In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

REVIEWS 481 SHORTER NOTICE Wordsworth's Formative Y ears. By GEORGE WILBUR MEYER. (University of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature , vol. XX.) Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1943, $3.50. Wordsworth's Pocket Notebook. Edited, with Commentary, by GEORGE HARRIS HEALEY. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1942, $1.50. h should be made clear at once that both these books are for the specialist in Wordsworth. The one is a detailed study of the littleregarded writings before Lyrical Ballads; the other is a critical edition of a small notebook, kept over forty years later by the elderly and fashionable poet, which D;~akes available a trifle more information for scholars but will change no literary judgments·. Wordswor·th's Fo1·mative Y ears is written in the belief that The Prelude is untrustworthy, not ~mly as factual autobiography, but even as a history" of " the growth of a poet's mind/' and that for a correct understanding of Wordsworth's emerging ideas in the ten years before Lyrical Ballads we.must refer only to the contemporary writings. In these, Professor Meyer undertakes to show, there can be fountfmore than casual or prejudiced readers have noticed; in fae;t, most of the mature poet's ideas about man, nature and society may be detected before his twenty-fifth year and the arrival of Coleridge on the scene. To support this positive contention Mr Meyer examines An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches, A Le_tter to the Bishop of Llandajf, Guilt and Sorrow, The Borde1·ers and The Rui11ed Collage with more watchful patience than·previous students have been able to retain when going ov.er these often turgid literary documents. The positive thesis about the eariy writings is much better sustained than the negative, and minor, contention about The Prelude. An orderly change can be traced from one poem to the next, the course depending in part on the French Revolution and the alterations in the poet's fortun~s and prospects. Typical and persisting ideas and attitudes can also be identified in even the earliest work. The youthful writings are neither intellectually nor poetically empty. Mr Meyer's .book is entirely convincing, within limits. But by trying to ignore The Prelude as a poet's summary of what really mattered in these years, he has diminished the value of his study, and has run the risk of confusing, as Wordsworth did 482 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY not, the temporary concern with the permanent intellectual acquiSitiOn . Wordsworth believed that true poetry was the result of "emotion recollected in tranquillity," and only less obviously that sQund self-understanding was possible only after the passage of time. He was sure that he had a deeper and wiser knowledge of his youthful mind when he completed the first draft of The Prelude in 1805 than when he wrote this letter to Mathew~ or that paragraph of Descriptive Sketches in 1792. And he was right. Wordsworth's Formative Years is the most thorough, and at some points the best, study of the youthful writings, but not of the youthful poet. For that we must still turn to The Prelude. The other volume listed above, a notebook, containing for the most part bare memoranda of engagements during the poet's visit to London, Cambridge and Oxford in 1839-40, was left behind at Rydal Mount, apparently as of no interest, when the Wordsworth family moved away in 1859, was picked up by the gardener as a souvenir, and eventually found its way to the United States. Mr G. H. Healey has now given us a careful page-by-page transcript of this unconsidered trifle, with introduction and notes, and the Cornell University Press has printed i.t handsomely, in a style worthy of more significant matter. The entries include n111ny items such as: "14 Tu breakfast Mr. Marshall. Dentist 2 c/clock"; at least one curious ur-Stein experiment in something or other, "Mrs. Cookson 35 Burton St./ Burton Crescent/ 35 Burton Street/ Burton Crescent/ Mrs.·Cookson"; and about sixty lines of verse, including early drafts of two sonnets and a fifth reading for a brief passage in The Prelude. There is no observation whatever...

pdf

Share