 370. For accounts of the influence on Emerson of Wordsworth’s ideas of nature,
see David Bromwich, “From Wordsworth to Emerson,” in Kenneth Johnston et al., eds., Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 202–218; and
Linden Peach, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), 29–57. For a thorough survey of the evidence that Nature was a direct response to Wordsworth, see Joel Pace, “ ‘Lifted to Genius’?: Wordsworth in Emerson’s nurture and Nature,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2, no. 2 (October 1998): 125–140.
Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 9. Influential readings of Romantic nature as a displacement or evasion of politics and history occur in
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986);
and Alan Liu, Wordsworth, the Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
Several scholars offer alternatives to the dominant New Historicist narrative of Wordsworth’s descent into mere Tory reaction, each emphasizing different elements of his feudal utopianism. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987) describes how the poetry is structured by an agrarian ideal of civic virtue.
James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and the Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) shows how Wordworth’s idea of feelings and tradition as reliable moral and political guides are based in the Burkean theory of second nature.
Michael H. Friedman, The Making of a Tory Humanist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) argues that Wordsworth became committed to an ideal of affective community.
John Rieder, Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997) describes the continuity between Wordsworth’s early radicalism and his later commitment to fantasies of agrarian community.
Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) traces the transformations in Wordsworth’s lifelong commitment to Commonwealthsman and Country–Party ideas of liberty in a visionary mountain republic.
D.L., “Shelley and Pollok,” Western Messenger, 3 (March 1837): 473–474, 478. See Elizabeth R. McKinsey, The Western Messenger: New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) for an account of the migration of a number of young Transcendentalists to the Ohio Valley. For discussions of nineteenth-century cultures of reading,
see William Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1830 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 34–50;
Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 173–195;
and Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 15–79. For accounts of the Romantic author as public intellectual, see Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 249–269, and
William G. Rowland, Jr. Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 171–193.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman, “Wordsworth,” Southern Literary Messenger, 7 (February 1841): 105, 108.
Anonymous, “William Wordsworth,” Southern Literary Messenger, 3, no. 12 (December 1837): 708, 705. For a fascinating reading of Wordsworth’s own anti-Jacobinism focused on the opposition between the figures of Robespierre and the ideal poet,
see Brooke Hopkins, “Representing Robespierre,” in Stephen C. Behrendt, ed., History and Myth: Essay on English Romantic Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 116–129.
Anonymous, “William Wordsworth,” 708, 709. Rowland, Literature and the Marketplace, 39–62, argues that Wordsworth formulates a rhetorical scene in which an inspired poet speaks to an audience united by an abstract human nature in order to create a spiritualized facsimile of the community he saw being materially destroyed by the rise of industrial capitalism. James K. Chandler, “Representative Men, Spirits of the Age, and Other Romantic Types,” in Kenneth Johnston et al., eds., Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 133–157, shows how Wordsworth studies are still shaped by the idea that he was the period’s central representative poet and captured the spirit of the age.
Willard Spiegelman, Wordsworth’s Heroes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1–23 compares the Wordsworthian poet-preceptor with other contemporary figures of the genius or hero.
N. Porter, “Wordsworth and His Poetry,” Quarterly Christian Spectator, 8 (March 1836): 141, 129, 130–131.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). William Wordsworth in New England and the Discipline of Nature. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_7
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