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  • Wordsworth and the poetry of What We Are
  • Matthew Bevis
Wordsworth and the poetry of What We Are. By Paul H. Fry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 240. ISBN 0300126484. £35.00.

Wordsworth had an aversion to whitewash. Discussing houses in the Lake District, he advised: 'the safest colour, for general use, is something between a cream and a dust-colour, commonly called stone colour'. Paul Fry's study offers itself as stone-coloured criticism. This Wordsworth is not so much red or green, but grey; rather than being pressed into the service of political or ecological agendas, the poet is cherished for his commitment to a particular kind of tonal blankness. Such a tone – at once visual and aural – is something akin to a feeling that Rilke often mulls over, from his appreciation of the way Orpheus's voice lingers on in boulders to his sense that the poet's task is to aspire to 'the equanimity of stones'. What interests Fry is Wordsworth's enduring attraction to the 'ontological shock' that poetry can create when it reminds us of the 'thinghood' that human beings have in common with all being. The shock is both bracing and calming: 'Wordsworth discovers the ontic unity of the human and the nonhuman in the sheer minerality of things […] delineating the human by feeling tentatively around the edges of humanity in that moment of faint sentience, never far from bedrock, where death and life graze each other.' According to Fry, such a pared-down yet unified vision is a vital part of the poet's originality.

One of the many strengths of Fry's book is that such attempts not to mean are made to feel at once adventurous and grounded. In some ways, as Fry acknowledges, to read Wordsworth in this way is to read him against the grain, to resist the slant of the writer who often seems tied to the roles of 'levelling rural lyricist, psychological visionary, and Sage of Rydal Mount'. Wordsworth is well known for his 'visionary dreariness', of course, but Fry offers new insight into the prominence of the dreariness rather than the visionary; the rocks and stones (as well as the trees) in Wordsworth are not there to be read as moral emblems or as intimations of immortality, but encountered as silent, potent reminders of the oneness of being. Fry situates the poet in a broadly monist, materialist and empirical tradition from Locke to Hartley, yet also shows how he develops his own peculiarly haunting ways of seeing. More somatic than semantic, Wordsworth becomes a poet who frequently encourages in us – to use Fry's apposite phrase – 'a suspense of knowing'.

The book ranges widely, and is full of sensitive and provocative readings. Fry is excellent on Wordsworth's earliest poetry (especially on the reduction of the loco-descriptive to what he terms 'sheer ostension' in that work), and has many revealing things to say about the Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, The Excursion and later lyrics. He is sharp, too, on Wordsworth's resistance to anthropocentric readers (particularly Francis Jeffrey), and on the limits of the 'egotistical sublime' as a way of discussing how the poet's 'I' envisages its connection with the world around it. Perhaps the central argumentative strand of the book, though, is Fry's conception of the antagonism as well as the alliance between Coleridge and Wordsworth. In his account, the two writers 'always have opposite ends in view' when trying to rethink the nature of the ordinary. Broadly speaking, Fry pits Coleridge the transcendentalist against Wordsworth the materialist: while the former sees imagination as making things one, the latter sees it as a form of serene 'in-difference', a power which rather discovers things as one. At those moments when Wordsworth does not seem to be following this script, Fry frequently decides that the poet is evading his own most radical insights and being 'not wholly candid', merely offering a token gesture in an 'effort to agree with Coleridge', for 'that would appear to be what Coleridge wants to hear'. [End Page 178]

This – in addition to presenting Coleridge as more decided than he...

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