Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Finale

98 98 Finale Therefore, although it be a history Homely and rude, I will relate the same For the delight of a few natural hearts, And with yet fonder feeling, for the sake Of youthful Poets, who among these Hills Will be my second Self when I am gone.1 T he Prelude takes for granted that reading and writing are important life-­ affirming, mind-­ altering, soul-­ making activities. If this is true, then the poet—the writer—is quite possibly the most important person in the world. The Prelude is a poem about its author needing to believe he is necessary by convincing himself. But it is not a vanity project. Rather, it is an honest expression of what all artists must believe about themselves . The artist’s chief mechanism of defense is to blame the public for its degraded sensibility and taste—or to deplore the forsaking of its very soul. AsWordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont, one of his few admirers in 1807: It is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of Poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world—among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society.This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of Poetry in my sense of the word is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.2 This partly explains how and why Wordsworth could write and revise nine thousand lines of iambic pentameter about the development of his mind, his imagination, his very soul 99 Finale and then insist that it be published onlyafter his death. Still, the work of writing one’s self can never rest for a vitally creative person; and this explains whyWordsworth obsessively expanded, revised, and tinkered with the poem for nearly fifty years, instructing his executors to publish it once he could no longer be embarrassed by it. Conversely, can Wordsworth explore the revelation of his poetic self without seeming too into himself? Can any writer attempt such a feat without redounding charges of egotism on himself/herself? The young Keats, who did not live long enough to read ThePrelude, still recognized enough of Wordsworth’s self in his other poetry to invent the phrase “egotistical sublime” as a way of describing that which is “wordsworthian” (Keats, in this letter, tellingly resists capitalizing the eponymous modifier).3 Wordsworth, no more a narcissist or egotist than any other writer, was not completely comfortable with the making of either his former or his present self into the hero of a subjective, introspective epic poem. But Keats’s phrase is easily misunderstood: Keats does not mean that Wordsworth’s poetry is vain, swaggering, orconceited—although someof Wordsworth’s other readers thought so. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that egotism involves “the practice of talking about oneselforone’s doings.” The point is that Wordsworth’s personality impresses itself so strongly on the poetry that it has (or means to have) the aesthetic effect of the sublime. But it is not that Wordsworth thinks he is himself that awesome; it is that he is amazed to find what he finds inside of himself, amazed by what was put there for him to use. In his book for the Muse Books series on Blake and creativity, Eric G. Wilson writes that “the great problem forall whowish to create” is “how to transcend a past, both personal and cultural, that has shaped one’s habits of perception.”4 This is not a problem for Wordsworth: the problem for him is that someone likeWilson, or like Keats, thinks he should transcend his past and its influence on him. 100 Finale Wordsworth was worried that some readers would find his life-­ writing too self-­ indulgent, too idiosyncratic to matter . As James Dickey commented in a 1976 interview with The Paris Review, the problem with “confessional” or autobiographical poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, or Sylvia Plath—all literary descendants of Wordsworth (for better or worse)—is that “what is presupposed is that their life and their situation is going to be eternally fascinating to you. And it isn’t.” Dickey adds in contrast, “I am interested in Roethke’s relationship to the ocean, because that gets me into it. I can participate...