Wordsworth and Greek Myth

WORDSWORTH AND GREEK MYTH ALEX ZWERDLING Literary historians anxious to demonstrate the revival of interest in Greek myth during the Romantic period usually point to the poetry of Keats and Shelley. And it is certainly true that the attitude of these two poets towards classical fable is radically different from that of the previous century. But in contrasting the "Romantic" with the "Neo-Classical" point of view, we must beware of identifying the feelings of all the writers in each group; of assuming, for example, that there was essential agreement between the first generation of Romantic poets and the second. The fact that Wordsworth wrote relatively little poetry which actually uses the Greek myths makes such an identification of attitudes relatively easy. And yet, the older poet's part in reclaiming the province of classical fable is at once unique, extremely influential, and difficult to assess. The subject was of great interest to W ordsworth. In such poems as the first "Ode to Lycoris," "Laodamia," and "The World Is Too Much with Us" Call of which will be examined below) he uses the material of Greek legends; in addition, he discusses classical myth in several prose statements , and, most Significantly, in a famous section of Book IV of The Excursion. This passage Cll. 718-62, 847-87) is generally regarded as the most sharply defined and important praise of Greek fable in the Romantic period. In its way, it has become as useful to the historian of ideas as Ulysses' speech about order in Troilus and Cressida. But treating the passage in this way has forced us to simplify its meaning and distort Wordsworth's own unique conception, and it is important to see the lines in their more limited perspective, first as a statement of Wordsworth's, not The Romantic Poet's, and then as part of the dramatic context of the poem from which they have too frequently been wrenched. The passage was treated as a Significant statement even in its own time, and by some very important, though not exactly disinterested, readers. Landor, for example, called Wordsworth's lines ''The best verses he ever wrote.'" And Keats's praise of them was so extravagant that it tempts us to identify the attitudes of the two poets, and to make Keats Wordsworth 's diSCiple. The younger poet had said, after all, that The Excursion was one of "three things to rejoice at in this Age";2 and Keats's friend Volume XXXIII, Number 4, July, 1964 342 ALEX ZWERDLING Benjamin Haydon noted in his copy of The Excursion, "Poor Keats used always to prefer this passage to all others.'" Such hints have encouraged modern scholars to lay great stress on the influence of Wordsworth's lines. John Middleton Murry, for example, thinks that "the real seed of Keats's 'sensation' of Hyperion" was probably "sown in him by the forty lines in The Excursion, Book IV, describing the religion of Greece." It is here, he says, that we should look for the "germ of the imaginative feeling of Hyperion.'" And Douglas Bush suggests that Keats's "boyish passion for myth had been confirmed, as instinct ripened into understanding, by the potent authority of Wordsworth, whose inspiring discourse on mythology in The Excursion was a fundamental chapter in Keats's poetic bible.'" "The great passages in the fourth book on the origin and significance of myth must have been both an inspiration and a confirmation of his own instincts; indeed the core of Hyperion, the speech of Oceanus, might almost be called a summary of various parts of the Excursion.'" It is unfortunate that this emphaSiS on the influence of Wordsworth's statement seems to have prevented us from looking at the passage itself with any care, and from attempting to assess exactly how Wordsworth felt about Greek myth. A central factor in the intellectual background of his attitude was a controversy persisting into Wordsworth's own time, about the nature and status of the pagan fables. By around 1800 Greek "idolatry," as it was still very often called, was finally beginning to be recognized as an important and absorbing subject which had been obscured rather than illuminated by...