Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

The History of a Poet’s Mind

20 20 The History of a Poet’s Mind When thou dost to that summer turn thy thoughts, And hast before thee all which then we were, To thee, in memory of that happiness It will be known, by thee at least, my Friend, Felt, that the history of a Poet’s mind Is labour not unworthy of regard. To thee the work shall justify itself.1 N ear his thirty-­first birthday in 1801,Wordsworth claimed that his life had been “unusually barren of events.”2 He was lying. Perhaps even to himself. The last decade of the eighteenth century had been particularlyeventful, often deeplydistressing, and profoundly formative for the poet. After surviving the 1790s, Wordsworth at first sought to disavow, to supplant, to forget, the experiences of his twenties. In December of 1799, he settled with his sister, Dorothy, at Dove Cottage near Grasmere, Cumberland, among his beloved lakes, rills, cataracts, and crags, not far from the villages where he had been born and raised.The bulk of The Prelude, begun earlier that year in Goslar (as we shall see in the next chapter), is devoted to figuring out who he had been in relation to the man he had become by 1798, and as a way of understanding thewriter he thought hewould continue to becomeover the next five decades. With the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 came the promise of a literary career; and with the end of the century came the promise of the start of a new life. Wordsworth addresses The Prelude to Coleridge because they were together during the summer of 1798 and were finishing work on Lyrical Ballads. “[I]n memory of that happiness ,” Wordsworth hopes, Coleridge will know and, more important, will feel “that the history of a Poet’s mind / Is labour not unworthy of regard.” Wordsworth’s addresses 21 The History of a Poet’s Mind to Coleridge echo Augustine’s refrain in the Confessions “I write this book for love of your love”—except that Augustine is talking to God.3 Wordsworth seeks a similar approbation from Coleridge, having himself had something like a conversion that enables him to know that “other Being” he was becoming. He has learned that composition—his preferred term for “writing”—is conversion in the act, happening again, over and over. It is renewed life—again and always. Coleridge knew Wordsworth was a gifted poet before Wordsworth did. To Coleridge he was “the Giant Wordsworth ” and was destined to write a great work “to benefit mankind.”4 As earlyas 1796, beforeWordsworth had written any of his best-­ known poems, Coleridge declared Wordsworth “the best poet of the age”—a view shared by no one for years to come.5 Sharing similar literary aspirations, each read theother’s workwith mutual admiration.Coleridgedetermined Wordsworth’s tragedy The Borderers (seldom read today) to beon par with any by Shakespeare.One great bard thus matched, Coleridge encouraged (no doubt hectored) Wordsworth to write the great epic to rival Milton’s Paradise Lost. A similar ambition had driven Milton, Dante, and Virgil. The ambition of writing an epic as good as Milton’s was not unlike the cliché of any writer aspiring to write the Great American Novel. Before Wordsworth, many now-­ unknown poets had attempted to do battle with Milton in the epic arena. Milton trounced them all. Eventually, poets gave up trying. ForWordsworth and Coleridge, Milton was still the man to beat. And it was not long before the two contrived a challenge .ItwasnotThePrelude,whichhastheanomalousstatus of being the prelude to a work—a poet’s magnum opus— that does not exist. That great project, Wordsworth’s epic throwdown, was to be called “The Recluse,” and it was born at the same time Wordsworth and Coleridge developed the concept for Lyrical Ballads, back in 1798. It was reading “The 22 The History of a Poet’s Mind Ruined Cottage,” begun in 1797, that showed Coleridge the scopeof Wordsworth’s potential. Intoxicated by Coleridge’s faith in him, Wordsworth wrote excitedly, “I know not anything which will not come within the scope of my plan.”6 The plan, however, was not his but Coleridge’s.The original figure of the eponymous rural recluse whose observations of man, nature, and society would renew a culturally, politically , and philosophicallydispirited agewas originally Coleridge ’s projection of himself as Wordsworthian. If The Prelude is an epic after all, Coleridge is...