Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War

You know perhaps already that I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue

--William Wordsworth to William Mathews, 23 May 1794. ¹

Perhaps it is impossible for a modern reader of Wordsworth to encounter such a quotation without experiencing some feeling--pity, indignation, regret--that occurs at the poet's expense. The young man who recalled in The Prelude how, during the early stages of the Revolution, his "heart was all / Given to the people," did not remain for long in the people's corner--at least not on terms that a supporter of the Rights of Man could easily comprehend. ² Charges of political apostasy were issued by the poet's contemporaries as early as 1812 when Wordsworth accepted a sinecure as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, and they intensified with the publication of The Excursion in 1814 and the Thanksgiving Ode volume in 1816. For his own part, Wordsworth resented and energetically denied such accusations.

Whatever impression the poet's assertions of ideological consistency might have made in the first half of the nineteenth century, since then the idea of self-division has become such a dominant theme in Wordsworth studies that contemporary readers dismiss them almost as a matter of course. Whether one subscribes to M. H. Abrams's view that Wordsworth's best poetry was prompted by a heroic and semi-tragic internalization of millennial desire, or with more recent New Historicist critics who see a craven and hypocritical substitution of the poetic for the social, the sense that there is a crippling discontinuity between Wordsworth's aesthetic principles and his political beliefs remains essentially the same. Certainly, it would require considerable sophistry to argue that the individual who defended the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and campaigned for the Tories in 1818 did not undergo significant changes in his political outlook. I wish, however, to assert that those changes can be understood in terms of both rational and aesthetic continuity, and that the commonplace notion that Wordsworth, some time around 1800, withdrew from serious political commitment is one in which we should cease to acquiesce.

The essay below is divided into two parts. In the first I consider Wordsworth's struggle to see the visionary poetry he practiced as a kind of ideal democratic literary discourse. The main points of reference are to Wordsworth's efforts to transform the poetic stance he had struck in Lyrical Ballads into one that would allow him to write The Recluse, an epic philosophical work of unlimited utopian aspiration. In the second part, I turn to his response to the Napoleonic wars and consider how this response became inextricably linked to the problems associated with the Recluse project and at least briefly seemed to offer the poet a paradoxical solution to them. In this second part I pay particular attention to the 1809 prose pamphlet, The Convention of Cintra, a passionate condemnation of a cease fire negotiated between English and French troops at the start of the Peninsular War.

The mere existence of the Convention of Cintra should belie the notion that Wordsworth, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, somehow retreated from direct political discourse. Cintra is Wordsworth's longest work of either poetry or prose, and although it is ostensibly concerned with international affairs, it implies significant things about his changing conception of domestic social and political possibilities. The pamphlet has been almost entirely ignored by Wordsworth's New Historicist readers, and their inattention is part of a general failure to assess Cintra's relationship to Wordsworth's poetry. ³ This failure may result from the fact that the pamphlet supports the war against Napoleon and concludes with a qualified assertion of nationalism, both of which sentiments are usually regarded as evidence per se of the later poet's conservative bent. On the contrary, Wordsworth's own concern regarding Cintra was not that it would open him to the as...